Blogging and writing can be just like work and other academic endeavors in that you need to have a good working environment. It’s hard to be creative and get your thoughts out if you’re being distracted, are uncomfortable, or can’t concentrate. If you’ve been having problems getting your thoughts transposed to the keyboard lately, maybe try some of the following:
- Get comfortable - go curl up on the couch or in the easy chair. Take your laptop outside, or maybe find a quieter, more private place to try and type.
- Set the mood - personally, I usually enjoy a little music while I’m working and am in the zone. If you don’t have any mp3s or CDs on you, there are definitely some good places to stream music on the net. If you have a decent internet connection check out last.fm, pandora, or any of the other streaming radio stations out there.
- Acquire a beverage - sometimes a tall glass of your favorite beverage or a snack can help get you going.
- Take a break - sometimes now just isn’t a good time to accomplish your goals. If you have some ideas, jot down a few notes, save as draft and come back later.
These are just a few ideas. Let us know if you have any more.
Have you ever wanted to add a poll to your sidebar, page or post? We’re trying out a new polling feature. Let us know what you think of it. Multiple answers are allowed. If you choose “other”, please leave a comment and let us know what that is.
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Beware of Wordpress 2.6. I just upgraded and lost all my categories. If you are adventurous, I would suggest backing up your database before proceeding.
Mobile blogging just got better, the Wordpress app was just made available on iTunes. A full review will be posted in the near future after some testing.
As Tara mention earlier, I’ve been using mojoBlog for a Joomla blogging tool. So far I’ve been really enjoying it. The tool is basically a stripped down version of Wordpress. I don’t have all the features, plugins, or template options, but it’s eons better than trying to use the Joomla content system for blogging. The only real modification I made was to go into the template and modify the RSS links in the footer section. They’re setup to go to the default feeds, I wanted to redirect them to my feedburner links.
Supposedly you’re supposed to be able to bring in some Wordpress plugins and whathaveyou. There’s a disclaimer saying some will work and some won’t. I’ve only tried one plugin and it didn’t work. I’d be interested to hear if anybody has successfully installed anything.
Wordpress 2.6 has been released. Time to upgrade.
Cool new features
- Post Versioning
- Press This button for easy blogging
- Captioning for images
- Live preview of themes, before committing
- Google Gears integration
- Word count
- Gallery sorting, with drag and drop
- Plugin interface update
- New Avatar options
- Shift click to select multiple options
I’m not anywhere near into photos and photography as Tara and Smitty are, but occasionally I do post a picture or two. Since I’m not a “photo person”, I don’t have any fancy software to crop, edit, or tweak any of the pictures I might have. Two freebies I wanted to mention to you are Irfanview and Picnik.
Irfanview is something I’ve been using for probably three years or so. It’s a great tool for easily cropping, resizing, resampling, reducing red-eye, etc. Another great feature is that you can do batch processes on any folder or group of files. So anything you do on one, like changing to grayscale for example, can be done to any number of photos with just a couple clicks. Renaming can also be done with the batch tool which can be very handy when standardizing a bunch of files that have crazy names from a camera, scanner, etc.
Picnik is a tool I just learned about last week. It’s similar to Irfanview in that’s it’s free and easy to use. This one is web based and I think the interface is much more simple to use. For my “day job” I train faculty and brainy people with PhDs how to do things on computers. We’re always trying to find simple, easy-to-use tools and applications for them to use. These are two we’ve had success with, and I’m sure you’ll find easy to use as well.
Five Link Friday: Commenting
Here are five links about commenting - how it can help your blog, and how you can become a better commenter.