From brain to screen - Thoughts on blogging

If you have nothing to write about, why not write about writing? Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking, that’s an awful cop-out when you’ve run out of ideas, and to be fair, I have for the moment run out them. Still, it might not be a bad idea to give a little insight into the convoluted way that I come up with my articles, and the equipment I work with. I know, I know, writing is mostly about your talent and your ideas, and less about the equipment, but there are some things that still require careful consideration.

But let’s take things step by step, shall we? The most important thing you need, is of course a topic. I can’t really give much advice on that front, but you should obviously write about something that interests you, and while varying your topics is not a bad idea, you should keep the topics relatively consistent. That is to say, if you’re writing a beauty blog, putting an article in there about plasma dynamics in the accretion discs of supermassive black holes will by its very nature cause confusion and potentially scare off readers. Hell, if you can write an article about THAT, you’d be better advised publishing it in Science, or other renowned scientific publications.

I’m not going to give any recommendations on style, as that depends very much upon your personality. Once again, go with what you feel comfortable. Try to keep strong or foul language out of your articles as much as possible. Not only does that make your blog easier to read, the effect will be much more noticeable once you do use it. And while I personally may not be too keen on grammar, punctuation or spelling, in my eyes, grammatical errors are covered by the 1st Amendment, you should try to steer reasonably clear of major spelling mistakes. It simply makes a blog that much easier to read. And of course, if you aim to make money with your blog, you’ll have to be flawless. 

Oh, and if you’re writing about factual things, double check your facts, and then verify them again. I can’t stress that part enough. There’s nothing worse than basing the premise of an article on a supposed fact, only to find out that that “fact” turned out to be an urban legend. It may take a bit longer than expected, I’ve been working on a pro-nuclear-power article for my german blog for over a year now, but it will save you embarrassment or even a shit storm in the future. Also, and this goes for both factual and op-ed articles, try to break up the text with a few pictures, where applicable. You don’t need to go full tabloid style, those papers (Sun, Daily Mail, et al.) are after all aimed at customers who stopped evolving intellectually at picture book level, but a few pictures certainly can’t hurt. The exception is travel blogs, there pictures tell an important part of the story. You just can’t describe Slieve League, for example, you have to see it.

I told you you have to see Slieve League...
Marksie531 at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

Once you’ve sorted out the writing part, the next part is the equipment you need. Generally speaking, any machine that can access the Internet and run a word processor is fine, so a Raspberry Pi would absolutely work. There are, however, a few things to consider. You will be doing a lot of typing, so a good keyboard is a must. Whether that is an integrated keyboard on a notebook or convertible, or an external keyboard for a desktop or a mobile device, is entirely up to you. You’re also gonna be looking at that screen a lot, so a high quality display is essential as well. What operating system you use, or what browser, that is your own personal decision.

As for myself, I switch between my Windows gaming desktop and a MacBook Air, depending on what I feel like, and where I am.  Since a lot of my articles are travel reports, or similar, I often include self made photos, for which I tend to use my main camera, a Fujifilm HS20 EXR. True, it’s an older model, but it works like a charm, so why change something that works? Of course, most smartphones have great cameras these days as well, and quite frankly, unless you’re into photo art, or have a phone with a sub-par camera, there’s no reason to go out and buy some huge DSLR camera. 

A manufacturers image of my main camera, A Fujifilm HS20 EXR.

Okay, so you’ve got the equipment sorted, both hardware and software. Now where to publish it? There are dozens of platforms out there, and of course, you can always set up your own website. However if you want to concentrate on the articles, rather than spending hours of setting up and running your own website, then using a dedicated blogging service is the way to go. The two biggest and best known are definitely WordPress and Blogger, the latter being a Google service. I use Blogger for my own two blogs, but there is once again a whole zoo of blogging platforms out there, just check out this list for a small selection.

Just a glimpse at the back-end of blogger.com for authors. There's much more to it.

Of course, you'd expect a Google service to serve up a whole truckload of information. Blogger certainly does not disappoint in that regard, let me tell you.

One final word of advice. Many blogging services have a comfortable web interface for writing and editing the articles, and when you’re away from your own device, that’s all well and good. It might be a good idea to get at least the text sorted out in a word processing program before going online, that’s become my workflow. This not only has the advantage that you have a second copy of your articles in case you need it, you’ll also be able to write your articles off line, which can be a real asset when you’re in an electronic wasteland, or worse, Germany with it’s “world famous”, meaning non-existent, free wifi infrastructure.

And that is basically it. The most important part about blogging really is your ideas and your creativity, and since you run the blog, you also call the shots, decide what to publish, and what to write about. Chances are, there will be people out there who want to read about it. Just have fun with it, see what works and what doesn’t, and take it from there. And believe me, blogging really can be fun.