Sometimes you can feel like you just don’t have enough time to blog. Perhaps you have a full time job. A child or two to raise. Or maybe you just want to take some time for yourself and forget about the blog all together.

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

A few days ago, I posted about six sites you can use to help you find images for your blog posts in just a few seconds. But what if using photos from Flickr isn’t really your thing? What if you want to use a snazzy icon or two to go along with your text? A Flickr search engine certainly isn’t going to help you there.

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.

WordPress is easily one of the best blogging engines around. It’s got thousands of plugins, nearly as many themes, and its easy enough for anyone to use. But, for some time now, there hasn’t been any place to find all of the newest themes in one centralized location. That’s all about to change with the creation of the Theme Directory at wordpress.org/extend/themes/.

Taking a page from the highly successful Plugin Directory, the Theme Directory lets you search and browse through themes with ease. There’s even a “Preview” button to view a live demo of the theme in action. Is it perfect? Not yet. Is there a lot of content at this point? Nope. But I’m sure it will start to grow quicker than anyone can possibly imagine in due time.

According to the WordPress development blog, it’s as easy for developers to include a theme in the directory as it is for users to download one.

We’ve gone through great lengths to make this as painless as possible for theme authors. You don’t need to know anything about Subversion (our back end magic takes care of all that for you), just login with your WordPress.org username and password and go to the upload page. From there you upload your regular theme zip file and we take care of the rest.

Once you upload your new theme we do a few automated checks for some of the requirements for each theme. If we find one that you missed we’ll provide you an error and description of what needs to be fixed. When a theme upload has been accepted we’ll send you an email and put it in the queue to be reviewed, to make sure we didn’t miss anything. After the theme has been approved you’ll get another email letting you know that the theme is now live.

It’s about time the world’s most popular blogging platform finally has a place where everyone can go to check out great themes. Though, it may soak up some of the traffic that theme authors were used to getting on their own websites.

[Via Weblog Tools Collection]