Hence – an offline editor makes sense. How that works with one’s theme and layout – a slightly more complicated question.  But at least one can get copy formatted for insertion into the WP Post Editor more quickly offline.

Word processors – MS Word, OpenOffice, of course can save files as html.  But a dedicated offline blogging tool might be easier to fine-tune for a particular blog theme. In the course of looking, I found this outstanding post  5 Best Offline WordPress Editor For Your Blog.

And – under the heading of finding treasure while searching for everyday tools, I found the post on EdwardKhoo.com. This is an outstanding blog – lots of helpful how-to posts about irritating problems not otherwise widely addressed.

The blog itself is an outstanding implementation of Darren Hoyt’s Mimbo Theme, available on ProThemeDesign, where one can find the work not only of Darren Hoyt, but also of the brilliant Ben Gillbanks. Check out their new theme ByLine.

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But also – check out this excellent graphic:

Blogussion - using custom graphics to grab readers

That article – about their redesign is by Alex, who is also the proprietor of Asnio - a blog about entrepreneurship. A blog about entrepreneurship by a teenager – I anticipated that it would turn me off, a snarky forum about avarice and rationalizing disparities in wealth. Which tells you more about my biases than his Alex’s work. Which is outstanding.

Here’s Asnio’s Free Stuff page, which also includes a lot of useful material about Thesis Theme customization.

Alex is also the author of the Blogussion post 18 Resources to Help you Write Better Blog Titles, which I should probably read, and I think he’s responsible for some? all? of Blogussion’s images which open their posts. I don’t think they’re keyed to categories, but I think they’re mostly original work. Here are a few that I like; notice that the Twitter thumbnail¹   which works on its own as an image of the bird’s face, doesn’t really prepare you for the full-sized illustration – partly because the thumbnail has a nearly 45-degree orientation, but the full image – and the standing bird, are more or less at right angles to the frame.

Twitter "thumb"

My thought was that this made for a less expected – and therefore more satisfying visual payoff for the reader who follows the excerpt to the complete post.

Here’s the image accompanying the complete post:

a less predictable visual delivery for the readers who follow the excerpt link to the full article.

This article, by the way, is by Matt Cheuvront, who can also be found at Life Without Pants.

My favorite image on Blogussion, however, is this:

The domino theory meets Dr. Who?

This illustrates Alex’s post How to Properly Prepare a Guest Post in 5 Simple Steps. I’m not sure what this means, except that I think the implication is that a single guest post can bring down an entire blog. I’m hoping to get permission to use it on Popular Logistics as a way of illustrating network failures, particularly communications networks.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Related posts on blogussion
• Web Situs – 9 Things I’ve Learned About Social Media
• Blog to the Top! | blur Group
• Head to Head 5, HowToMakeMyBlog vs. Blogussion

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1. Twitter “thumb” – full size, 66 x 66 pixels; link is to page on which except appears, five rows down, left column. As of this writing, the excerpt is on the front page of Blogussion; I’ll have to update links later in order to make this point.

Blog Promotion: 169 New Ways to Build Traffic like a Ninja

4 Easy Ways To Increase Readership On Your Blog

5 Easy Blog Improvements in under 5 Minutes

100+ Lists To Help You Become a Better Blogger

Blogussion.

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1. Surfeit, abundance, cornucopia, wealth.

Skelliewag is a blog about blogging – a “Meta-Blog” – and it’s excellent. We’ll let Skellie describe herself:

Skelliewag is a blog about planning, creating and growing the online projects you’re obsessed with. If you have big ideas that keep you awake at night (in a good way), this is written for you.

Who is Skellie?

Skellie is a blogger, writer, occasional entrepreneur, sometime freelancer and Envato worker-bee. Most of all she likes to build things on the web. You can follow her on Twitter.

Elsewhere, Skellie describes the blog this way:

Skelliewag is for bloggers, freelancers and entrepreneurs who think outside the box. If you want to make a living from your passion, not AdSense, this is written for you.

I realized today – looking at some old notes – that I hadn’t looked at Skelliewag in a while, and was rewarded with her beautiful redesign and some posts well worth reading:

• The Three Ds That Will Make or Break Your Blogging Career – Desire
  
• 30 Days to Become a Freelancer (inspired by ProBlogger’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog program)
• 10 Bloggers Share Their Best Post Ever

And there’s even more. I guess I’m going to have to figure out this Twitter thing so I can keep track of Ms. Skellie.

Skelliewag.

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• He lives in Malaysia, and he’s probably not a native English speaker;
• I am a native English speaker, but I think his grammar is superior to mine;
• GlosonBlog is excellent
• He’s 11 years old; I can live with the fact that an 11-year-old could do all of the things above.

But what’s unfair – and I think that the blogging community has to address this – he’s trained his cat to maintain the blog. No worryng about cron jobs, spell-check – I think the cat should get its own blog.

GlosonBlog.com maintenance cat

My cats pretend to “help” with my blogs – by entering random key board sequences if I step away from my desk and they’re in the mood. I summoned all my courage, confronted them – and they responded that, given enough time (i.e.infinite) on the keyboard, they’d produce the best blog post possible.

People have trouble believing upsetting news which disturbs their world view. I’ve repeatedly pointed out that the work of this canine blogger looks suspiciously like the work of this particularly well-known (and deservedly admired) and brilliant blogger/blog theorist. We tried to get the  dog to sing, to rat out the intellectual property rights thief who’s built a career on his own dog’s back.

It’s just like the 1920′s again, when Mickey Mouse accepted Walt Disney’s  promises that Mickey didn’t need a lawer to review their contract. Next thing he knows, he’s doing his own stunts and fighting off hippopotami in tutus.

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Mr.  Roua’s blog, Dragos Roua – The choice of a personal path, uses the Thesis theme. Uses it in an oustanding way, and worth the visit if only for that reason.

Let me take this opportunity to point out what I think is a recurring ethical dilemma  in blogging. Maybe it’s just because I need more coffee.

Mr. Roua’s blog, and this blog here – WordPressBlue – are both members of, and more importantly in this case, affiliates of Thesis.

He wrote the great post I”m sending you to (or trying to). So when I reference the Thesis theme in this post – whose affiliate code should I use? He’s created all the value added – I just noticed it and posted about it.

For the purposes of this post, anyway (and I think the fresh pot of coffee is probably ready) – I’ve used his afffiliate code.Here’s a sample about what’s excellent in this post, Everything he has to say about production and promotion makes an awful lot of sense to me. One gem:

2. Make A Mindmap Of Your Blog

Keep a bird-eye of your blog. Putting your blog into a mind-map, with posts, categories, promotion and income sources proved to be an enlightening exercise for me. Not only it offered a totally different image of my blog but gave me a lot of ideas for overall improving.

To this next idea I’ll add – having been an editor, an author, a copy editor, and ghostwriter – it’s very hard to proof and edit one’s own work.

27. Read Your Own Blog

Too often ignored. You must be your first reader. Whenever I have some free time I read some of my older posts. There’s nothing narcissistic in it, on the contrary, most of the time I dislike what I wrote, and think I could have done it so much better.

It’s not “just another WordPress weblog” (the default tagline which comes with a new WordPress installation, along with the “Hello World” default post.

41. Your Blog Header Is Your Identity

Pay attention to your blog header, that’s where the blog title is usually placed. People will remember your blog by visually recreating that zone. If it’s too crowded it will be hard to memorize. I Always recommend to keep your header as clean as possible, in order to be easily remembered.

Here’s one comment that jumped out at me as very helpful. Gloson, apparently a regular reader, posted as follows:

[Gloson refers to his own post],  7 More Things to Do to Improve Your Blog.But I think your list is far more comprehensive than mine. LOL

And since you usually reply to almost every comment on your blog, one way you could improve it is installing this “Subscribe to comments” plugin. Hopefully it will improve interactiveness.

Certainly my experience is that it’s easy to forget that you’ve entered a comment on a post – and by extension joined conversation. If I understand correctly, this post allows the reader/commenter to return to her/his other work – and be “paged,” as it were, when the conversation heats up again.

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