Blogger’s block is a bit different. After all, with writer’s block, your deadline may be weeks or months away. That’s fine because you have time to recover later on down the road. If you’re the kind of person who runs a blog with daily posts, though, you may find that blogger’s block can be especially problematic. With the necessity for daily posts, blogger’s block can be fatal to your subscriber counts. After all, keeping up with the posting rhythms is of the utmost importance–especially for a daily blog.

But blogger’s block doesn’t have to ruin your posting routines, though. Here are 5 steps to help you alleviate the problem.

• Build on Ideas Ahead of Time

If you’ve got a good idea, write it down and expand on it later. Maybe it’s something you dreamt about last night. Or something you read on some other blog. But when an idea comes to you, jot it down somewhere so you can come back to it later. When you find you’re all out of original ideas, check your list for some inspiration.

• Join and Be Active on Forums

No better place to get new ideas than from forum members. Whether you’ve gotten yourself involved in a quick Q&A session or a heated debate over something like healthcare reform, chances are you can take tons of inspiration away from it all.

• Write a Deluge of Posts When You Feel Like Writing

Having a good day? Feel like cranking out tons of posts? Go for it and post the rest later. Even if you’re a one post a day kind of blogger, write two or three. Then you’ll always have something there to fall back on when your brain just isn’t working like you hope it would.

• Subscribe to Related Feeds

Good artists copy. Great artists steal. Well, I’m not saying that you should steal from other bloggers, per se, but you can certainly draw inspiration from other people’s feeds. Maybe your favorite design blog just posted about 10 hot new blog templates. Find 10 more, maybe throw in a few from his list, and make your own post on the same topic. Though you may want to wait a while before posting–especially if most of your readers subscribe to the other blogger’s posts too.

• Do Some Polling

Slap a poll to the sidebar of your blog. People love polls because they’re so quick and easy. If you’ve got enough traffic flowing in, you can get a minimum of two posts out of a single poll. One to announce the poll and talk about it a bit. Another to announce the poll’s results. If you’re crafty, you can even extend the poll’s benefits by writing posts about the breakdown of each response.

• Crowdsource

When in doubt, ask Twitter. So long as you’ve got followers a plenty, you’ll find tons of information just waiting there for the taking. A quick question, a couple of retweets, and you’ll have your answers in no time.

I’ve also created a new Twitter account. It’s all the rage right now, so I figured it’s time to really jump on the bandwagon. You can find me @contentedniche.

Over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about Ubuntu for another site. (If you don’t know what Ubuntu is, its the most popular Linux distro around.) The post was not meant as a Linux bash (no pun intended) but as a simple list of seven things that the developers could do to make their operating system better. Harmless enough. Well, every few days or so, it seems that some new raving lunatic Ubuntu fanboy happens to the site and leaves a scathing comment insulting my intelligence, my family, my dog (may he rest in peace), my blog, and just about anything else that pops into that disturbed little brain of his.

The comments always make me chuckle. People who don’t have the guts to leave their real email address but think its perfectly OK to hurl nasty remarks my way. Ah, only on the Internet. If you’ve never received such a comment on your website before, here’s one of the latest examples, unedited and left in its entirety for your pleasure:

OK, what teh f*** is youre problem. Ubuntu isn amazing os that is widely popular in the mainstreem world. the fact that most survers are running on linux shows only one thing, it is reliable. unlike windows, This os actually works. NOW, i dont give a dam about your failing nowlege but critisising ubuntu only shows that your a noob and cant wrok teh terminal. Only a**holes that want to be spyed up on by bill gates use windows. all tehy can handel is point and click. NO, you a**, the server you are running probably runs linux. so b4 you go about saying how bad linux is, lern to use it!

But these comments lead me to a predicament. What do I do with them? Hit the delete button and pretend they never existed? Approve them and then reply with a defense? Edit them to make the commenters sound even more moronic? Post the really funny ones on another blog so my readers can share in the laughter? It’s a real conundrum, though when I do approve savages like these, I always always remove their website address.

So what do you do when comments on your blog go bad? And what was the most scathing comment you’ve ever written or received?

And even better…it didn’t break my blog.

If you’ve been feeling like blogging is a lot of work, takes a lot of time, or is just too much of a consuming effort to make it worthwhile–think again. Here are 9 ways to find the time to keep your blog at the top of its game.

1. Set Aside Time to Blog
They always say the first step’s the hardest. They’re right. If you don’t have a lot of free time on your hands, forcing yourself to allot even a half an hour a day to blogging is going to tightly constrict your daily routine. However, there are two easy ways to go about giving yourself time to blog. First, you can add more waking hours to your day by getting up earlier or going to bed later. Second, you should evaluate what you do every day and see if there are times you can shave a few minutes from your activities. For example, if your favorite TV shows come on at a certain time, TiVO them and start watching a little later than when they start. You’ll save yourself at least ten minutes on an hour long show when you don’t watch commercials. Devote that time to blogging instead.

2. Let Your Computer Work for You
There are a number of ways to let your computer do the work for you. If your blog posts are formulaic, make a template of your average post and use that each time you draft a new post. If you manage multiple blogs, use blogging software instead of visiting each site’s dashboard one by one. If you maintain a general blog, bookmark all of the trend sites you use so that you can pop them open at once instead of doing it manually. The point here is that even though each little task may only take a few seconds, they can add up to save you plenty of minutes during a full day’s work.

3. Live By a Schedule or Calendar
We all tend to establish routines. Wake up in the morning, go to work (or school), come home, have some dinner, and so on. While your routine may be deeply engrained in your mind, if you actually map it out in a calendar program or on a piece of paper, you’ll often find that you may have more large breaks in your day than you thought you did. By maintaining a real calendar, you can plan your time more effectively and free up some valuable blogging time even though you thought your days were packed from morning to night.

4. Set (Realistic) Goals for Posts, Readers, and Subscribers
If you’re pulling 80 hour work weeks, don’t expect to be able to post 10 times a day. Easily the most common problem with blogging is that you end up setting these amazingly unrealistic goals when you first start out blogging and you find that you can never hope to keep them. I’m speaking from personal experience here. This started out as a daily post blog, if you’ve been with me from the beginning. In any event, it’s important to keep your head level and not fall into the trap thinking that you’re going to post way more than you could ever possibly hope for.

5. Find Images Before You Write
Finding images takes time. Lots of time. Do it well in advance during the time between when you think up a good idea for a post and when you actually draft that post.

6. Knock Out Several Posts Each Day You Blog
Have a day with a particularly long amount of free time? Use it to your advantage to plow through several posts at a time. Long, short, whatever. The more posts you can do in a sitting, the more backups you have in case you are unable to get a post done later in the week. This tip goes hand in hand with using the publish at a later date feature built into WordPress. Schedule your posts as necessary to avoid missing your self imposed deadlines.

7. Take Notes and Save Bookmarks
Whenever you think of a great topic to post about, write it down. Did someone else think of it first? Save their post as a bookmark and incorporate some of their ideas into your own posts. Just don’t plagiarize their ideas or their verbiage. Being able to maximize your time means minimizing the amount of time you sit in front of your computer trying to think of what you should write about next. You’ll never have to fear writer’s block again if you write down ideas well before you write about them.

8. Spread Out Your Research Over Time
This goes with point #7. If you’ve been writing multiple posts a day and thinking up ideas for posts in advance, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t be doing your research in advance too. Once you have your idea in hand, do whatever research you need to in order to write your post. Heck, you can even do research for posts while you’re at work, talking on the phone, or watching your favorite sitcom.

9. Brainstorm On the Go
Finally, brainstorm about your blog, your theme, your posts, and your pages while you’re away from your computer. Then bring those ideas to fruition when you finally sit down at your computer. If you’ve finished up with all of the tough mental work before you get to work on your blog, you’ll find that the ideas have a lot more room to run. Changes to your theme come faster. Posts flow better. And you might even experience that magical moment when you realize that this whole blogging thing you’ve been trying out may just be successful yet.

Image by Wordle

Great news for Tiger and Elin Woods–but this is a blog about blogging, writing, content, and the like. Not about sports stars and their children.

But what can celebrities like Tiger and Elin Woods teach us about blogging?

Sometimes you have to jump on the bandwagon and jump on it fast. Riding the trends is a great way to get your blog out there into the limelight and even stir up a new audience while you’re at it. That’s exactly what I’m trying to prove with this post.

So why did I choose Tiger and Elin Woods and her pregnancy as my topic of choice? I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading about the positives of using tools like Google Trends to help boost traffic to a blog. For some people, it seems to work like a dream–possibly bringing in thousands of unique visitors in a matter of hours. Just as good as social bookmarking without all of that high school popularity contest crap to go along with it.

By capitalizing on what’s hot at the moment, you can cash in on the hoards of visitors looking for a specific topic. Just give your piece its own unique spin and see where it goes from there.

However, a word of warning. Do try to keep your blog posts on topic when you’re recruiting ideas from Google Trends. Otherwise you may risk alienating your readers–which will ultimately show that you care far more about attracting uniques than keeping people coming back time and time again.

But now is the time to take it in a new direction. I’ve noticed that resource posts and other, longer, articles are drawing in the most attention, so I’m going to focus on those for a few months until I can sustain my numbers at a comfortable place. Then I’ll be back to daily posts and see where things go from there.

Does this mean I’m not going to highlight some of the best and most unique icons and WordPress themes? Of course not, just not as often.

And did I mention that I’m hard at work on building a few themes of my own? I don’t want to give any set in stone deadlines, but expect to see the first one posted by mid month.

So expect to see the changes come this week with fewer, but better (and certainly more in depth) blog posts to come.

Oh, and if you have any suggestions for a post you’d like to see, just drop me a comment below.

Thanks for sticking around.

Come to think of it, never mind. The theme is all about the design, and theme-ographer Evan Eckard makes that perfectly clear with massive, lush backgrounds and wild handwritten notes strewn about the page.

While Notepad Chaos isn’t breaking any new ground in a technical sense, it does wonders for those with a keen eye for design.

That’s too long for you to be spending on a single post.

Now, there’s a time and a place for a long post. I tend to spend a lot of time on resource lists or how-to guides I’ve posted on other blogs, but I know some of you out there are spending at least that much time on short, choppy posts like this one.

Sometimes people write slow. My old roommate was a very slow writer. It would take him days to finish a short four page double spaced essay–no matter the topic. And aside from “practice makes perfect”, conquering your slow writing isn’t going away any time soon. Unless, of course, you’re a slow typist. Then you just need to train yourself.

But enough rambling. Let’s get to the point.

There are a number of ways that you can improve your posting speed, and they won’t take you too long at all.

First, start a word processor file that you can use to keep your post notes on. Title ideas, topic ideas, websites that you’re drawing inspiration from, and anything else that can help you become a faster poster. Keeping all of your ideas in one place will significantly improve your posting times.

Next, visit your favorite free photo site, or one of the photo search engines I’ve previously recommended, and download a ton of pictures that you can use with your posts. Do they have to fit with the subject matter? Nah, the more unique the picture, the better. (And yes, I know I haven’t been using post images myself–but I’m working on it.)

Finally, keep your RSS reader updating as quickly as possible. When you get the scoop about a news story or something else that’s fast breaking, write up a couple of paragraphs on it as fast as you can, slide in a few links, and submit the post. If you can do a few of those a day, you’ll be well on your way to hundreds of posts in a couple of months.

This post took only 10 minutes to write. Simple as that, I had all of my research in front of me and all I had to do was type.

That’s why I’m showing you some of the best icon search engines on the internet. Whether you like to include icons with your blog posts or you’re just looking for a little something to spice up your desktop, these web apps should be right up your alley. Check them out, see if they offer what you want, and move on down the list if they don’t. And, in case you’re wondering, they’re in no particular order.

[For each site, I looked up two icons, one for Safari and another of a Dog. Some could find an image for both, some could only find one, and others couldn't find any--but your mileage may vary.]

1. Iconlook On first glance, Iconlook seems to be the most professional of the icon search engines. Glossy logo, big search field, it’s a regular web 2.0 site. Even when you search, you have plenty of options to check. Do you want big icons, small icons, or something in between?

However, Iconlook only found one icon for Safari (and it looked amazingly similar to the default icon) and only one icon for a Dog. Both were usable, but for a site that looks so promising, I would have expected more.

If you’re willing to browse, though, Iconlook gives you the option to check out all of the popular icons in a handy grid.

2. Iconfinder Iconfinder’s appearance is surprisingly similar to that of Iconlook. Big logo, big search field, grid layout for found icons. However, it lacks the selection feature to choose a particular icon size you need and it is missing a page filled with popular icons.

Also, searching for both Safari and Dog rendered nothing. In their defense, though, searches for more general topics like Drive, Computer, or Internet all came back with a fairly large number of results.

3. Iconlet Iconlet strays from the gaudy, glossy look of the previous two sites and goes for a more minimalist approach. While this is all well and good, their search feature can be annoying when you find multiple sizes for a particular icon–each size gets its own listing instead of simply combining multiple sizes and showing the largest. Not particularly user friendly.

Iconlet’s database is rather large, however, as a single search returns a number of results in multiple sizes. All icons are free, open source, or creative commons licensed. But, it wasn’t able to find a Safari icon–though it did find a couple of Dog icons.

4. SearchIcon SearchIcon is supposedly listing over 60,000 icons as of this writing, and I can totally believe it. The search engine feels stronger and more robust than some of the other contenders, and it really shows with the quality of results it returns.

SearchIcon also includes a handy feature that I’d like to see all of the other search engines incorporate. A path button which takes you to a page filled with related icons from the same series.

Searching for Safari came up with quite a few attractive results while the search for Dog churned out a handful of others (though no true picture of a dog).

5. Icons Search To be honest, I wasn’t too fond of the way Icons Search looked before I entered any search terms. It seems almost amateurish–but then again, so does Google.

The search feature itself, however, is fast and accurate, coming up with quite a few results for both Safari and Dog. Icons Search is also the only site thus far that 256×256 size icons. Really the only drawback here is the way the icons are displayed after a search. Much like Iconlet, there are multiple pictures of each icon depending on what sizes they come in.

6. The Icon Browser The Icon Browser is easily the most hastily put together of all of the icon search engines we’ve seen. It resembles an early web app from a decade or so ago. In a lot of cases, appearance can be deceiving–but that’s not entirely true here.

The search for Safari returned nothing while the search for Dog returned quite a few results, all of which were low quality, pixelated GIF files that look like clipart from the days of the Windows 3.1.

7. deviantART Last, but certainly not least, we have DeviantArt. Yes, I know it’s not a true icon search engine, though they do have a massive supply of amazing artwork that really blows the rest of the sites out of the water. Just type what icon you’re looking for then click on Customization followed by Icons on the left side of your screen.

Obviously, given the huge amount of art hosted on DeviantArt, finding a Safari icon and a Dog icon was a piece of cake.

So which of these search engines was the best? Search Icon is the clear winner as it totally outshines the rest of the true icon search engines. However, if you really want the highest quality content, you’re going to have to pay DeviantArt a visit.