As I’ve been writing the last few months, I’ve noticed a very particular pattern about my posts: most of them are entirely text. It took me a bit to notice this, and, in fact, my Gamerstable blog was the wake-up call. That entry made it live without a single hyperlink. I noticed it later when I reread that entry and said to myself, “I just spent a whole blog entry talking about my favorite podcast, and I never once linked to it… …That is a problem.”
This, I think, is the result of two factors of my writing. First, as I’ve mentioned before, I write on my bus ride to work where I do not have internet access. Second, my personal style is to say things with words rather than other expressive elements.
Blogging without Internet access is somewhat different than blogging otherwise. First, I use OneNote instead of the WordPress web client. As a result of that change alone, everything I write ends up being copy/pasted into WordPress sometime after I get back home. At that point, I tend to tighten up the formatting and do an editing pass. This can catch a lot of the errors I tend to make while writing on a moving/bouncing bus, which is quite valuable. But, it also means that I need to use that pass to do anything extra – such as adding links, images, or fancy layouts for army lists/deck lists. So, in one sense this may have improved my text writing ability, while reducing my reliance on all the extras.
On the other hand, my natural inclination is toward text-only. One place I’ve noticed this before is that I have a tendency to enjoy text-only or text-mostly blogs that I read (such as The Decadent Gamer and Twenty Sided Tale – yes, I added these links in afterward) more than, say, web comics. The other way this manifests is that I’m not much of an artist, so any artwork that goes up on my site is most likely not going to be mine. While I have a digital camera that I use to take photos of my models, photos are typically something I reserve for studio work – I don’t even take it with me when I’m out of vacation or travel.
With that said, when I get a new phone, I want to be able to do Internet connection sharing/tethering to my tablet so that I can get Internet while I’m writing. I hope to use this to tighten up my writing process and avoid the copy/pasting of posts. I’ll have to be careful though, as this could just as easily turn into “surfing the web” in the morning rather than writing. On the other hand, I don’t really plan on adding a lot of frills to my blog posts – I expect that they will likely continue to blog with mostly text (with hyperlinks when they make sense).