Wise counsel on writing and other oustanding resources at BloggingTips.com

Blogging Tips – written, it seems, by a large gang of extremely skilled web and graphic designers – is a blog I wish I’d been reading from the beginning. Some posts well worth reading:

Improve Your Blog Typography with Typogrify

A Few Tips On Paragraph Length (a  question which should be considered, in my view, in conjunction with the question – how many lines or words before using the “more” tag? The people at Blogging Tips have worked that through with an elegant balance: enough of a post that one can make a reasoned decision about whether to go to the end of the piece, but no so little that one has to make a guess on the basis of the first sentence or two. Which makes more sense in the context of breaking news than in a special-purpose, self-defined audience outlet).

6 Twitter Directories To Add Yourself To (We here note that we know this is important, but haven’t gotten to it yet – neither this nor any of the other SEO-related things we need to address. That said – this post seemed a good place for bloggers to learn about Twitter).

An excellent piece about the development of blogging: 500 years of Newspapers – How many years of blogs?

Plus:

• three WP themes on the house (is that a New York idiom, like “on the arm?” We mean “free,” but have an aversion to writing copy in which the words “three” and “free” are adjacent. If you’re writing copy in radio news, you only need to make this mistake once to learn from it).
• Active user forums
• Useful Links which are  actually quite useful - and there seems to have been a conscious attempt to avoid the appearance of an editorial conflict of interest, which is a good thing. With a different group of people, this would have been seized upon as an opportunity to self-promote.

There’s also lots of white space – somehow an uncluttered feeling, and reading a post isn’t made difficult by the site design. I didn’t realize it at first, but the use of tabbed navigation in the sidebars seems to triple the useful space.

Finally – all of the posts about copy and copy editing are outstanding.  I hope I’ve correctly listed the Blogging Tips writers who write about writing:

• Patti Stafford from Patti Stafford (for example, Respect Your Readers and the contrarian post Give your writing a natural flow by combining sentences (We recommend Jonathan Vos Post: Raymond Chandler’s Hamlet not only for its excellent sentences, but because it’s funny. Especially if you like Shakespeare. Or mysteries. Maybe both). If you’re feeling discouraged, or someone you care about is, check out Rejection: It Happens to the Best.
  

• Patricia Vennes from Writer’s Rants (those who find English punctuation counterintuitive or difficult – and lots of very bright people do – are advised to read and bookmark It’s, its, it is, Huh?; her version of Hello world! is an introduction to her blog, not the default WP post; and this post, we predict, is going to lead to the novel from which is excerpted published:  Excerpt from 2086: An Unauthorized BioRev Novel, by Yours Truely (the misspelling in the title is,  we believe, intentional; let’s have no complaining about that).
  

Those are just two of the dozen or so contributors to Blogging Tips, which will be added, in short order, to our blogroll.