I got good advice from fellow OS'er Kent Pitman, when in late January I set a goal of daily (instead of twice weekly) blogging: throw in some posts about process, he said, and that seems like a worthwhile pursuit for today.  I won't write a "How To Blog" post, because a). I don't think I have the authority to do so, and b). I don't think there's any concrete answer for that -- everyone does it differently, and for different reasons, and with a different desired outcome.  But here's how I do what I do, down to the software details:

1). I read other blogs.
I use Google Reader to collect the blogs I read (there are 86, but some are not frequently updated, and a few relate to non-political interests like cooking and movies) into one convenient place.  Then, because I know the value of traffic for sites, I try to do most of my reading by visiting the individual sites, using the "Next" button goodie.  What that means is that when I'm on my computer, I click the NEXT button in the links bar, and it takes me to the next unread item from my blog list.

The downside to this is that I always have more stuff to read, and I fall behind.  Right now there are 616 items waiting to be read in my Google Reader, 343 of which are "essential" political pieces.

2). I read the New York Times.

The New York Times has a gadget called the Times Reader that downloads the NYT to your computer every day, and then updates it however often you ask it to.  Imagine waking up to the whole NYT waiting for off-line perusal on your computer.  It's very nice.  Plus, when you go to the Times Reader, you get a very print-like layout of articles, which you can browse by section.  It also provides the option of increasing the font size on the articles, which my strained eyes always appreciate.  And when you've read an article, it gets grayed out on the section page -- a nice way to track your way through the paper.

I use both a PC desktop and a Mac laptop, so I'm a fan of anything that works on both.  Times Reader does work for both, but for the full version on the PC, you have to pay about $15/month.  I get by on the free edition, in part because I also visit the NYT homepage pretty frequently, and in part because I have the full version for Mac (which is free because it's still a somewhat quirky beta edition).  At some point, though, I look forward to paying for this service, which for me would be cheaper than home delivery (which, if you have it, includes a free full edition of Times Reader anyway).

3). I use Flock.

Flock is a Web browser that's internally the same as Mozilla Firefox (and runs the same extensions), with a few added "social media" tweaks.  It can integrate with any number of social sites -- from Flickr to Facebook, Twitter to del.icio.us -- but I use it primary for its blogging integration.  Flock has a built-in blog editor that is the most graceful and stable composition client I've ever used.  You can compose posts in a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing window, tweak the code in a Source window, or Preview how it will look online in a preview window, all tabbed in the same place.  Here's what it looks like:

 

(I know that's tiny, but maybe it gives you an idea.  You can also take the tour at Flock's site).  It handles the coding for fonts styles, images, links, bullets and numbers, and blockquote indenting, similar to how you'd write something in a word processing program.

It also -- and this is the best thing -- saves your work.  So if the browser crashes as you're composing, there's a very high chance that you'll lose nothing.  I never have.  You can also save posts to work on them even when you're not connected to the Internet.

The trick with OS integration is that Flock is built to work with Blogger or Wordpress, but can't automatically upload to OS.  A quick copy-paste takes care of that, though, and I've never had translation problems between the two.

I'm writing this in Flock right now.  It says hi.

4). I cite.

Verbal Remedy has some great advice on how to make things more visually appealing.  What I would add to this is one primary thing: how to  cite sources.

Nearly any heavily-trafficked blog you look at has a way of block quoting: Setting off major excerpts (blocks) taken from other sources.  I do this, too, and not just for the aesthetic value, but for the practical value.  When I'm taking information from someone else's work, I owe them the courtesy of setting their text apart, so that there's no confusion over where that information came from.  For a single sentence or a short piece, quotation marks work fine, but for anything that's longer than that, setting the quote off -- in a blockquote -- feels necessary to me.  For instance, if I want to include text from Verbal Remedy's "How to Write for the Web" guide, I'd do it like this:

If you're coding this in HTML, you take the text you want to indent and put it between these tags:

here's where the text goes!

 

There's one problem with this: the truth about readers is that many of them will skip that block of text completely, or will read only the opening sentence.  So if the meat of the quote is hidden within, I might emphasize it, like so (emphasis mine):

The reason I MUST say that the emphasis is mine is that emphasizing something changes the meaning of the paragraph.  It's important, then, to say, hey reader, please understand that I'm the one who's saying this is the most important line of this paragraph; the author did not make that distinction.

There are two other vital types of blog citation that I use and frankly encourage.  The first is an in-line citation.  I use a lot of these, and my style is still evolving.  Basically, it's a way of providing a reader with a source for what I'm saying, which I feel is necessary whenever I'm making a statement of fact that might be seen as controversial.  So: Ron Paul said yesterday on the House floor that we need more earmarks.  Sometimes I include a citation with the source name, because it seems like good practice in these days of declining journalism to give credit where credit is due: The U.S. is looking to Iran for new supply routes into Afghanistan, the New York Times reports today. 

Some people get fancy with these, and develop elaborate bracketed short-hands, like [WSJ - sub. req.], which means the link goes to the Wall Street Journal, where subscription is required.  While I think that's a nice courtesy to readers, letting them know that they won't be able to read the source article unless they pay for it, I also think it reduces the readability of any piece to include little codes like that.  But -- like I said, my point of view on this is evolving.

The second kind of citation is a "hat-tip."  These are often shorthanded: h/t (and yeah, that's one short-hand I often use).  If I'm citing something or writing about something that I wouldn't have come across if it wasn't for a link from X blogger, then a hat-tip is required.  It's blog courtesy.  So for instance: Calculated Risk had a nice piece yesterday explaining that we're only one-third of the way to an official depression (hat-tip GOOD).  I could have just linked to Calculated Risk, but that takes away the deserved credit that GOOD deserves for directing me there.  And I could just link to GOOD, but to link to someone who's linking to someone else feels, well, kind of lazy to me, and as a reader, I'd much rather be routed to the original source than an intermediary.  So, the hat-tip.

 

And that's it.  Four easy steps that go into every post I put up.  Maybe only of use to me, but that's all right -- sometimes it's nice just to put things in writing, to remind myself of the basic process, which somehow gets me a little more jazzed about the fun, hard-to-describe part: The actual writing.

Which is what I should get back to now. But first: these are the programs and little tips I've compiled.  Who's got better suggestions?  I'm always open to them, and love trying out new gadgets.