CreativeTechs Craig Swanson led us through our second session of "Blog Your Portfolio" at the School of Visual Concepts, here in Seattle. Craig and Larry Asher, the SVC director did a stellar job helping the three of us in this experimental class actually get our blogs up and running.

Not satisfied with using the default templates included with Blogger and Wordpress, I've made a lot more work for myself trying to modify the look of the templates - getting into the CSS and tweaking in Dreamweaver. Lots to learn.

Larry gave us a good presentation on writing for the web, citing Jakob Nielsen, who was here in Seattle recently with User Experience 2006, and some of his own work as the creative director for Worker Bees. Craig suggested this MarsEdit software as a way to loosen up and not worry about writing the great American Novel on your blog. As usual, it's not working very well out of the box. Is it me, the software, the server, or sunspots. Who knows? I've e-mailed tech support and hope to have an answer soon. My workaround so far, has been to write in the MarsEdit window, which is like a simple e-mail program window, copy and paste into the Blogger "create a post" window, then publish. It really was easier to write that way.