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How I Blog: Aaron Foley

How I Blog: Aaron Foley

This is the 25th post in our “How I Blog” series. To read the rest, visit the archives. Interested in participating? Drop us a note about ‘How I Blog’ along with a photo or yourself or your blogging space at tips [at] blogmedia [dot] biz.

Aaron Foley

I decided long ago that I’ll never make a living blogging. I’m just not that interested in blogging about digital cameras, search engine optimization or web 2.0. I blog simply for the fun of it.

The inspiration to blog came in 2003 when my girlfriend got a job in Yellowknife Canada and we moved up north. Knowing I would want to document this part of my life I started up with a blogger account. Since then blogging has become a vital part of my life and I now write my personal blog at www.Smalltownunderground.net and contribute to Blogcritics.

The small town I live in does offer some possible problems with employers so I’ve taken to blogging quasi anonymously, telling only friends that I blog. Mostly my posts are about my life up here with some general thoughts thrown in for good measure. My life in the far north offers the opportunity for some unique content and I normally try to take advantage of that as often as possible.

Despite buying Getting Things Done I’ve never actually found the time to read it which could account for my lack of a solid posting routine and time. I write most of my posts in either the evening or late night after having taken in the day, but I have been known to fire off one or two from work. My blogging routine follows a pretty straight forward path. I normally spend about a hour sorting through the blogcritics.org e-mail.

As a contributor to Blogcritics.org I get about 100 emails a day for products to review or news items to write about and try to pick up on some that I find interesting. This has led to more music reviews on my blog which I’m happy with. After that I spend sometime reviewing my Bloglines feeds to see if there’s anything that I find blogworthy. I usually check out the news sites for some political and world news. It’s important for me to get a northern perspective on things so both the local newspaper site and the CBC North sites are regular stops.

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I’ve also started to produce podcast so I’m paying special attention to mp3 blogs and spend too much time trolling Myspace for bands. My actually composing of posts is normally done in one of 3 places. The main WordPress admin panel that, The Performancing extension for Firefox and the new Beta of Word 2007 . Easily 90% of posts go directly into the wordpress posting UI with Word being used for longer posts and posts that require better grammar and flawless spelling ( my Blogcritics.org posts).

I try get a good balance of life vs commenting on the world . I want this blog to be a record of my thoughts and life while I live here and don’t want it to be too heavily laden with product reviews.

All my blogging is done on a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop running windows XP, and Firefox 1.5; normally on my couch sometime after midnight with cheesy b-movies providing the soundtrack (BloodSport 3 for this post).

Aaron Foley lives in Canada and blogs at smalltownunderground.net.

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