Howto Start a Blog, Get Useful Blogging Ideas, Add Good Content, Reduce Effort with Tools and Keep Blogging

Avoid Bloggers-Block:

After the initial burst you can't think of what to say - so the blog languishes.

A blog is short form for web-log i.e. a kind of "A log entry in your Personal Diary".

It is not meant to be a book which you publish after many many rewrites and deep thought.

Some people even have one-liners or even other peoples blogs as blog-entries.

Find an Idea/Topic:

Your idea becomes self sustaining if it's useful or matters to you or your friends.

You can organise your self-learning or teaching notes as blogs. Collect questions from people around you or from forum newbies.  This way you create more knowledge for yourself and write excellent blog-posts that are useful to others.

Publish or Perish:

Publish as soon as you have a line of text on your blogs.

Drafts are the best way to kill blogs.

Use them only when you require to do some basic tidying before posting.

Even this can be done later followed by a republish.

Blog Incrementally:

Paste your current state into the blog (like saving a session of your mind a.k.a. brain-dump).

Every time some find some new useful information you just paste that into your blog-post.

Use a multiple clips clipboard manager to copy all the info you need.

The post should be written in logical manner with least gaps in the reasoning or steps

Any good links that you open in Firefox tabs can be saved for:

    a) Further investigation

    b) Future use

Reduce Blogging Effort:

Ideally follow 80-20% rule.

Spend 80% time spent on gathering material.

Spend 20% time spent on filling in gaps and reordering/rewriting post.

See Tools section for more details

Tools:

Currently I'm trying to reduce editing/formatting effort/time by using the following tools:

Blog Upload: Evaluating desktop client s/w's for editing and posting to blog (like ScribeFire, Windows Live Writer, SeMagic)

        I've used 2-3 good desktop blogging clients:
      
1) ScribeFire to handle blog-editing, upload and managing of multiple accounts/blogs.

           Looks to be the best option for now.
        2) Kompozer is good for a basic HTML whysiwyg editor.

        3) Windows Live Writer - not really used it but looks good enough for basic blog maintainence.

Blog Composing: Kompozer, CSS Stylesheets (TODO)

MindMaps: XMind with Freemind (for mindmaps and concept maps with collaboration respectively)

Pictures: Paintbrush Digicam for Photos, MediaWiki Free Photos

Video: InstantDemo, Jing ScreenCapture software for Demonstration Videos.

        Diagrams: Diagramming s/w (To-Do)

Uploading: To-Do

See Also:Basic Format  for a Technical Blog

Howto Improve your Blog's design

Accessibility: Does the title grab the attention of your intended audience?

1. Does the title have keywords used by the audience while searching google?
2. Does google index your blog regularly?
3. Push your blog updates to blog broadcastors like weblogs.com
4. Does your blog load up fast? Use the "Jump/Read More" feature and Optimize load time.

Retention: Is it easy for a casual browser to remember your blog and info you pain-stakingly put in?

Why write technical blog posts Part 2

Some interesting quotes (with links) from "Apprenticeship Patterns":
 
Section 6: Construct Your Curriculum

" the vast amounts of wisdom captured in the books of experienced practitioners like Jerry Weinberg, Fred Brooks, Steve McConnell, and Kent Beck cannot be replaced, not even with higher-bandwidth information. Even if you’re not a bookworm, a successful apprenticeship needs to include some books as well as time devoted to studying. You’re not in school, though. There is no assigned reading—it’s up to you to find recommendations and construct your own curriculum."

0) Reading List
          "Problem: 
                   The number of books you need to read is increasing faster than you can read them.
        Solution: 
                Maintain a Reading List to track the books you plan to read, and remember the books you’ve read."

1) Study the Classics:

"Joshua Kerievsky once asked Jerry Weinberg how he keeps up with all the books that come out. Jerry said, “Easy—I only read the great ones”
[...]

"Successful apprentices tend to focus on “long-lived books” and use the Web or experimentation to learn how the information has evolved. Dave remembers vividly the experience of reading his first classic in this field, The Psychology of Computer Programming, and marveling at how relevant the book felt, despite the stories of punch cards and room-sized computers. The wisdom captured in such classics is vital information to keep you heading in the right direction on The Long Road."

2) Dig Deeper:

"Problem:

You keep running into difficulty maintaining the code you’ve written because it turns out that the tutorials you followed cut corners and simplified complex issues. You find that your superficial knowledge of a thousand tools means you’re always floundering whenever a subtle bug arises or you have to do something that demands deep knowledge. People often accuse you of having a misleading CV because you don’t distinguish between a couple of weeks of extending an existing web service and a deep knowledge of the issues inherent in maintaining an interoperable and highly scalable enterprise system. What’s even worse is that because your knowledge is so superficial, you’re not even aware of how little you know until something or someone puts you to the test.

Solution:

Learn to dig deep into tools, technologies, and techniques. Acquire the depths of knowledge to the point that you know why things are the way they are. Depth means understanding the forces that led to a design rather than just the details of a design. For instance, it means understanding type theory (or at least the simplification offered by the typing quadrant at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TypingQuadrant) rather than simply parroting the things you’ve heard others say"

Why write technical blog posts Part 1

Technical blogs help to:

• Record and speed-up the process of learning a new topic.
• Can be used as learning devices. 
• Provide a useful format for note-taking as you learn new things.
• Sharing and growing knowledge with others.
• Provide invaluable feedback necessary for your own growth.
• Capture the essence of what you learned during research

Technical blogs should evolve from one-liners to concise researched posts.
They should act as brain-dumps of all your research.

Research is a frightfully expensive activity with loads of context building up as you search.
What happens after to all this invaluable context after you spend a week or more researching it?
It evaporates within days of research as you move on to other things.


The beginners mind full of questions is an invaluable resource.
Unfortunately it's impossible to retain as you learn more and more!!


Slowly the questions give way to answers...
Only for more questions to pop-up... with answers following slowly.
The mystery thickens fast as you try to satisfy your quest for understanding.

Researching, reading books, articles, blogs that you browse on the Net, experimenting, theorising, modelling.
All these go into the steaming cauldron of your quest....

Slowly the mists part to slowly yield insights into what makes the thing tick!!


Writing and Revising your blogs is a definite way to nurture and match this process of  growth.
The very process of writing simply and clearly forces you to seek out the core of the concept.
This is THE most valuable gift to the technical blogger - fuelling his own growth while helping others on the path.

Innocence yielding to Experience yielding (very) slowly to Mastery.



Not only does it capture the questions and answers you found.
It can very easily form the basis for helping out someone on the same path.