I highly recommend using a desktop blogging program. Obviously they make blogging easier, but more importantly they remove friction from recording and sharing your great ideas.
I use MarsEdit to write this blog. Honestly I don’t know if there’s something better out there. I tried it because it was mentioned by people I read. It worked well enough for me that I never went looking at competing programs, and when the free trial was up I paid for it.
All of the Internet’s Strengths, None of its Weaknesses
Some benefits of using a desktop blogging program are obvious. You can do everything you can do with your blog’s web interface and more. The whole writing experience is just a bit more snappy and polished when you take full advantage of the computer you’re writing on with a native application.
Getting the Computer Out of Your Way
But the less-obvious benefit is that a blogging program makes it easier to jot down ideas. Whenever you want to write something, you just hit “New Post” and start writing. You don’t have to name or categorize your post until the time is right. That may not sound like a big deal, but it’s huge in practice. As John Gruber explains in detail, having to deal with the filesystem just to jot down an idea is a lot of friction.
…(the) problem is that the mental friction posed by the Save dialog often keeps you from ever even creating or saving small items of data in the first place.
MarsEdit lets me just start typing when I have a new idea; and quickly find old ideas when I want to build on them.
Do Something With Your Ideas
There are lots of dedicated “notes” applications that “get the computer out of the way”. Blogging apps are superior to all of them, because they make it easier to do something with your ideas. Using another program to keep track of ideas is another barrier to actually publishing them.
You might not want to share every idea, and that’s fine! Just because you’ve written it down in a blog editor does not mean you have to hit “post”. I would love it if you built your secret idea and got rich off it. No lie. If you make something amazing enough to make a fortune, then you’ve made a difference in people’s lives. And I think that makes the world a better place.
But for most ideas, an essay is still the best way to change the world, because it’s the best way to change millions of peoples minds. Using separate programs to track and publish of ideas is another barrier to actually publishing them. Blogging programs make it easier to get the most out of everything you write by removing this barrier.