Comments on: Making Posting to a Blog Incredibly Easy ... How to?

Question: Making Posting to a Blog Incredibly Easy ... How to?

WCityMike — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 21:36:45 -0800

How to go about accomplishing certain things regarding posting to a blog, but in a certain way ... would like Mefites' advice. I was surfing one day, and came across this in someone's blog entry.

I cannot find a good unobtrusive and reliable way to post to my blog. For short blurbs, I want to be able to do it from anywhere, but using my cellphone is too inconvenient (I abandoned my PDA a few years ago). I could use Google Docs, but (1) it doesn't work with Safari and (2) I wasn't able to make it post to my MovableType-based blog. I also want to be able to "reply" to other people's blog posts on my own blog, but trackbacks seem to have disappeared from all but a few blogs. Third, I had been working on a few longer articles and I realized that (1) I don't want to mix meaningless musings with longer better thought out pieces on the same blog and (2) I don't know how to tell if the article is finished, so I keep revising it over and over and over.

I thought the iteration of these problems was rather insightful, and, furthermore, I realized these problems were ones I ran into upon my own blog (aside from the "(2)" in the third question). Yet I really can't think of effective ways to address these problems. Any of your thoughts on these issues and possible solutions would be appreciated.

(No self-link, but my blog is WordPress, if that matters, and if you need the URL, click on my name below; the address is in my profile.)

By: iamkimiam

iamkimiam — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 22:20:10 -0800

I don't know about movable type, but Blogger lets you send and publish posts via email. It's really convenient because you don't have to log in or anything. The formatting is a bit wonky though. Movable type simply MUST have an option to do this as well (and I'm sure they'd do it better).

By: themel

themel — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:24:05 -0800

I don't get the "I could use Google Docs" thing - what is it that you can use Google Docs for that you can't simply do directly in your blog's web interface? And what is a more exact definition of "do it from anywhere"?

Re: Trackbacks - few people miss them. Replying to blog posts on your own blog shouldn't be too easy anyway, since it fragments the debate. If you want to comment, use the comments.

Third: Duh. Set up a second blog, what's the problem? Or move the meaningless stuff to Twitter or the like. Also, consider whether these actually need to be published.

By: pineapple

pineapple — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 06:53:25 -0800

I also want to be able to "reply" to other people's blog posts on my own blog, but trackbacks seem to have disappeared from all but a few blogs.

Trackbacks haven't just whimsically disappeared -- they were a huge spam problem, and frankly were never all that useful to begin with for the average (i.e. non-Kottke, non-A-list) blogger.

Wordpress also offers an "update by email" feature.

And, second what themel said wrt Google Docs: if you're using Wordpress, you have a browser-based dashboard. Why can't you update that from anywhere? Do you mean, "anywhere, even without a computer"? If so, you'll need a smart phone, and yeah, updating that way isn't very convenient.

There's always micro-blogging via Twitter or Jaiku or similar. It doesn't get much simpler than SMS texting your entries in... but of course there'll be character length restrictions. I have a "Twitter badge" on the front page of my blog, so that anything I text in appears in a separate section by itself, not commingled with "real" entries.

It seems the blogger quoted wants a solution that doesn't exist. I deserve a unicorn, myself, but I don't think I'm going to get one.

If none of these existing solutions work, you could always wait a while. Someone is surely just about to realize another Web 2.0 gadget app that can customize anyone's particular niche preference for blog updating.