It’s not just me that realized how blogging stinted my writing, it seems. My colleague Andrew writes about how blogging killed his fiction writing, something I certainly can relate to! You might remember that I started publishing short stories from the world of Orn to get myself started writing fiction again.

It worked. I am writing fiction again, with a lot of ideas in the pipeline. Sure, I’m still struggling with the fact that other writing fills some sort of need, which makes me less hungry to jot down stories, but on the other hand, I’m spending more time thinking about what fiction I want to write with the time at hand.

Welcome to reality, no one, not even Stephen King, can write all the time. I felt really sad when I reached that conclusion…

Anyway, do chip in and tell Andrew how blogging is affecting your writing in the comments!

I get a lot of press releases these days. Actually, I’ve always gotten a lot of them, but the last year or so they have increased. Being the editor of The Blog Herald adds to it of course, so there’s a lot of companies and people wanting me to write about their service. So how often do I pick up on a press release? Not very, actually, and that’s because the PR people fails to spark my interest.

Here’s a bit of free advice for you PR reps out there, trying to get me to write about your service. More

I just published this week’s interview on BloggerTalks, talking to the new Blog Herald blogger, Arvind Satyanarayan about Movable Type. It includes comparing it to WordPress, talk about Six Apart Services, and more.

The interview article is titled Movable Type or WordPress - Arvind Knows What He Prefers and Why and I think you should read it.

Have you ever been the editor of a site or magazine? Then you know how much time is spent brushing up people’s contributions, removing silly errors, sometimes fact checking, and even doing occasional formatting. I know that most blogs allow authors to proofread and publish their posts themselves, and it is good for the content flow, but bad for quality. We’re doing that on The Blog Herald, a site built on news and feature posts being more or less longer news, and it’s the only way to do it. Unless you have a proofreader sitting on standby all the time, it’s just not possible not to have this kind of posting procedure. More

I wrote a bunch of posts for The Blog Herald this week, which is fun of course, but not really a fair representation of my work as the editor of the site. There’s a ton of things behind the scenes, and honestly, I don’t think that the public will see the fruit of my editorship until after the redesign. That is, unless you counting me killing the Kontera ads, of course…

These are my top 3 posts by yours truly this week:

1. ProBlogger The Book with quotes from co-author Chris Garrett
2. Flickr Gets Video, But Just For 90 Seconds feature post, and the corresponding news post on pimped photo sizes
3. The April Fools Gag That Backfired

Number 2 is a good example of how to chop up a story, and by doing that giving it more focus.

My first week as the editor of The Blog Herald has been fun. A bunch of posts, lots of networking, and even more in the pipeline. Among this is a redesign, which I sincerely hope will be well underway this month, although I doubt a release in April is possible, and some tactical recruitment to fill some holes in the staff.

Speaking of which, the writers over at The Blog Herald have been great in welcoming me. Granted, I know a few of them since before, but still. Being brought on as someone who’ll fill the big shoes of the very talented Tony Hung, as well as tackle the problems that the site have. It could’ve been a problem, but it isn’t, always a nice thing.

I’m not working weekends, so now I’ll have some time to sit down and relax, and reflect on the situation. I do indeed have lots of ideas, and then there’s the design decisions to take into account, all with the goal of making The Blog Herald a natural place for bloggers (and wannabes) to visit. The goals are ambitious, to say the least. The only way to have goals in my opinion.

Have a great weekend, I sure intend to.

I’m the new editor over at The Blog Herald, as of yesterday actually. It was officially announced today though, so pop over for that. Among the things on my plate for this gig is of course a redesign, you can follow that on the site of course, and via Twitter, both mine and the one created for The Blog Herald.

A little while back I received an e-mail with an unusual request. Someone, which I’ll let be anonymous for the time being, asked me to write an e-book for him detailing the secret behind my success in the blogosphere. The take was that he didn’t perceive how I made direct money from any of my blogs, and therefor recognized that I must be making it from spinoff services promoted through my online writing. This person was pretty well informed about my background, because he found it equally interesting that I managed to get into the international blogosphere by starting a blog (here at tdhedengren.com actually), and going from there, with English being a secondary language.

I found this interesting, and I’ll tell you why. More

WordPress 2.5 are mere days away (it’s slated for March 10), so if you’re going to upgrade right away you better get started future-proofing your blog. The always excellent Lorelle’s got a checklist up on The Blog Herald, with links to more reading. Check it out.

Personally, I won’t make the switch to 2.5 until a week or two after release. I usually await responses on the WordPress support forums to see what kind of problems people are having. Maybe that makes me overly cautious, but I like my blogs running smoothly, not struggling with error messages and bugs in a new release. That being said, I do keep my blogs updated within the branch I’m in (2.3 at the moment), so when I do switch to 2.5, I’ll be committing to it.

And I still think skipping 2.4 in the naming hierarchy is both stupid and confusing. To make things clear: 2.3 is the current version, the next version is 2.5.

I was hoping to announce a project today, but I’ll have to push that forward a bit, waiting to get the definite word from my favorite illustrator. Would be nice to launch it with a piece of his work, but I hadn’t planned it so if he’s swamped I’ll just go ahead. It’s worth the extra days of waiting though.

Meanwhile, I’ve returned to The Blog Herald with a post connecting to my tooting your own horn post. If you want to know how to get me to read your blog, this is the post for you. Long time TDH readers (hah!) might remember that I started my international blogging career at that fine site, before moving on to 901am. Full circle, eh? More