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Any Strange Blogging Habits?

Any Strange Blogging Habits?

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Max Soliven, the late, long-time publisher of the Philippine Star had one peculiar habit. Even with the popularity of laptops and word processors, Max typed his daily columns with a manual typewriter and had someone at the office encode the piece for him. Even stranger, whenever he was out of town, he still wrote his editorials on his manual typewriter and faxed the dozens of pages back home for encoding.

But I guess that was how Max wrote. That was how he got into the groove of writing. He has been a war correspondent and a political detainee, among other travails, and perhaps you get to appreciate the wonders of manual technology this way.

Perhaps many bloggers today have never even seen a typewriter in action, moreso a manual typewriter–you know, the one that sounds a loud DING when you go past the right margin. But most of us do have our own blogging habits, be they strange or not.

I, for one, have a few hard-to-break habits. For one, I almost always type complete URLs on the URL bar rather than use bookmarks or use a site’s search box. So rather than use the Lijit box here on the Blog Herald to look for something, I am fond of typing www.blogherald.com/search/xxx. Or perhaps I’m writing a new post, I key in www.blogherald.com/wp-admin/post-new.php. When I need to edit theme files, I usually type in the complete URL to that PHP script, and sometimes even including the file name of the file I intend to fix up. Somehow, I find it faster to let my fingers type rather than have a look at bookmarks, let the mouse cursor wander toward a link and then click.

Being old school, I opt out of any visual text editor, and often type in HTML tags manually rather than click on the buttons above the text editor. I’ve found visual editors to break the markup and thus become more of a trouble than help most of the time. Same with the code buttons.

And being paranoid of browsers crashing or WordPress eating up my latest updates, I copy my post text, paste it to notepad and save it as a local text file for later re-posting in case something bad happens.

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And usually through all this, I just drink up my coffee up to half-full (or half-empty?), spend minute upon minute on writing a blog post, and when I finally get back to my coffee it’s already too cold to drink.

Perhaps these may just be bordering on the weird. Maybe there are other bloggers who have habits really worth mentioning, to which mine would pale in comparison.

Quirks, weirdness, peculiarity. If these things help get you in the writing mood, then perhaps it’s your thing. I’m interested in hearing if you have habits that define your blogging activity, and if you find these strange.

View Comments (9)
  • Hey Mate!! I don’t think your blogging habits are weird at all. I myself often type out the full URL in the taskbar. I still make use of bookmarks and such, but sometimes it is easier just to memorize the full URL and type it out. Plus, it is fun to hear my fingers type. That is one of the reasons I like blogging so much. I get to hear my fingers type.

    I typically write out my blogs in a word processor and save it before I upload it. I have learned through various bad experiences that you always save a copy of your work before you upload it. Not only do you save it before you upload it, but you save it often as you write it. There are any number of things that can happen that will erase several good minutes (hours) of work and ruin a person’s day. Plus, word processors make it easier to pick out and fix those terrible typos. They are so annoying.

    And while I don’t drink coffee, my (hot) tea is always icy by the time I get back to it. It is terrible, especially this time of year when the weather is cold and we need the warm beverages to warm us up.

    The things that define my blogging more than anything else is my use of double exclamation points. I personally believe that one ! is too little and three !!! is way-too-much. Thus a double !! is just right. Any time I use exclamations I typically double it up. Isn’t that great? Curiously, I do not double my ?’s. I think the curvy part of the ? makes it too bulky to effectively double it up. Also, from time to time I like to take a page out of other language punctuation techniques, and use the ¿ and ¡ at the beginning of my sentences. I do not do this all of the time because I think that many people wouldn’t understand or like it.

    I always want my writing to come across as professional as possible, and such eccentricities are, in my opinion, a little too out there for the average reader. Also, I have a special signature-ish ending to all of my posts. I always write “Cheers!!” whenever I post something. I do not know why, it just kind of happens.

    Hope you are well. Cheers!!

  • “Being old school, I opt out of any visual text editor,”
    Holy Jesus, how old are you???
    I bet you walk to the TV to change channels too?

    OK, here’s mine, I just can NOT go by a misspelled mispelled missppelled word without stopping to correct it. Fie on you Richard Brodie!

  • You type out the full URL? OMW. I could never do that. Firefox remembers which URLs you visit and auto-populates with URLs that match what you’re typing. Do you use this feature at least?

    On a separate note: my mom had a typewriter and I always used to imagine myself as a writer back in Grade 1. What fun that was!

  • I also handcode HTML – I very rarely use any kind of WYSIWYG editor.

    I compose nearly all of my posts off-line too – partly because, like you, I’ve had a few lost to connectivity quirks, but also because I rarely have the opportunity to draft posts entirely in a single sitting. Instead, I rough out some ideas (usually in Notepad++) and stash them in a Google Docs document. Then I revisit, refine, lather, rinse, repeat… until I get where I want to go.

    I know that practice is kinda tedious and seems protracted, but this way I can work on posts from anywhere – my PC at work, my ancient & ailing desktop PC at home, or even on my notebook sitting on the bathroom floor during my son’s evening bathtime. I’ve gone to using Google apps, Foxmarks, and other “cloud” tools quite often so I can work on stuff from anywhere.

  • You must have a phenomenal memory if you’re doing all your web surfing by typing in the full URLs. That’s pretty impressive.

    My old-timer habit is books. I know I’m not alone in this, but we’re heading into a time when books are going to become increasingly digitized (especially since Oprah recently endorsed Kindle). When I think about it, I feel like I should make the switch (you know, to save the trees) but the thought of not having shelves and shelves of bound paper and ink is just a little over the top, even for this modern tech-loving reader.

  • As for me, i have never used any blog posting software to post my blogs. I heard a lot about them that how “awesome” they are but never used any one. I always log into WordPress Dashboard > Write and then write all my articles. I use firefox with spell checker on though to make sure i don’t post any spelling mistakes.

    That might not be too weired but that is how i write.

  • My late father always mention the name of Max Soliven, and he has really contributed a lot.

    Anyway, I write my posts using MS Word for more than 4 hours when late night, and I cannot sleep until it’s done. Then I view it multiple times after I published it, and it makes me feel good. I then tell my self that I just finished another masterpiece.

    I just don’t know if it’s weird.

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