Title: My blog workflow | |
Author: Solène | |
Date: 28 August 2022 | |
Tags: blog life | |
Description: In this text, I share my experience as a blog author when | |
it comes to publish articles and get new ideas. | |
# Introduction | |
I occasionally get feedback about my blog, most of the time people are | |
impressed with the rate of publication when they see the index page. | |
I'm surprised it appears to be huge efforts, so I'll explain how I work | |
on my blog. | |
# Make it simple | |
I rarely spend more than 40 minutes for a blog post, the average blog | |
post takes 20 minutes. Most of them are sharing something I fiddled | |
with in the day or week, so the topic is still fresh for me. The | |
content of the short articles often consists of dumping a few commands | |
/ configuration I used, and write a bit of text around so the reader | |
knows what to expect from the article, how to use the content and | |
what's the point of the topic. | |
It's important to keep track of commands/configuration beforehand, so | |
when I'm trying something new, and I think I could write about it, I | |
keep a simple text file somewhere with the few commands I typed or | |
traps I encountered. | |
# Write ideas down | |
My fear with regard to the blog is to be out of ideas, this would mean | |
I would have boring days and I would have nothing to write about. | |
Sometimes I look at packages repository updates in different Linux | |
distribution, and look at the projects homepages for which the name is | |
unknown to me. This is a fun way to discover new programs / tools and | |
ideas. When something looks interesting, I write its name down | |
somewhere and may come later to it. I also write down any idea that I | |
could get in my mind about some unusual setup I would like to try, if I | |
come to try it, it will certainly end up as a new blog entry to share | |
my experience. | |
# Don't think too much | |
There are two rules for the blog: having fun and not lie/be accurate. | |
Having fun? Yes, writing can be fun, organizing ideas and sharing them | |
is a cool exercise. Watching the result is fun. Thinking too much | |
about perfection is not fun. | |
I prefer to write most of the blog posts in one shot, quickly proofread | |
and publish, and be done with it. If I save a blog post as a draft, I | |
may not pick it up quickly, and it's not fun to get into the context to | |
continue it. I occasionally abandon some posts because of that, or | |
simply delete the file and start over. | |
Sometimes it happens I'm wrong when writing, in the case I prefer to | |
remove the blog post than keeping it online at all cost. When I know a | |
text is terribly outdated, I either remove it from the index or update | |
it. | |
I don't use any analytics services and I do the blog for free, the only | |
incentive is to have fun and to know it will certainly help someone to | |
look for information. | |
# The blog software | |
This website is generated with a custom blog generator I wrote a few | |
years ago (cl-yag), the workflow to use it is very simple it never | |
fails to me: | |
* write the blog file in the format I want, I currently use GemText but | |
in the past some blog posts were written in org-mode, man page or | |
markdown | |
* add an entry in the list of articles, this contains all the metadata | |
such as the title, date, tags and description for the open graph | |
protocol (optional) | |
* run "make" | |
* wait 30s, it's online on HTTP / gopher / Gemini | |
The program is really fast despite it's generating all the files every | |
time, the "raw text to HTML" content is cached and reused when wrapping | |
the HTML in the blog layout, the Gemini version is published as-this, | |
and the gopher files are processed by a Perl script rewriting all the | |
links and wrapping the text (takes a while). | |
# Quick proofreading | |
Before publishing, I read my text and run a spellcheck program on it, | |
my favorite is LanguageTool because it finds so many mistake versus | |
aspell which only finds obvious typos. | |
# More advanced blog posts | |
It happens for some blog posts to be more elaborated, they often | |
describe a complex setup and I need to ensure readers can reproduce all | |
the steps and get the same results as me. This kind of blog post takes | |
a day to write, they often require using a spare computer for | |
experimentation, formatting, installing, downloading things, adjusting | |
the text, starting over because I changed the text... | |
# Conclusion | |
If you want to publish a blog, my advices would be to have fun, to use | |
a blog/website generator that doesn't get in your way, and to not be | |
afraid to get started. It could be scary at first to publish texts on | |
the wild Internet, and fear to be wrong, but it happens, accept it, | |
learn from your mistakes and improve for the next time. |