How long does it take to blog?

Someone asked me how long doing the blog took me. There was no quick answer.

Many components are involved. One of the most important is the photos. Once taken, they need to be downloaded - at that point I try to give them tags and/or move them to subject folders. For blog purposes, the ones I plan to use are cropped etc and saved for web in my "blogging" folder.

With the photos comes the idea for the post - and as I process the pix and determine the sequence, the words start to form.

Some ideas come from things seen on the web - and then it's a matter of downloading the image, and making sure I know the website to link to, for attribution.

Once the photos are all in the new post, the words get added. And the links. I try not to get caught up in finding ever more interesting links - they are there for my information, as starting points for further research at another time (but sometimes they send what I intended to say off in another direction...).

When the writing is done and the "publish" button clicked, I check the post on the blog and inevitably there's some small thing that needs changing.

Sometimes I do a series of posts to be published at intervals throughout the week. (It's good to get away from the computer!)

So, if I see a photo on the web and just write one sentence with a link to the site, that can take less than 5 minutes.

But if it's been a busy week at college and I have to get out my notebook and revisit and THINK - as well as prepare a series of photos - and add links, to artists mentioned, for instance - that can take up to 2 hours.

Of course a lot of ideas never get blogged about, even if I've prepared the photos. Periodically I go through the "blogging" folder and put those in the "might use someday" subfolder; the photos actually used go into archive subfolders (by month).

And then, because the blog is also used as my Reflective Journal for college, every few weeks, I go through the blog and put posts into Word files under various topics, and print out the new pages (two per sheet) to add to the "books" of the various topics. When a project is complete, it gets a japanese binding; until then, paper clips hold it together.

For this blog post, though, the words came first and then I went searching for photos. The entire post took half an hour.