Blog block without my laptop
People often ask me about the process of how I blog, so here’s a bit about that.
On my laptop, I use NetNewsWireLite as my main aggregator. I can update the contents, they store automatically (some indefinitely, some for a specific period of time), then return later to read them and blog. At last count, I had about 850 unread items in about 100-120 sources. (Don’t let that number scare you: it’s an accumulation of items over a few weeks. I don’t think I’ve ever zeroed out that aggregator. I had it down to about 200 unread items a few weeks ago. I probably get about 50-100 new items per day. Some sources, like the Librarians’ Index to the Internet or the ResourceShelf, might dump in a lot of new content, but I don’t have to read everything. NetNewsWireLite is easy to skim.)
I also have a folder in my e-mail program called "Blog This" where I drop e-mails I receive from discussion lists, friends, etc., containing items I would like to blog. I think I had between 13-20 there.
Using methods like these is great because I’ve been so busy lately, I often can only grab a few minutes to blog. Remember those days when I would do 3-7 posts a night regularly? Yeah. *j sings "All those days are gone."
It’s nice to have tools to do some of the knowledge gathering and storing for me because it’s very easy and fast for me to go into my aggregator or e-mail client and pull out something I marked for blogging and just haven’t gotten to yet.
I’m learning one of the giant problems with my method, though. Now that my laptop is in the shop and may not get repaired until Tuesday, February 21, I don’t have access to that stack of stuff. I actually have to work to find stuff to blog about. (That’s kind of a joke, actually. I almost always have something to blog.)
There’s something to be said for using online aggregators (not that I was against them; I just don’t prefer them) or at least setting one up with a duplicate or very similar OPML file. If the aggregator attached to this blog worked as well as it did a few years ago, I would be seeing a lot of the content I subscribe to on my desktop. Unfortunately, I think those days are also over.