I am not currently pleased with the quality or quantity of blog posts that I am writing for either of my blogs. Part of this is due to the fact that I am probably attempting to do too many things at once, and some of it is due to the fact that I have no solid blogging workflow process. So lets ignore the rational solution, which would be to cut out a few projects, and attempt to outline what could be my blogging process:
- Idea Generation - in a moment of inspiration you come up with an idea for a blog post, and now need a place to keep this idea until you can write about it.
- Rough Draft - at this point I typically get all of my ideas for this blog post down “on paper”.
- Let your post marinate - This was covered in a post here , about letting the blog post sit for a bit, and allowing your ideas to fully develop. It prevents what the author calls “writer ADD”.
- Links and references - at this point I usually go back to fill in links and references to material that I am referring to throughout the post
- Reread and publish - reread the post one more time looking for an errors, then publish.
1) Idea Generation
This part of the process is typically done on my Treo. I’m out and about, when all of a sudden I am struck with an idea for a blog post. I put this into the default Notes application on the palm, under a category called “Life in Lists”. From here I have no strict process to turn these ideas into posts, so I just depend on remembering to look at the notes on my Treo or through MarkSpace Memo Pad, which is the application that comes with Missing Sync enabling Mac users to sync the notes to their Mac (as opposed to using the notes in Outlook on a PC)
2) Rough Draft
My first pass is either in Microsoft word, or directly in a blog editor. Writing things in word was initially more natural, but significantly more frustrating as i tried to carry that level of text formatting over to the web. This lead me to trying to write directly in my blog editor.
I have tried using performancing, ecto, and writely (I’m currently writing this in writely, with the hopes of posting directly to my blog). There are my thoughts so far:
Performancing - this firefox plugin has been very good for publishing posts. The only reason I don’t use it more is that Ecto and Writely seem to be more powerful from the workflow perspective. They both allow you to keep track of all your posts for all your blogs, and to a certain extent which ones are rough drafts and which ones are published to your blog.
Ecto - Good for writing posts, and better than Performancing for keeping track of all your posts past and present. It will sync with your blog and keep local copies of all your posts for future editing offline! Issues that I have had with it include not being able to add new tags to posts quickly (it gives you the list of existing tags on your blog to choose from), and the fact that my rough drafts are stored locally. With locally stored rough drafts, I am not able to keep working on my posts when I don’t have that specific computer in front of me, which happens often when I am too lazy to bring my Mac home from work.
Writely - I started this one after using Performancing and Ecto, and I saw right away this could be the answer to all my problems. First, it allows you to tag your “documents”, which are essentially your blog posts. I am able to tag rough drafts, posted articles, and have a tag for each of the blogs I am writing for. On top of that you can use writely’s collaboration tools to invite someone to look at the post and edit it before you publish it to your blog.
The workflow potential for Writely is great, but I am still having problems getting it to publish properly to my blog. I may have some settings wrong in Drupal, so I will continue to work on it and keep you posted. As of now I also have not found a way to tag my posts from Writely, sot hat those tags get passed on as tags within my blog.
3) Let your post marinate
This article does a better job of covering than I will, plus its already been written, so I wont repeat it. One thing I do want to add is that the Idea Generation step for me on my Treo in itself helps me process the idea. If its not a good one, usually I won’t have much to say or won’t be as excited about it when I get to the point of actually writing the blog post
4) Links and References
In order to focus on writing I usually save linking and referencing other articles until later. Sometimes, when I have the article to be linked right in front of me I’ll do it on the spot, but most of the times I’ll have to go back and do some digging to find my references. Its also something that makes sense to do as you go back and reread your post as you let it marinate.
5) Reread and Publish
I am very bad a rereading my work. Its shocking how terrible my writing is, and its not easy to face the truth. I was never a good writer to begin with, and it was made signifiantly worse by the years of bad habits developed through short informal e-mails and instant messages. Either way, it needs to be done, and its a great time to reflect on your content, style of writing, etc.
