Be a better blogger

...Relatively, of course.

What do people use to do their blogging with? (Apologies if this has already been asked—heck, I may already have)

I’ve used livejournal and blogger before, with varying degrees of satisfaction, like the idea of wordpress.com (but not the lack of customization), and am using wordpress (1.5 and 2.0—I’m lazy about upgrading) on a Textdrive-hosted site currently. (I’ve also played with Textpattern, which is pretty appealing, and which I believe was the original raison d’etre for Textile, the markup used by 43things.) I haven’t tried MT yet, nor do I plan to.

I’m also curious about whether people are paying to blog (either for a blogging service like LJ or typepad, or for an MT license, or for hosting on which to use an open-source blog engine, etc.), getting paid to blog, neither, etc.

Also, do folks on whatever platform have any tips and tricks to share—good wordpress plugins, for example?

For those who are Wordpress users, it can be very liberating to from time to time dig into the guts of your template. Kubrick, the current default, is pretty easy to modify with a little practice (though I am very unskilled and inelegant about it).

The codex is very useful for this.

I recently started a collaborative blog with a couple of friends. It’s basically just a shared linkblog, which is what it was intended to be—a way for us to share links without having to email them back and forth all the time.

The trick now, of course, is making it feel like it belongs to everyone. The current design I hacked together out of the Kubrick template over the course of about an hour and a half, and it’s mildly representative of my aesthetic choices and not at all of the others’. I’m currently asking them to suggest color schemes and header images, and we’re all amiable because none of us care that much, but sooner or later we may have a conflict over, for example, whether or not the header should include tentacle rape. (Most of us are opposed to this, either mildly or strongly. One possibility is “Tentacle Rape Thursdays.”)

Also, I’m wishing that the permissions system in Wordpress was a bit more powerful. In order for everyone to have access to all the features (including plugins), everyone has to be an admin—and while these are mostly people I trust and/or people who know more about code than I do, it would be nice to have a little more granularity (am I using that correctly) in determining who gets what access.

BoingBoing/Technorati

Wired piece may be of interest to some. I don’t have a clear enough topic focus to be marketable, myself.

My massive post-NaNoWriMo exhaustian really put a dent in my blogging habits. However, I’m back into the habit, more or less (though the quality of my output isn’t fabulous for the last few days), and I have an improved header graphic of which I’m fairly fond. http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com/gramarye/

If you haven’t seen it, you might want to take a look at this snippy catalog of “usability” mistakes in blogs. I’m not a big fan of this sort of list (when it comes to language and writing (where they breed like bunnies), they’re almost always wrong, pretentious, and counterproductive), and that’s one of the ugliest web pages I’ve seen in years, but there’s some semi-interesting stuff there.

It’s delightful what searches end up taking people to me.

• “Grilled cheese in prison” is easily my favorite. (I had a post on making grilled cheese near one on watching Prison Break.)
• “Fuck + Latin Equivalent.” (I had a post on dirty words in Sanskrit.)
• “Macho leathery biker goodness.” (I swear, this was a quote from a commercial for a Saturday morning children’s cartoon. Really.)
• Love, Actually relationship map. (This one is dead on; I put a fair bit of effort into it. Though I’m aware it has a couple of problems.)
• “Disturbing porn.” (No clue. My blog contains absolutely nothing even tangentially related to porn of any kind. I take it back; this is the post
• “creative ‘ask a girl to prom’” (There’s a Clone High quotation I reference at some point: “If you’re going to ask a girl to prom, try to avoid the usual cliches like your helicopter, or your talking foetal horse.”)

Taking my blogging seriously - not because I plan to make a career of it, but simply because I don’t believe in taking any kind of writing too lightly - has been an on-again off-again concern. I’m hoping I’ll get traction by moving away from the packaged limitations of the obvious services (i.e., from here to here.) to my very own installation of WordPress. Different look, different feel, different level of attention.