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Powerful Tips for Bloggers

Post by Maria!

Life hacking has evolved to mean many things but at its core

it’s a term for geeks to describe their love of using tech skills

to save time, automate boring tasks and confuse people with

their array of hot keys, shell scripts and jargon.

As I become more comfortable with expressing my ideas

through writing I felt it was time to focus on achieving the same

aim with a bit more efficiency and cleverness.

These are the solutions I came up with.

Write with Markdown

Writing for the web isn’t all sunshine and lollipops. There’s the

ugly necessity of writing out HTML which, while not in any way

difficult, makes your writing less readable during the editing

process.

Markdown is the answer and the best way to explain Markdown

is to show you what it does.

Let’s look at a standard HTML tag:

Bold text goes here and now the Markdown

equivalent: **Bold text goes here**. Doesn’t that look much nicer?

Every common HTML tag has a Markdown equivalent, allowing

for improved readability while writing. On a small scale you

may not notice much of an improvement, but

click here to see a screenshot of this article written in

Markdown.

For use with Wordpress, install the Markdown for WordPress

plugin, which converts the syntax to HTML for your reader but

maintains the original syntax for editing.

There’s the added advantage that writing Markdown syntax is

quicker than writing out HTML and, in combination with

TextExpander (more on this in a second) the time spent

formatting your posts will be cut down to seconds.

Speed up your workflow with

Text Expander

TextExpander is a killer app and a necessity for serious

bloggers.

Here’s an example of its power:

Let’s say I want to create a link using the Markdown syntax.

The syntax for that is [Anchor text goes here]

http://sitename.com).

It’s not much typing by default but all I need to type is :link.

TextExpander recognises that I’ve typed :link and:

1. Replaces it with the syntax I want.
2. Inserts the URL I wish to link to between the parentheses (taking it from the clipboard).
3. Launches an input field titled ‘Anchor text‚Äù that lets me add the link’s anchor text between the square brackets without breaking my flow. (Example)

Let that sink in for a moment. This is one example that saves

me 2-3 seconds for every link I include in my articles.

Imagine how much time you could save after

setting up your own rules. TextExpander do provide you

with thousands of text substitutions out of the box though,

so there’s no upfront work required to experience the benefits.

If you use Windows ActiveWords provides similar

functionality.

Edit blog posts with any text editor

Text editors are the perfect writing environment. They allow

you to focus on what truly matters ‘the writing’ and are n’t

bogged down with cumbersome controls that encourage

fiddling rather than effectiveness.

Wouldn’t it be great to write and edit blog posts within a text

editor? Sure, you can copy and paste text into WordPress,

but what if there was a better solution?

All it takes is the ability to edit text fields

(like WordPress’ HTML view) using your text editor of choice.

Any Cocoa-based browser (like Safari) should allow this by

default, but if you’re like the majority of web workers who use

Firefox then install the It’s All Text!extension. Setup a hot key

and KA-BLAM you’re able to edit any text field you wish with

a text editor.

When writing with Markdown this trick lets me combine

Text Mate’s syntax highlighting with WordPress’ automatic

save system. It’s the best of both worlds.

To get most text editors working with the Firefox method

you may need to read this article.

Improve your writing with clever formatting

One of the age-old writing principles is to write less. Detail is fine,

clutter is not. But we like to fill up space. We’re compelled to fill

blank pages with content, even if it dilutes what we’re saying.

To combat this tendency increase the size of the text you write

with and give yourself less space to fill.

Within TextMate, for example I write with size 14 text and have it so

the text wraps after 78 characters. This means that even a small

paragraph fills up plenty of space, satisfying my ego while

deflating the word count.

Build a comprehensive backup system

If you’re putting a lot of work into a project without any redundancy

you’re never going to have peace of mind. Spending 30 minutes

building a bullet-proof backup system is one of the best time

investments you can make.

Email backups

1. Setup an email forwarder through cPanel ’something like backups@yourdomain.com’ that directs to a Gmail account. Use this one email address for backing up all of your blogs.
2. Create a filter in Gmail that identifies emails being sent to your email forwarder. Set this filter to archive your emails, label them as ‘Backups’ and mark them as read.
3. Install WP DB Backup, configure it via the settings page and start building an archive of your blog’s database.

Amazon S3 Backups

Amazon S3 offers storage that’s dirt cheap on a small scale.

I have a 6+ month archive of my largest blog and I’m still paying

less than $0.50 per month.

To take advantage of this:

1. Install the WP S3 Backups plugin for WordPress.
2. Create an Amazon S3 account.
3. Connect the two elements by entering your access key and secret key (which are both available in your S3 control panel) into WordPress.

It’s worth using S3 Backups just to backup your blog’s files

but an additional copy of your database won’t go astray.'

VaultPress

Automattic, the creators of WordPress are putting together

VaultPress, a backup and security web application that

connects with your blogs and performs a whole bunch of

magical functions including:

• Real time cloning of your files
• Security fixes without your intervention
• Handling massive amounts of data

Once the tool is released to the public (sign up for the beta)

it will be a premium service, but from the little we know it

sounds like a worthwhile expense.