Interestingly, over the years while we’ve had many friends who’ve tried blogging, not many keep up with posting after a while. I think a good part of it is that blogging in itself isn’t convenient, relative to social network sites like Facebook or Google+ anyway now. It’s a lot easier to post up microbits of reflections and notes that you can share, as opposed to logging into your blog provider site and writing up a new post, or in my case – a Blog Writer – to write something more substantial than a sentence or two.
Our domain here is about 12 years old now, and we’ve been blogging regularly since 2006 – somewhere in my last year of my research when I was done with my thesis and packing to return back to Singapore. At times, I’m sure even Ling would have wondered why we’re still posting so much, especially when it’s so out of fashion these days, and our reading audience comprises maybe about a dozen close friends and fellow parents of young children! Moreover, the sort of work that the both of us do in real-life presents implicit expectations of our public behavior, including what we do online – which sort of means the only safe things I can write about is entertainment, technology, photography and children.
It’s funny too to note that Ling still uses the somewhat clunky WordPress front-end to write her blogs. Usually she’ll write her post and put up her pictures, and then tell me it’s ready for posting whereupon I’ll look through her post, clean up any formatting issues and check her tags before posting or scheduling it up for her. For myself, I’ve posted here about blog writing software that I use; namely Windows Live Writer.
The program though doesn’t work very well with the super-high display resolution on the new MacBook Pro. Basically, the program lacks a zoom feature (e.g. similar to what you see on word processors). After some searching and trying out of alternatives, I found a nifty add-on/plug-in/extension that’s supported by all the four major browsers (Firefox, Safari, IE and Opera): it’s ScribeFire. Unlike Live Writer, ScribeFire doesn’t run as a separate program but as a tab in your browser. The program isn’t as full-featured as Live Writer (e.g. direct insertion of images into the Editor doesn’t work very well on Firefox), but otherwise works well enough and works in offline mode too.
Blogging regularly (and substantially) requires dedication. I’m glad that you both have it because I look forward to each and every post compiled here!