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Blog faster! 5 ways to make improve your publishing volume
January 31st, 2008 by John BrianWhen I was in college, one of my most difficult classes was scenic painting. Not only did it mean trudging into class at 8:00 am (the only class with that distinction in my five years of school), the 
professor would amble around behind us as we were painting and, if were looked like we were stopping to ponder our work thus far, shout "Paint faster!"
While it had the effect of giving the class a sort of sweatshop feel, the practical reason for his argument was that the faster you painted, the more work you could do, and the more money you could make in a year.
Today, who among us doesn’t wish we had more time? My available time at the office for blogging is limited, so any tool I can find that lets me blog more efficiently is one that I’ll latch on to. Here are five ways I’m able to get posts done faster, so I can blog with less time or churn out more posts in a week:
1. Trade out the web interface for a desktop app. Web interfaces are nice in that they can be accessed anywhere and provide a direct link to your blog. But they also have some shortfalls, 
namely that it’s easy to lose unsaved work and you can’t always see what you’re doing. Wordpress, on which the Beaconfire Wire resides, is particularly problematic in this way - I used to have to take another half hour or more to add graphics, just because of the difficulties of positioning them without seeing what I was doing.
I evaluated a few options and ended up settling on Windows Live Writer. It’s free, interfaces with major blog software (though it would really prefer you use Windows Live Spaces), and provides a familiar feel, including a spellchecker that provides the red squiggly underlines that have substituted for strong spelling skills in my generation.
In particular, the ability to line up images and set their attributes quickly has sped up my blogging. And while there are still some bugs (<a name> tags will crash it badly), it’s largely a stable project. Plus it’s free.
2. Set some standards, and conform to them. Yeah,
it’s cooler to fight The Man. But self-imposed standards can save you time on decision making and let you automate some actions. For example, for the last few months, almost all my callout images have been a set width (239 px, since we widened the blog), plus a black border and white margin that do my spacing for me (for a total width of 250 px).
This means I don’t have to worry about how the wrap will look, since I’ve seen it before, and know that it’s about the right size. It also helps me pick out my source images - if I can’t imagine something looking good either cropped or shrunk to that size, I don’t use it.
3. Take advantage of automation. As mentioned above, I’ve made a habit of setting up all my images to some basic
standards. I’ve set up a photoshop action to perform this formatting for me. This can be particularly helpful for photobloggers - there’s little more tedious than creating thumbnails of 300+ files every time you want to make a post. But with Photoshop’s automate command, you can just create an action, point to a folder, and walk away.
Other tools have their own automation functions - it’s worth investing a little time upfront to learn to use them so you’ll save time in the future.
4. Write, then edit and format. As a 
blogger, you’re almost certainly your own editor and researcher, and possible your own designer and layout guy. Since these techniques require different parts of your brain, finish one before you start the next - write the whole post without worrying about typos or graphics. Then go through on a second (and possibly third, depending on complexity) sweep to clean it up, add your images, and make sure the layout keeps it readable.
The only exception here is when your graphics are tied to what you’re writing - when I wrote a walkthrough of the process of creating a Facebook social ad, I needed to screenshot my work as I was writing. The result was a post that took about twice as long as it should have. That said, there was really no other way to put it together without grabbing the screenshots as I was making the changes that I was writing about.
5. Let the tools do as much work as they can. You’re the ideas guy and the writer - use tools that do as much of the rest as you can. I use SnagIt to grab screenshots, Photoshop for quick graphics 
edits, and the aforementioned Windows Live Writer to put it all together. If it’s a code-heavy post that Live Writer is having difficulty with, I’ll sometimes move over to Notepad++ to help me see what’s going on with the format. Good RSS aggregators, like NetVibes, help you find material quickly from a variety of sources, from a Google News Alert to other blogs to crib from. Putting together the RSS feed can be sped up by using Feedburner. And when it’s time to find graphics, I’ll use services like these to quickly find royalty-free content to drop in.
That said, there’s no tool to do the writing for you. Sometimes, it can just be hard to get started, or you’re just short on ideas. This is the other place where blogging faster can help you - the more time you save on writing, the more you can spend on research for new topics and the more you’ll be willing to just toss posts that didn’t pan out to meet your expectations - I always have three or four in my queue that are topics I hope to get back to, but just aren’t where they need to be at the moment.
Volume isn’t everything, but whether you blog for work or for fun (or, as in my case, a little of each) the more time you can spend writing and researching the better your posts will be. So blog faster, fellow bloggers… blog faster!
