My Blogging Workflow

Many people have been writing about their blogging workflow, so I thought I'd add mine to the mix as well.

I'll be honest, when I saw this trend, I didn't think much of it. I mean, workflow? For blogging? Do we not all just sit down and write?

Turns out other people are much more organized than I am. That shouldn't be such a surprise, given that I only play as an organized person. So, I truly thought about what I do when I decide to write a post for this blog or for The Linux Cast.

Inspiration

I write about a wide variety of topics. From music to tech to mental health. So usually, my inspiration comes from within. I have stuff to say, and this is my place to say it. I don't really care if anyone else reads it. This is a place for me.

But I do get subconscious inspiration from other places. I'll see someone talking about something on the IndieWeb and that will spawn a thought. It might not even be related to whatever was being written.

So, I'll take a note of it.

Writing

I have settled in with Ghost as my platform. I'm not 100% happy with it, but changing would be a pain, and I'm not sure if I'd be any happier with anything else. It has started working really well, which is good, given that it wasn't always that way.

So, I do all my writing in the Ghost back end. It's fine and does the job. It uses basic Markdown, so I'm comfy enough here. I think I may go to writing my stuff in Vim and then transferring it over, but I haven't yet.

There's just something about not having to move the words around that makes this seem like less work. I'm lazy at heart, so the less friction there is to me blogging, the more I'll blog.

I also like writing with LanguageTool, which isn't something I can get in Vim. I can write knowing that most of my mistakes will be pointed out to me right away. It saves on editing later.

I edit for a living, and I hate editing my own shit. So, almost always, these blogs get at max one read through. Which means, the fewer mistakes there are, the better. LT helps with that. Which I'm thankful for.

Posting

Once written, I post it. I don't have some fancy publishing schedule. Sometimes, these posts are pushed out after 1AM. Then other times, I publish in the middle of the day.

Then I will share it on Mastodon and maybe my Discord. Those are really the only social networks I'm on these days, so that's the limit of my self-promotion. Though, I may push these out to my YouTube following when the topic is something that will entice some Linux Nerds to come read my blog.

Anyway, that's really it. I write it, I publish it. I am not sure how I got 500 words out of that, but there you go.