- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 24
-
Sparkle (0)
Be a better blogger. Yep, that's what this BlogHer series is all about. Maybe you have some bad habits that need changing. Here are a few tips to move you in a new and better direction.
It isn't easy to change a habit. I recently managed to change a coffee habit. I am determined to drink free trade coffee. I felt lazy and didn't want to bother grinding the beans. I can't find ground free trade coffee, however. Big roadblock. Here's how I developed a new coffee grinding habit. I rearranged my kitchen a bit, put the grinder and a pretty new air-tight jar for the beans right next to the coffee maker. (Rearrange your physical space to encourage new behavior.) I started the daily grind. The minor rearrangement seemed to work as motivation. It took about a week to change to the grinding habit. (Force yourself to keep up the new behavior for several days. It will be a ritual in no time.) I know it worked, because this morning I had a guest on my couch and decided not to run the noisy grinder. I looked at that grinder with actual longing and felt inconvenienced by having to use pre-ground coffee. Habit changed.
My number one bad blogging habit is composing without a backup. That includes composing right in the blog entry window without saving the draft now and again. It also means not using some other tool to actually write the post before I put it into the blog software.
Learning to blog with a backup can save you (and me) from untimely crashes, loss of signal or connection, remote servers going down, and other nasty surprises. There are easy ways to develop the good habit of writing elsewhere or with backup and making sure the work is safe on your hard drive before you tempt fate on the live Internet. You can use any plain text editor, like BBEdit (my tool of choice) or Notepad. There are tools specifically for blogging like Blogo or Windows Live Writer that will post to multiple blog platforms for you and can be used in offline mode. The tools specifically for blogging have all the bells and whistles that help you insert links, images, and preview before you actually post to your blog.
Relying completely on your blog's formatting tools and refusing to learn any HTML tags is also a bad habit. There are at least three HTML tags you should learn to use: <a>, <img>, and <blockquote>. You don't need them so much in your own posts, as you need them when leaving comments on other folks blogs. Most comment forms will accept a little basic HTML. Take advantage of it.
Check out these instructions: How to Add Images to Your BlogHer posts and The TGB Elder Geek: Making Links. Instead of pointing you elsewhere for a resource for creating a blockquote, I'll explain how to do it right now. Put <blockquote> at the beginning of the quoted material. Put </blockquote> at the end of the quoted material. Simple, right? Reminds me of the other day when I asked my friend Becky Padilla what her name was on Twitter and she answered Becky Padilla. Some things are just easy.
Not proofreading before posting is another bad blogging habit. A careless typo, a mangled sentence you edited badly—there's always something that you can catch by proofreading your post two or three times before you push publish. One serious problem with the careless typos and mangled sentences is they get picked up in your RSS feed and get broadcast to the world. You may go back a few hours or days later and make a correction, but it's already in the RSS feed wrong.
Grammar Girl has some tips for improving your proofreading habits.
My primary advice on avoiding typos is to have someone else proofread your work. On the other hand, I know this isn't possible for things like e-mail or rushed projects, so here are four proofreading tips I've collected over the years.
1) Read your work backwards, starting with the last sentence and working your way in reverse order to the beginning. Supposedly this works better than reading through from the beginning because your brain knows what you meant to write, so you tend to skip over errors when you're reading forwards.
2) Read your work out loud. This forces you to read each word individually and increases the odds that you'll find a typo. This works quite well
