Blogging: How Do You Post Your Content?

The Internet is representative of an ever-growing modern social platform. While common devices such as Facebook and Twitter have their particular purposes, a blog is where the bulk of the news, commentaries, ramblings and other bits of useful information are ultimately found. While just about everyone writes to either a personal or professional blog, many bloggers aren't aware of, or use methods of posting outside of the blog's basic web interface.

There are several popular and leading blogging publishing platforms today, such as Blogger, Moveable Type, Live Spaces, TypePad, and Wordpress. At their core, they are all similar in basic concept and features. Regardless of which one is being used, all of them have a built-in web based text editor for blog creation and posting. For the most part, each service offers blogging via a web based interface that allows for basic text creation, and insertion of media such as a linked image, video, and audio uploads. Additional basic features include font formatting options, post categories, and saving a post as a draft for later publishing.

Some blogging platforms, such as Wordpress allow for the customization of many features for a blog via community developed add-ins. Requiring a self-hosted version of the service, add-in enhancements can greatly improve upon blog entry creation and posting. Examples include easy and direct linking of Youtube and Vimeo videos, quick and easy tag creation, podcasting features, and automatic posting to Twitter. There are literally hundreds upon hundreds of add-ins, that help to provide a flexible and feature rich blogging experience.

Blogging on the go? What if there is no actual online connection to at least draft a post? Certainly any text editor would be sufficient for quick creation, followed by an eventual copy and paste to the web based blog. Although somewhat workable for the blog post body, it isn't the most efficient solution for font formatting and creation of additional information in the post, such as category, tags, post name, post date/time, and more. Fortunately, there are fuller featured software applications available that allow for blog post creation while on the go and offline. Perhaps the most popular and well known software application suite in home, school, and business, is Microsoft Office. Both Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 offer the ability to create and ultimately post a blog entry right from within Microsoft Word. A post can be saved as a typical Word document and edited later, published as a draft, or published as a live post. Right within the word processing software, a blog title, category, and more can be built right into the document and synchronized with a blog. Setup and use is as simple as choosing to create a new document and then selecting "Blog post." Microsoft Word then offers a new contextual tab on the ribbon specific for blogging features.

Although web-based and a bit crude as far as formatting and features go, the popular and free Microsoft Office alternative, Google Docs, also supports a direct to blog posting feature simply by quickly setting up you blog account credentials and then by selecting a document and posting it to a blog.Community testing shows that Google Docs seems to be a quick and dirty way to create a post, but at this time is not a feature rich blogging solution.

Mobile blogging solutions are also available for most blogging platforms as well. Blogger for example, allows for blog posting simply by sending an MMS or SMS message to a specified number that is linked to a blog account, Many of the platforms also allow email to be sent to an address that is tied to an account in a blog's setup options. Wordpress offers a more integrated solution with available free blogging applications for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry for publishing directly to a Wordpress hosted, or self-hosted blog.

Sources/Resources:

Blogger Mobile
Wordpress Mobile Apps
Microsoft: Help with blogging in Microsoft Word
Posting to Your Blog from Google Docs