Flow: blogging in the creative zone

If you blog regularly enough that your tools become an extension of your mind, you may experience flow

the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. (Wikipedia)

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who invented the term, says flow is characterized by a sense of timeless absorption. 

So, what happens when the tools break?

Three Ways to Follow Your Blog

Photo: Frantisek Krejci/Pixabay

By default, your blog has three different ways to tell readers when you publish a new blog post.

Only one of them is called "following."

These methods are not the same, though they accomplish similar things.

In search of subscribe-by-email

EDOARDO TOMMASINI

The impending demise of Feedburner's subscribe-by-email service (July 2021) has many of us weighing our options.

The service is a valuable way to connect with regular readers. Its loss will further erode what is left of Blogger's frayed social layer.

Which Blogger service shall I kill next?

Image: Pixabay

The pixels were barely dry last spring on my seven-part tutorial about inserting images into blogs when Google flipped the board and scattered the pieces to the wind.

All that work, all those screenshots and animations, became obsolete.

Subscribe-by-email will end in July

POPULAR SERVICE CONNECTS BLOGS TO READERS

Image: Pixabay         

The automated subscribe by email service, which is part of Feedburner, will shut down in July, Google announced on Wednesday.

The move leaves users of Blogger with no clear choice for how to continue to offer a subscribe option to readers, though many third-party solutions exist.

The "subscribe by email" gadget will also stop working that time.

Don't drop photos into your blog

USE INSERT INSTEAD

At the moment, though I hope things will change, do not add images into your posts by dragging them from your device or from another web page.

This method kind of works and looks okay, but there are side effects that are not immediately obvious.

Insert images from the edit toolbar instead.

Your blog in a feed reader

LIKE A BROADCAST

Unless you disable the option, your readers can subscribe to your blog in a feed reader. 

Feeds are the open-source alternative to subscribe-by-email and to following.

Here's how they work.