For a few months, I really dropped off the blogging wagon. Too much real-world stuff to do. But now that that’s calming down a bit, I feel it’s about right to get back into it. And boy, is it hard. First, reading. I’m hoping that NetNewsWire, which I’m evaluating, will allow me to deal with the mountain of feeds better than BlogLines. Right now it’s saying “5556”, which I fear is the number of posts I need to triage. Part 1 will be to come up with a categorization, filters, tags, whatever is necessary to make it so that I can deal with the sheer volume of information coming from the blogs I was subscribed to months ago. (a lot of that will be deleting never-really-that-interesting blogs, of which there are plenty, luckily!). Second, posting. We’re currently hosting the ActiveState blogs via Typepad, but let’s just say that editing on Typepad is cringe-inducing. So I’m also evaluating MarsEdit. (It seems only fair that I’d play with the NewsGator products, as at least some of their tools were written with ours, if the rumors I heard are true). Third, tracking. I need to spend some quality time with technorati et al., to get useful feeds. Unfortunately, the trivial “vanity searches” don’t work, because ActiveState is mentioned everywhere anytime someone talks about e.g. using ActivePerl, and my own name is mentioned by lots of people who are clearly playing games with Amazon referrals trying to hawk Learning Python or the Python Cookbook. I should have used a pseudonym! Fourth, time management. There’s got to be an appropriate balance between too little blog reading and writing and too much. Still looking for that one. Fifth, emotion management. This one may be a bit weird. I find reading blogs can be draining. Especially when it comes to “work blogs”, I find that I have to spend a fair bit of effort figuring out what blog posts are simply expressions of human feelings and thoughts, and which are PR plays. At the same time, here I am blogging at work, trying to figure out what I want to say, so that it’s useful, fun, interesting, or at least not annoying. Ah, my life is so hard…