This is a clipping from a maillist I am on, pursuant to someone’s question about how to [I/other people] “blog”?

I suspect that my response is mildly heretical as far as some people will be concerned, but nonetheless they may amuse some…

My response to the question below probably also illuminates why I choose to use Blosxom…

I guess what I’m really asking in this thread is – how does blogging fit into your work day? Do you blog interstitially, or in short bursts or in fits (like over lunch, or just after dinner?). What tools are clustered around the activity of blogging? IMHO those are the appropriate integration points for a blog-editor.

The statistical bulk of my blog entries – work, team, internal and external – get done on interrupts; those are the “pointers to links” postings, the snippets of other people’s stuff, and suchlike.

The longer postings are generally done in after-dinner “fits” – such an apt word – or at other times when I have a quiet moment, and can be bothered to think.

All of my postings are done using a command-line interface (ie: shellscript) which looks awfully like /usr/bin/mailx (viz: asks for subject line, implements dot-on-line-of-its-own == extra EOF, spawns out to $EDITOR on “~v”)

This speaks volumes about how important I believe it is to support casual blog composition to encourage usage; there is also a preprocessor which implements shorthand for some HTML elements. When I discovered Wikis I was pleased to find considerable overlap in Twiki syntax, thereby cluing me in that I was not the only person to think about these problems and try to overcome them.

I implemented these tools when I first started blogging back in 2001, self-plagiarising stuff I wrote in 1995 for automated HTML generation. They’ve been tweaked regularly, ever since.

My “commandline first and most” approach was reinforced after a few bad experiences with Netscape as a web front-end, crashing during composition of multi-kilobyte-long postings.

Like other older geeks, I have a general distrust of GUI tools for bulk input, for that very reason; I began doing cut-and-paste postings where the text was composed in an xterm, and then eventually thought “sod it, let’s take the browser out of the equation.”

As someone who used to make heavy use of TeX, I see no reason that I should lard the time I spend on composition of words with having to faff-about with flakey GUIs – the idea that I should have to ceremonially fire-up a special “blog editor” for the specific purpose of writing some rather simple ASCII text, appalls me.

Now for reading blogs, that is another matter entirely – just as I still write HTML by hand quite often, yet use Safari / Mozilla / Firefox / Camino to view it, I likewise blog in raw text and then use NetNewsWire and a selection of GUI browsers to read the data, in pretty fonts, with nice typesetting.

I see nothing wrong with creating art in my back yard with a handaxe, but exhibiting it in an art gallery.

So, I use NetNewsWire, but might well like it to be linked into something like Namefinder – the contents of which I am considering uploading wholesale into my iBook’s AddressBook.app – and were it not for the fact that I am so wedded to EXMH as an MUA, I might even like to see it in my mail client.

But please: spare me the “ceremony” of blog composition.