Blogging Tips for Beginners: A Web Browser for Busy Authors #writetip

Flock Browser – Flock Art

To be an author is to be a blogger. Not all writers are as enthusiastic about that new aspect of our profession as I am. I love geek stuff. I love playing with new ways to express myself, and I really love the possibilities blogging can bring to stories.

So why isn’t every writer enthusiastic about blogging? I think the biggest barrier is a technological hurdle. So, that’s the blogging issue I’m going to address first. You need more than a web browser to get this job done right. If you are trying to muddle along with Internet Explorer or Firefox, with no enhancements for blogging, you are wasting too much time trying to put your posts together. And that is one of the biggest complaints I hear: Blogging eats too much time.

While you can install add-ons that will improve the blogging experience with IE or Firefox, I’m not even going to waste your time trying to describe how. It’s better to use the browser that was designed for blogging and all the social networking you do: Flock. All the tools you need are built in and they are fantastic.

I have been using Flock since the first release around 2005 and I started mainly to see how it functioned as a browser. Flock made a blog reader out of me and then a blogger. Here’s a snip of a five-star review for Flock at CNET (snip made automatically by my Flock browser).

Flock is designed to streamline and emphasize how you interface with social networking sites, RSS and media feeds, and blogs. Because it’s built on Firefox 3, its behavior will feel familiar and it supports most–but not all–Firefox extensions. And yes, the “awesome bar” is part of the latest version.

Flock Browser – Free software downloads and reviews – CNET Download.com

I know you’re saying, but I’m not good at all this technical stuff. You don’t have to be.  When you want to quote another blogger, you highlight the text and it’s a right click away from appearing in your blog post properly attributed(see the quoted text above — just a highlight and a click ). When you want to add an image to a blog post, it’s a right click away. You can keep Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace open in the Flock sidebar and get your social networking done while you blog. Are you juggling half a dozen blogs and webmail accounts? Support for that is built in too.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be going over the basics of blogging for beginners and I’ll explain how to implement these techniques with Flock. If you’re already using a blogging tool, you’re ahead of the game. If not, go download Flock. It’s free.

Get ready to love your blogging.