Reader beware: huge hunks of my professional career's been spent in the blogiverse. Lest you be tuning in from the distant past, I want to make it clear before we go on that if you're still picking sides on blogging software, you are probably old school and we should just go get drunk together.
"You should blog more," said one of my good friends. I agree. We all should blog more!
I could take the easy way out of explaining why I hesitate to push "publish", with a backlog of posts in draft. I could blame venue-vertisements like Facebook, tools like Twitter, or beat that old dead horse of the CNN scroll for ruining our collective attention spans.
Blogging is different than it used to be. Before I start to sound all "get off my lawn", I think short-form updates have been good for us as writers and for all of us as humans. People are truly unafraid to share snippets of their lives and connect: with former classmates, family, friends, strangers. Twitter's character limit has helped us get funnier. Brevity begat funny. We're more aware that we've got a limited space in which to capture your dwindling attention.
But, what to use to blog these days? As a writer by trade, and a geek second, I've never needed more than a pretty font, a link button, a big enough text area to type in, and a way to put a picture where I want it. Pretty themes? Bonus! Easy-to-install-and-preview themes? Crucial.
Is this a product chopportunity (challenge+opportunity)?
Tumblr: the hipster secondhand store of blogging. I love it. Like decoupage, collage, a bookmark in my favorite place. Like del.icio.us flipped on its head for 99% visual interest. Pintrest without controls. Kickass themes. A place to share the hey-looka-here-at-this-thing. But, if no one's gonna write on their Tumblr, well:
Mlkshk is better at sharing images for the LOLs. Mlkshk is the internet without the bad news.
Movable Type is and shall ever be my first love. As a freelancer, I haven't had a ton of interaction with the guts of it lately. However, I can't count the times I'll jump up during a TV show to declare "THAT is an MT site!" (Baseball that's so inside, it squares the circle: looking back through some old ProNet archives, I realize how many of my nearest and dearest are people I met at Six Apart. Le sigh.)
WordPress is for work. The interface of WP always makes me roll my eyes a bit, but it IS a powerhouse of features. It's not my fault that I'm right-brained and thus, just want to delete half of the UI.
TypePad is still my favorite thing for blogging long-form, and it's got its quirks leftover from the olden days that I find charming and you probably find maddening. It's like a kickass house my friends built: I know where to step down or watch my head, but you might not. You probably don't and shouldn't.
So this still begs the question, and the app: if none of these tools are perfect in the Swiss Army Watch way? That makes me excited that maybe, out there, someone's working on something like OmmWriter combined with Instapaper. Something elegant. Something easy. Something to make writers' lives easier.
Something that means we'll read the whole thing.
Ginevra Kirkland 