If you find yourself having difficulty blogging regularly, I’ve found that sometimes the key is to make the technical part of the act of blogging easier and more convenient. Integrating the ability to blog into applications or websites you normally use can not only make blogging easier, but encourage it.
flickr
My favorite photo sharing website makes it very easy to make a blog post using either one of your photos or someone else’s that is marked as reusable. At the bottom of the “Extending flickr” tab of the “Your Account” page there is a section to add details about your blog (or blogs). If you’ve never done this before, read the simple directions to set things up properly for your type of blog and you’re all set. Once you’ve added at least one blog, a new “Blog This” button will appear above the photos you look at on flickr. Clicking on this button lets you write a blog post about that photo and post it (and the photo) to your blog all from within flickr.com. Once your done, you’re right back to looking at photos on flickr.
Google Docs
I’ve been using Google Docs since it was called Writely and I love it. I store all kinds of information in Docs and having access to it from any computer is very convenient. Today, however, was the first time I noticed that the “Share” button also allows you to post a document as a blog post directly to your blog. There is a similar set up process like flickr and then your able to post. If you already use Google Docs, this is just another reason to keep using it. If not, using Google Docs in this way can allow for more structured storage of drafts (using folders), a more robust WYSIWYG layout interface for your blog posts, versioning and collaborative sharing/writing of your blog posts–to name a few reasons.
There are other great tools that let you interact with your blog such as Windows Live Writer and ScribeFire, which I’ll cover in a future post.
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