Technology and Techniques behind blogging

I want to start pulling together techniques, tools, technology, and tricks for bloggers to use.

Things that simplify the blogging task, eliminate drudgery, and add a little panache to the finished product greatly interest me.

Ways of collecting, analyzing, distilling, and present information are good in any environment. I think they can be applied nicely to the blogging environment.

Blogging is a way of recording what you are thinking at the moment, something you have just learned, something you have just done, and what is going on in the world at the moment.

The challenge, therefore - is to know what is going on at the moment that is interesting and germane to the topic of your blog, to ensure that you are doing interesting things, and to find ways to communicate these things in a way that is interesting.

And above all, it should be easy.

Blogs are like various things. They can be like a diary. They can be like a lab notebook. They can be like a news journal. We have all kept these things at one time or another.

Put too much time & effort into them and that log starts to become a burden. Before long, the log gets dropped.

Why? No time left to do the activity for which the blog is supposed to be preserving the benefits of doing!

Here are some questions:

• How many other people started a diary and then just dropped it because there was no benefit from it?
• How many people were taught to keep a news-reading journal in junior high school, and completely dropped the habit later because it did not seem to yield any benefits?
• How many people need a way to track what they are doing from week-to-week but get tired of writing it in notebooks that are too unwieldy once they have enough information in them to be useful?

I think there are some things that can be brought to bear in order to make blogging less of a burden. I think those things are worth writing about. That is what I will do here.