Lately I have been finding it easier and easier to post regular entries here and I thought I would share the reasons why. I like most people with a blog that gets a few readers find it hard to motivate myself into getting all the bits together to make up a new post.

You know, text, images, open up photoshop, get a brew, log in - thats enough to make me think ‘meh ill do it later’

Well now I have a way of working that cuts through all that crap and I can just get back to writing.

Software: -

For writing the posts I am now using MarsEdit on the mac (This page has some good suggestions for those on windows). MarsEdit is a great offline blog writing tool. Heres a screenshot of me working up this post.

(Note that MarsEdit underlines my crappy spelling)

I then send the finished post up to the blog automatically as a draft and publish when I am ready and have finished the tags, extras and stuff.

To add the images I have moved to using Jing which is a fantastic tool for grabbing, formatting and annotating the image before uploading it straight to Flickr leaving the embed code on my clipboard so I just paste it into MarsEdit.

You can add arrows, text and frames to suit. I will even screenshot straight out of photoshop to save me the effort of saving it as a web image first (Told you I was lazy)

Once the post is uploaded to the blog I will log in at my convenience and add some tags, meta data etc. Zemanta is a great tool for adding links automatically to any post as well as offering up so

me image suggestions to help illustrate the post too.

Small things I know but they make the creation of posts a job that can fit in around the rest of the jobs you have to sort.

Some things to add to this way of working: -

For post ideas I am thinking of adding Skribit but to be honest I hate what they have done with the latest version.

I am also thinking of writing a simple plugin that allows me to post a new blogpost announcement to Twitter automatically as its published, depends how useful others think that would be?

Tags: Guides, personal blog, Wordpress

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.