Elinor Mills recently wrote about an author who’s “working on a book and is appealing to passionate readers like me to help him get it published.” According to Mills, “He is seeking financial backers via a Web site called Kickstarter, which bills itself as a ‘funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers.’ (A similar site is called Fundable.)”

This approach seems to be working for the fellow. Mills talked to him about 48 hours into the effort, and at that point he’d raised $2,200. His goal was only to get $3,500 by November 1st, so he’s about 63 percent there with all sorts of time left.

You could always, of course, beg your friends and family members in a more direct manner. Something like Kickstarter will allow folks to really get the word out, though, and will also spare you a lot of awkward interactions.

So until the day that writers are in high demand (don’t hold your breath), there’s an idea that’ll hopefully tide you over.

Nilay Patel writes, “[T]his pressure-sensitive keyboard looks exactly like a normal ‘board, but each key can register up to eight levels of pressure, opening up all kinds of interesting possibilities.” And at least one of them might help writers.

Have you ever grazed a key by accident while trying to hit something else entirely? Once, your humble author did this (possibly brushing multiple keys) and wound up only being able to type right to left (thankfully, a reboot straightened things out).

Anyway, if Microsoft (or an individual owner) programs the pressure-sensitive keyboards to ignore soft touches, you could eliminate a good many typos and accidental keystrokes.

Or, when you’re taking a break from writing to play a game and battle some aliens, it might be that extra-hard input will be interpreted as hitting your spaceship’s boosters, increasing a phaser’s rate of fire, or whatever.

Now it just remains to seen if the keyboard comes to market. And what the price is, of course.

Scott Stein recently gave some thought to whether or not really little keyboards are harder to use than not-quite-full-sized ones. He wrote, “Even though any Netbook keyboard is better in theory than any smartphone keyboard, slightly-smaller-than-full-size keyboards provoke a strange effect on prolonged typing. Fingers can get cramped, hands tired, and keyboard errors get made more often.”

His argument is that tiny keyboards keep your attention, while with an almost-normal keyboard, you’ll likely try to go on autopilot but keep finding things “off.”

And then there’s the realm of full-sized keyboards to consider. Some will happily submit to a trip through the dishwasher. Others are “ergonomic” to the degree that they look like the control panels to an alien starship. Then you’ve got your standard-layout keyboards, but with all varying degrees of button pushback and noisiness.

Depending on how much typing you do, it might be smart to buy several different keyboards and then just pick a favorite.

When you view a video, you can find links at the bottom of the unit. Click “Share” to show a module similar to the picture above. To be able to take full advantage of YouTube’s blog posting feature, click the “Setup” link as you can see at the bottom of the pic.

Alternatively, you can also log in to your YouTube account, click “My Account” and find your profile link as illustrated above.

Doing either of the two methods will take you to the next screen…

This isn’t exactly the next screen. You will first be prompted to add a blog to your list and be forwarded to the screen above. The beauty of the YouTube blogging feature is that it’s not restricted by platform. The YouTube blog posting could be used for Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress.com, self-hosted WordPress, FreeWebs, Friendster and finally, Pizco. Notice that you’ll need your API key if you’re using a self-hosted WordPress blog. Back to topic — simply choose your blog’s platform in the pull-down menu, type in your username and password (for your blog) and click “Add Blog.” You can add more than one blog in various platforms supported. As soon as you’re able to add a blog, however, you can go back to the video you want to embed and click on “Share” again. This time, the module will look like this:

Using the drop-down menu, you can choose which among your blogs you’re posting to. Type in the title of your post and then afterwards, you can paste or type in the Text Box. Click “Post to Blog.”

And you’re done!

The first time I used this feature it only took a few seconds before the post appeared on my blog. You might need to tweak the title a bit, though. My only gripe with this feature is that it changes the permalink of your post even though you have your own settings saved. Since embedding links in a blog is very easy and you hardly have any use for this, I think this feature works best if you’re blasting one video to numerous blogs. What about you, what do you think?