So you've finally decided to start a blog. You feel you've got a lot to say and you realise a blog might be the right place to say it. But once you've signed up... you suddenly feel a little unsure of yourself. You thought you had an infinity of ideas, but now you've got blogger's block before you've even begun... Well what do you do?

Here's what I recommend. Start by writing one short post on each of the following topics. (I'm assuming a tech audience here)

Articles To Kick Start Your Blog

1. My favourite software/tools
2. My favourite blogs
3. My favourite books
4. Technologies/Issues I wish I knew More About
5. Technologies/Issues I wish I'd never touched.A big shout out to crystal, excel vba and MS Access 2.0 from me ;-)

Once you've published short entries on each of those, you'll have a bit of a backlog, a kind of grounding that gives you an unexpected confidence. This will also serve to help establish your own identity in a way that is more useful and less self-indulgent than most blogs.

As demonstrated by Chris Sells

As a great example, Chris Sells used this technique when starting his own blog, many decades ago, before .net 1.0 had shipped. You can read from him:

• "My Favorite Books" [Chris Sells]
• "My Favorite Software" [Chris Sells]
• "Other Blogs" [Chris Sells]

And I choose to tag...

In the nature of these kinds of suggestions, I'll tag some blogs I know of that are either new or seemed to stall early -- but all of which have creative and intelligent writers:

• it's just a day job
• build chick
• Little Invisible Green Men