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Sometimes, no matter how strict and disciplined our posting schedules are, there are events that will forcibly push us out of our rhythm, such as family tragedies and emergency out-of-town trips (to places without good Net access, to boot). The longer the event, the more work gets piled up, and the greater the disorientation upon our return. That said, count me as one disoriented blogger. (I have been one for the past two weeks!)

In response to this problem of mine, I cooked up a list of activities which helped me ease myself back into the numerous problogging tasks on hand. Hope these can help future bloggers who’ll unexpectedly get yanked out of “the flow”.

Reading old blog posts – Days or weeks without blogging can dull your writing voice, as well as your vocabulary and wordplay. Sifting through your old posts will serve as the sniff of that familiar perfume that brings back the good ol’ memories.

Commenting on other blogs in your field – Well-written comments are like microcosms of blog posts; the views and thoughts contained within them can stand on their own for their author, and they elicit comments from other people as well. As such, writing comments can serve as an excellent warm-up drill. Go around a couple of good blogs in your niche and chip in your thoughts. This can be applied to other forms of online discussion, such as forums.

Randomly surfing the blogosphere – How many times have we posted about the blog posts written by other people? Other bloggers’ opinions are a potent fuel to fire up the hibernating blogger in you. Take a stroll around the blogosphere using Technorati, BlogExplosion, blog directories like EatonWeb, or even Blogspot’s Next Blog feature.

Why the “randomly”? Often, we are already familiar with the way of thinking and tone of the bloggers in our feed subscriptions and blogrolls. Random surfing can introduce us to something new, something that can shock and awe and draw forth the emotions, something that can trigger a blog posting frenzy, never mind the blog-rust.

Reading offline sources – Before going on blogging hiatus, I talked about getting blog content from offline sources. Whether you’re nicely tucked into your blog posting rhythm or totally out of it, offline material such as newspapers and magazines can provide the ammunition. If you’re having trouble consciously looking for something bloggable, you might want to try this: don’t actively look for what to blog. Just let it jump at you.

Managing blogs before writing – For your own blogs, do some blog management first before doing some blog posting. Doing those little design and SEO tweaks will get you into the doting-blog-owner mode fast. Don’t forget to check your visitor stats and ad revenue – if there’s a dip in either of the two, then you’ve got further reason to be inspired and blog again!

P.S. You might also want to check out Raj’s What To Do When You Lose Your Blogging Mojo. This related article dealt more with writer’s block than rustiness, but many of his tips can also be applied here.

I’ve been thinking about adding forums to a couple of my more successful blogs. The thought is that while blogs allow for commenting, they aren’t ideal for reader-generated content.

My worries about introducing forums are:

1. Too much moderation work
2. I’ve had too much experience with forums that get overridden with spam
3. Unlike with choosing a blog software, I don’t know the killer app for forums

So let me ask you the following questions:

1. What forum software do you recommend for both its ease of use and its rock-solid security?
2. How do you handle moderation?
3. Do you think that discussion forums can compliment a blog and help create a larger regular readership? Or do the blog comments suffice? Is there too much overlap in functionality?
4. Do you think that adding a forum is worth the effort for bloggers? Some of the time? All of the time?

If you take a look at some blogs, you may notice that they have their search bar in some odd places. Some put it in the header, some put it in the horizontal navigation bar, some in the sidebar. I personally like to have it in either the header or in the navigation menu. It seems like that’s always the first place I look when I want to find the search bar.

But getting the search bar positioned correctly can be frustrating, especially if you are using the entire header area to fit your logo.

So today, we’re going to position the search bar absolutely, within the header. I normally don’t recommend absolute positioning, because much of the time it’s not necessary, and if you can avoid it, definitely try to keep your positioning normal. But in this case, I think an exception is in order … so let’s get started!

First, let’s look at the header. For this article, I’ll use the a theme I created a while back called RockinSuckerfish (the 2 column version). Let’s look at some of the header code:

<div id=”header”>
<div class=”rss”>
<ul>
<li><a href=”feed:<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>”>posts feed</a></li>
<li><a href=”feed:<?php bloginfo(‘comments_rss2_url’); ?>”>comments feed</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class=”search”>
<form method=”get” id=”searchform” action=”<?php bloginfo(‘home’); ?>/”>
<input type=”text” size=”15″ value=”Search” name=”s” id=”s” />
</form>
</div>
</div>

For the time being, we’re going to ignore the “rss” div, although it is also positioned absolutely. As you can tell, the hierarchy of the markup goes like this: “header” > “search”

So let’s style the header, and position the search bar. The first thing to do is get our header styled correctly:

#header {
height: 123px;
padding: 0px;
margin: 15px 0px 0px 0px;
background: #9AB6CA url(images/header.jpg);
position: relative;
}

Your header may be different, but the one thing that you definitely need for this to work is the last style, position: relative; Without this, our absolutely positioned search form will position within the browser window instead of its parent element. By adding the position: relative; you allow a child element to be absolutely positioned within the parent.

Now, we need to position the search form. Here’s the code, then we’ll go through it:

#header .search {
position: absolute;
top: 50px;
right: 20px;
}

Now, obviously you can add whatever other styles you want, but you need to have at least this — position: absolute; — distance from either the top or bottom — distance from either the left or right. Notice I said “either/or” on those last two. Don’t do both … it probably won’t work 🙂

As you can see, I decided to position mine 50px from the top, and 20px from the right, within the header div. You can put yours anywhere you like… it’s really up to you.

Like I said, this is a neat trick when you have a pesky element that you want to position accurately and easily … but definitely don’t overuse it.

For more on absolute positioning, check out this article. It goes far deeper than this article, so if you’re interested in learning more, that’s a good place to go.

Enjoy!