Unhalfblogging

I've used IA Writer quite a bit on the iPad and am starting to use it on the Mac to see how it goes. 

You can run it in a small window amongst the relative clutter of your desktop, which seems a bit daft. The app makes much more sense in glorious full screen, removing all of those distractions and allowing for greater concentration. 

Focus Mode looks even more splendid on the Mac, as what you've written slowly fades from view, enabling clear focus on the very sentence… the very word you're writing. 

Now… what to write about. 

Well I'd like to get a batch of blogposts racked up. I used to be pretty prolific, both on my own blog and especially when writing for The Next Web. These days, I tend to share content in faster, shorter bursts via a range of social platforms new and old. Certainly Twitter and, to a lesser degree Facebook, but also spaces like new kid on the block, paid-for service app.net or ADN as the kids call it. 

Actually the kids don't call it that because they aren't on app.net. That's because it costs $50 a year and they don't want to/can't afford to pay... aside from which they've never heard of it. 

I tell you where they used to be… Facebook. They were there when they couldn't get their heads around Twitter.   Now, for whatever reason, they're all over Twitter but also flooding 70s-style photo-sharing service Instagram, which is more or less a social network in its own right. 

But blogs isn't really where anyone seems to be any more… at least not in my immediate crowd. If they are blogging, I'm not reading, so something's broken. Which is a shame, because it's nice to read a good blogpost from time to time. It's often even more fun to read and get involved in the comments underneath blog-posts, but other than on mainstream news sites, all that chatter has moved to Twitter… publish a blogpost and tweet a link to it, and people engage with you in Twitter rather than underneath your blogpost. The engagement is welcome wherever it takes place I suppose, but it can be a bit scattered and unfocused, even with the best tagging strategy in the world. 

So, for what it's worth, I'm going to blog again. More for the discipline than anything else. 

Unblocking the block.

Yes I know... I've blogged about blogging... the ultimate cliche.

pic: Search Engine People Blog

The Lost Art

When I'm not working on my work laptop which lives behind a corporate firewall and allows me to access internal systems and services, I'm usually using my iPad.

In pre-iPad days, I'd generally be found using one of several PCs around the place, desktop, laptop, netbook etc. Now, other for than specific tasks, they're generally gathering dust as I try to maximise my use of the iPad.

The iPad has changed my behaviour, changed my consumption habits and expenditure patterns. It has provided me with new ways to carry out all of the important things I used to do on different machines.

In the main, these new ways of working represent a distinct improvement on what went before. One changed behaviour which I regret though is the gradual tapering-off of my blogging habit.

Yes, yes,I know there are blogging apps available for the iPad, but they are all flawed. Usually, if you are able to attach a photo to your post at all, it'll be dumped somewhere incongruous in the post, which will be sprawled or centred in some bizarre machine font.

Not good.

By the time you've got on a PC to correct the mess, people have read it and gone away, thinking you're a complete amateur.

So, after a long lay-off, I'm blogging on PC for a while. Good idea?