Max Soliven, the late, long-time publisher of the Philippine Star had one peculiar habit. Even with the popularity of laptops and word processors, Max typed his daily columns with a manual typewriter and had someone at the office encode the piece for him. Even stranger, whenever he was out of town, he still wrote his editorials on his manual typewriter and faxed the dozens of pages back home for encoding.
But I guess that was how Max wrote. That was how he got into the groove of writing. He has been a war correspondent and a political detainee, among other travails, and perhaps you get to appreciate the wonders of manual technology this way.
Perhaps many bloggers today have never even seen a typewriter in action, moreso a manual typewriter–you know, the one that sounds a loud DING when you go past the right margin. But most of us do have our own blogging habits, be they strange or not.
I, for one, have a few hard-to-break habits. For one, I almost always type complete URLs on the URL bar rather than use bookmarks or use a site’s search box. So rather than use the Lijit box here on the Blog Herald to look for something, I am fond of typing www.blogherald.com/search/xxx. Or perhaps I’m writing a new post, I key in www.blogherald.com/wp-admin/post-new.php. When I need to edit theme files, I usually type in the complete URL to that PHP script, and sometimes even including the file name of the file I intend to fix up. Somehow, I find it faster to let my fingers type rather than have a look at bookmarks, let the mouse cursor wander toward a link and then click.
Being old school, I opt out of any visual text editor, and often type in HTML tags manually rather than click on the buttons above the text editor. I’ve found visual editors to break the markup and thus become more of a trouble than help most of the time. Same with the code buttons.
And being paranoid of browsers crashing or WordPress eating up my latest updates, I copy my post text, paste it to notepad and save it as a local text file for later re-posting in case something bad happens.
And usually through all this, I just drink up my coffee up to half-full (or half-empty?), spend minute upon minute on writing a blog post, and when I finally get back to my coffee it’s already too cold to drink.
Perhaps these may just be bordering on the weird. Maybe there are other bloggers who have habits really worth mentioning, to which mine would pale in comparison.
Quirks, weirdness, peculiarity. If these things help get you in the writing mood, then perhaps it’s your thing. I’m interested in hearing if you have habits that define your blogging activity, and if you find these strange.
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