David Isenberg, influential stupid-network prosultant and now a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center wrote, "At Layer 1, I sit in front of my computer and wiggle my fingers, same as I am doing now." David is of course a brilliant blogger, ranging from topics of professional interest in network policy studies, through matters of conscience and astute political observations to personal and cultural riffs that just float by and the reader says "Oh wow!" But at heart he's a datacom guy grounded in the good old OSI model.
I wrote him back and said:
My sense was that by keeping the question ridiculously unbounded, people would respond based on their own unique perspectives, perspectives informed by experience as well as by "their nature."
What I get from this initial response is that I was right, and that you have begun at the bottom with a brief description of Layer One. The OSI model has six layers on top of layer one. I wonder how you see the BSI (Blogging Skills Ingenuity) model....
Seriously, in the "how" we see technical skills in the context of a tool set, mediated by personal attributes like vision and style, translated into the digitized creative output of the blogger. I guess I was asking: How do the brightest among us do that?
But I didn't mean to be answering my own question, and "In my pajamas" still qualifies as a valid if somewhat cliched response.
I haven't heard back from David on that, but I did have a response from a beautiful woman with black velvet PJs who also happens to have some superior technical chops.
Here's how Michelle Goodrich (who designed the "How do you Blog" logo) from Mandarin Design replied:
An interesting question Frank...
How do you blog?I compose directly into http://www.blogger.com. There is no offline preparation like some folks do and sometimes I remember to do a spell check using Blogger. For particularly sensitive code that requires pixel perfection like the center float I do cheat and work with the post in a test page that is live at Mandarin, but rarely viewed.
Software and Tools:
The only tool used for Mandarin is an old legal copy of Adobe. There wasn't a word processor or any other software on this PC until someone who used it had to install an education version of Microsoft Office last year. I can easily blog from a public library PC.Pajamas:
I personally work in a bare bones environment in my pajamas (black velvet with satin trim) and don't use any software. Well, I suppose that http://www.blogger.com is software and that is what I use. If it isn't free I don't use it. There are no technical books here - I just make it up as I go. If there are mistakes I go back and correct it. I like to work in various flavors of browsers and make each new trick or tip look the same in all of the browsers as it evolves rather than mentioning that it works well in one browser and not another. I try not to confuse folks with the browser differences and usually pretend that differences don't exist. Ha! You know the secret now. No negativity.Most of the time resisting the urge to code is difficult, but I have learned not to create a new post every day. There are so many things I want to explore each day that it is difficult not to be over-productive. Instead I leave each creation alone so that there is time for feedback and comments. The referrer script allows me to see how (or if) people are using the tips and tricks.
Another part of how I blog is starting to show. I never look at other technical sites that tell or demonstrate how to do something in HTML or CSS. The original goal, and still the same practice, is to never think inside of someone else's box, either from book instructions or online instructions. Consequently, Mandarin is starting to look somewhat outdated.
Unlike you, and most of the blogs I read, there is no writing talent here so I just type and whatever words spew out just stays. I lean to the visual side and attempt to help real writers make their words more interesting (to me) by using drop caps, pull outs, images, and other text tricks practiced in magazines.
Mostly the blog is a big playground and I have a set of color crayons. No software, no tools. Just me in black pajamas and rhinestone flip flops.
I asked another brilliant web compositor, Kent -- from York Pennsylvania and the author of Squarks, how he did it. His terse response: "Teleonomically." Now the teleosts are a type of bony fish, and we all know what fish do when they're late. But I took his response to mean something on a higher plane. And last night, as I read Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near," it came to me. Kent was talking about some facet of self realization. But no... I dithered, puzzling this out. I hate it when people have active vocabularies so much larger than mine. I thought, if the teleonomic function of something is the effect it has which explains why it is there, then for Kent to aver that he blogs teleonomically might mean that he sees blogging as some kind of adaptation to a problem of environmental complexity, but in order to posit an adaptationist thesis for blogging, why that would mean... that would mean that Kent himself is an AI and we exist in the post singularity world already! I pulled a couple of monographs on jumping spiders and animal cognition out of the bottom drawer and shuffled through them. As near as I can tell (and I am waiting for confirmation from a friend at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute at Central Washington University) we are in no imminent danger. It is doubtful that the singularity, if it exists, is any more cleverly adapted at this point than the average 14 year old Live Journal blogger. Hopefully we can contain it in a server farm near York, Pennsylvania because if it gets out, most of the predicted outcomes spell doom for organic life as we know it.
Other terse replies I received included the following from Danah Boyd, a graduate student at UC Berkeley: Actually, I think that the 'how' question is far more confusing than the 'why' question. How? I type words into a little window and then push "publish." I don't know how to answer your question...
And from Dr. David Weinberger, author, philosopher and fellow at Harvard University, I received the following - remarkable I think for being both technical and terse. David says:
I blog in total prosaic ways.
Someday, though, I'm going to publish the documentation for the blog editor I wrote for myself. The VB-based editor isn't ever going to be debugged enough to be publishable, but the doc expresses what I want in a blog editor.
Please let me know if you'd like me to make this response more boring. Yes, it can be made more boring. Trust me.
Not to be underdone, Chris Pirillo offered this - terse, technical, with a side of Marxism (Groucho Marxism to be exact):
I typically open up a new message window in Outlook and compose everything in there. That way, I don't get caught with one of those "Server Not Found" messages if I try to submit a message I hadn't already copied to the clipboard. I don't do anything fancy with my blogging, though - other than tagging to gada.be. "I once shot a blog in my pajamas. How it got there, I'll never know."
Finishing up today's post I have a pair of high traffic, A-list bloggers with technical chops who both happen to be from Utah. Norm Jenson, author of One Good Move, whose video excerpts have just about replaced television for me, writes tersely:
Frank wants to know how I blog. The answer - I take notes. I take note of those things I find of interest and want to share with others, and using my tools, 3x5 index cards, MarsEdit , Quicktime, iMovie and Moveabletype I prepare and post my notes on the web.
Finally, technically rounding out today's collection with sound practice and good advice, Phil Windley shares the following:
1.) I use Movabletype with custom templates, lots of plugins, and server side includes. Part of the customization is for ease in changing things, some of it is for search engine optimization, some is just to get things I write in front of lots of people. Case in point: I recently noticed a big uptick in people viewing my photos, so I reworked the Gallery templates to look more like my blog and include the left-hand side nav bar.
2.) I use Webstat.com to monitor site statistics and watch it carefully to see what people are interested in and where the traffic's going. I like to know when certain stories have caught the attention of people. Similarly, I watch Technorati and Bloglines to see what people are reading. Different topics rise to the top in different audiences. The things that people are linking to and that show up in Technorati aren't usually the same thing that's showing up as most popular in my site statistics (I call it the Google skew).
3.) I have a half-dozen little tools that I've written in Javascript or Perl that format quotes, pictures, calendar entries, and so on. I recently hacked my Gallery implementation to automatically cough up the HTML I want for a picture in my blog with the click of a link. These little time savers cut the amount of time I spend writing HTML.
4.) Speaking of that, I don't usually use any kind of HTML editor. I write the mark-up by hand. I often just type it into the Movabletype entry window directly for short entries. I write longer entries in Emacs.
5.) I find things to write about from my feedreader (I currently use Google), from emails that people send me, and my own exploration. Having a job that requires that I be out looking at new ideas helps. I get ideas from interactions with students and friends.
6.) I usually write an entry all at once, edit it, spell check, and post. I find it hard to blog when I'm offline because I like to google things, check quotes, and find links while I'm writing.
7.) I leave comments on for the first three weeks an article is up, then turn them off to reduce comment spam (cronjob with a MySql script). My general policy is to not delete any comment unless its completely off topic or personally attacks someone. I don't use trackbacks at all. The few useful comments were drowned in a sea of ping spam that I didn't want to deal with.
8.) I have several features on my blog like "Upcoming Events" and "My Del.icio.us entries" that I include by post-processing RSS feeds and then including using server side includes.
I hope that people are picking up a few good tips and tricks, and satisfying their curiousity about how others do and don't do this blogging thing. There are three days left to run in this series and I hope to be able to be inclusive, to share at least a part of what everyone has contributed. Now this includes the incredibly prolix among us, people like Landsman and Golby ... I'll probably be including a few judicious excerpts and links back to their locations.
Who else is on deck... Sheila Lennon, Doc Searls, Sascha Meinrath, Steve Himmer, Martin Geddes... and many more, all leading up to our less than work safe due to use of the fuck word finale by Chris Locke on Friday.
Before then, I'm hoping Tom Matrullo is off the road and has something for us, and that Susan Crawford has finished grading papers, and that Robert Scoble is out of the low bandwidth zone and can lend us some insights on drinking from the RSS firehose. But, if not... we will just have to hunt these people down at a later date and subject them to the howBlog inquisition.
More tomorrow...
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