Articles in "Blogging"
If I Complete A Digression, Did I Get Anything Done?
I’m drowning in ideas I have no time to pursue…! I think this is what some people mean when they complain of “information overload.” In my case, it’s more like “idea overload.”
I recently tried some of the “getting things done” software tools I’ve downloaded in an attempt to get my idea-log under control… but none of them really helped. I’m leaning to a href=”http://bargiel.home.pl/iGTD/”>iGTD since it’s free, full-featured, and actively under development, but honestly, the work of compiling my list of projects and trying to prioritize and schedule them, etc., merely made me even more aware of how swamped I am, and how far behind I am in the things I want to be doing!
I will certainly be getting some of these “things” done eventually, but it sure is harder as the projects pile up. And my wife keeps wondering why I’m killing myself over work I don’t even get paid for…! Now, there’s a conundrum that simply could not have existed before the web came along. Am I having more ideas for interesting projects now because there’s a potential audience that might be likewise intrigued? Or is my “idea center” being overstimulated by the vast number of other fascinating projects now so readily at my disposal? And is ADD merely a byproduct of living with the web? That is, are we more distractible today because web browsing can lead us onto so many irresistable, multi-nested, looping digressions? No wonder so many of us have trouble getting anything done! 
Well, That Took Longer Than I Thought!
This is a tale of two blogs: Blogger, and WordPress. When I looked around for blogging tools and software last March, I settled on Blogger (now owned by Google) because it looked like I could get up and running very quickly. And I did! I don’t think it took me more than a week to customize an existing template and choose the few options available to get something I was pleased with.
Blogger is kind of like Apple’s .mac HomePage tool… mostly, you just point and click and make the best of the few options you have. Still, with very little effort you can end up with something that looks very professional. In my review of tools, I noted wistfully the powerful features of WordPress and Movable Type. As a guy who likes to program and play with code–especially with PHP and MySQL–those two blogging systems loomed on the net like two giant chocolate ocean liners. But I knew I had to be strong and ignore them, in order to get the blog up with a minimum of effort.
So, with Blogger and Ecto in hand, I happily began writing down many things, delighting in my newfound ability to express my rants in a more disciplined form. As the number of articles grew, however, I started bumping up against the one feature of Blogger that bothered me in the beginning: No categories. As of this writing, Blogger offers no way to organize posts into categories or to tag them with keywords. This is a pretty serious deficiency, but it only has an impact after you’ve written more than a dozen posts or so, or if you’ve started covering more than one subject area.
