Blogging How-to's: #2 of Series

What did I discover in the navel-lint as I looked back at my blog over time? A number of my posts were about blogging itself. My goal today is to glean and share at least one important and unique idea from each of those posts. The following paragraphs list the subject, the date of the previous post, its title and quotes from the original post:
Everything you wanted to know about creativity - "3-18-07 - "c" is for create. A quote,

First is the idea - Each time I decide the point of the post or choose a theme. I decide how to begin and end my argument, and what ideas or thoughts reinforce my reasons for writing about a particular subject. Editing toward a powerful lead and for a logical order of ideas is crucial.

Technorati tips - I am convinced that tagging helps me to get many more readers. Technorati is a widely used method for that. It is worth the effort to do it with all your posts, in addition to any labels you might also use. Each is different; both help get notice. On 10-26-06 I wrote - Tagging popular blog subjects. To quote,

How to include Technorati tags - Here's how I do it. It may not be the easiest but it works for me:

1. Using the "Edit HTML" form of my Blogger composer, I copy and past the following piece of code from my MS Word "boilerplate" document* - Technorati tags: [tagname] (switch to "Edit Html" tab to see the actual code)


2. Into the two [tagname] areas I insert the tag word in place of [tagname]. Thus the final "Tags:" HTML code might look like this: blogging weblog


3. Thus, in "Compose" mode, your Tag lines will have hotlinks that look like this: blogging weblog (switch to "Edit Html" tab to see the actual code)

Tips and tricks - This post contains several easy methods for how to do such things as using two browsers to read and edit at the same time, copy and paste URL addresses for links, avoid destructive little free programs that mess up your computer, effective "searches," avoiding losing a big block of unpublished copy, using news aggregators, and implanting good writing habits. On 3-11-06 I posted Life's lessons online.
One of my favorite bloggers, Grant McCracken, wrote something recently that surely applies to the blogosphere as a network. It is from his website, This Blog sits at the . . .from which I quote,

Each of us is a network. A messy, crowded, cloudy network. We are some rough, disorganized but not entirely unconnected composite of our experiences, relationships, interests and outlooks. We are diverse, complex and multiple.

. . . The issue here is how networks manage the great clouds of information they need to sustain themselves and to grow. It certainly makes since to "shadow" or to "ghost" other networks, to choose what they choose, to exchange what we've got. These cloudy selves are going too large to be sustained by their owners' efforts only. It is going to have to be a collaborative exercise. We are going to have to pool our resources. We are going to have to put our head's together. We are going to end up with some out of body, out of mind, out of network, cross dependencies that put at risk our conventional ideas of the discrete, free standing, independent, liberty seeking individual. Right?

I hope for each of my fellow bloggers a wealth of ideas, a clever turn of phrase, and inspirationl words for readers. Good writing is the key; there is no substitute for it.