Title: My blog workflow

	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.