Monday, September 14, 2009
Blogging Advice
I know it's been a while of silence for my blogging and I will get to what's going on. I've got a great deal to blog about. My hope this weekend was to get a number of entries saved and post them with some space. I found that I spent 1.5 hours and only got one post done - granted it was a BIG post. My holdup seems to be uploading pictures. They are large and need to be compressed to web-friendly sizes. Then arranging them within blogspot is just time consuming. My goal this week is to find a better way! In my mind, a post should not take more than 1/2 an hour and my hope is to get this down to 15-20 minutes and the rest is catching up on other's blogs. HELP!!!!
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7 comments:
Jennifer, I too spend a lot of time uploading pics. Blogger can be very slow.
No real help from this quarter except I do start posts and keep them in edit modes. Of course 4 in the morning is an ideal time for writing blogs
but I suspect excessive. ;-)
If it helps, your blogs are well read and thoroughly enjoyed. I know I am always happy when I can get updated on the goings on.
Thanks Theresa - I enjoy yours as well! I think part of my issue is also sorting through photos. I've taken to "burning" a lot of "film" since I have digital now. I have actually uploaded to Picasa WebAlbums, but have not seen how to get it over to blogger. And 4am bloggin from this end would be less than coherent. Hmmm.... It'll be fun week figuring it out though!
i find that little and often is best Jenn. i also compress significant pics soon after uploading them from the camera and try to keep my text short and the pictures punchy. hugs, Kaite
I'm glad other people have commented first! This is a huge topic....I felt almost like making a post about it - but then I'd be posting about things that annoy me in blogger....and I try to keep annoyance off my blog!!
My workflow is basically to shoot pictures of things I want to blog about while I'm doing them. Upload them from my camera into a folder for that month. Then put them in folders by the topics that I'm going to blog about. (I blog by topic not by day if that makes any sense).
When I process photos, I use Digital Photo Professional which is somehow related to Photoshop. From the window of thumbnails, I look at which pictures look best in their original state. I process them - cropping, adjusting sharpness, maybe adjusting contrast or saturation. Saving out of that program converts them to jpg. I name each picture that I'm going to use when I save it.
I have a free piece of software that Jim downloaded from Microsoft (I can get you details if you want), that compresses the photos. So, in my folder for a topic, I now have a bunch of pictures I won't use, and the pictures I'll use all have names in English. I select those photos with English names all at once, right click, and select "Resize" which runs that compression tool.
Then I bring up blogger, create a new post, and upload my pictures. You can bring in 5 at a time - in the upload window if you click the blue "Add Another Picture" button, you can get 5 of the lines that allow you to specify a picture.
I use the big size and center all of my photos....so no thinking....I'm just selecting each photo in my folder that has an English name followed by "(Small)" which is left by the compression software.
I use the old Blogger editor, not the one that lets you drag pictures about. I've seriously tried to you that one twice, and I've really hated it because it seems like it messes up the HTML in ways I can't really figure out.
OK, so once I have my pictures in blogger, I edit the html to have each picture in its own space (leave a space between each picture - just inserting new lines).
Then, in compose mode, I put the pictures in the order I want.
Then I write my text.
Then I add links, proofread it, preview it, try to cut out extraneous words.
Then I schedule it and publish it.
Not saying that this is ideal - and there are certainly changes that I wish google would make to blogger. But this works for me.
I do feel like it's easier to blog topic by topic rather than day by day....and for me, I like to be heavy on photos and light on words. A quick post can take me 15-20 minutes. A big post with lots of pictures and a lot of things that I need to look up or figure out can take me really long. Often those long posts help me learn as well, so part of what takes time is that learning process.
Phew!!! Sorry this was such a long comment. Hope you figure something out that works for you!! Every blog author is different!!
Good luck!
Sue
I was so counting on your comments Sue! I'll look at them in more detail tonight! I'm coming to the place where I think I need to process pictures separate from blogging. I'm hearing that loud and clear!
Thanks!
But you weren't counting on my comments to be absolutely huge, were you??? Sorry about that. I just put the whole thing in in case any section of it grabs you and seems like it could speed you up.
I do think practice makes perfect though too!!
It will be great (for me) if you blog more often!!!
Sue
Sue - I would have been disappointed at any less from you! I was glad for the details it did give me some thoughts to try. I've been using Picasa from Google and I'm learning how I can upload entire files to Picasa Web and they will all be compressed to a new file - i.e. unattended work. Then I can sort through them. I'm hoping that will help with the front end work. We'll see this week. It's all an experiment and I'm sure you know how engineers LOVE experiments!
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