Okay, lately I’ve been blogging a lot about WordPress, Magento and coding in general. Time for a breather, folks. No techie stuff in this blog post, just a fun, relaxing read about a change of scenery, stream-of-conscious writing and why I prefer it to writing draft blog posts.
Okay, just a little bit of techie stuff (let’s get it over with, shall we?). Over the weekend past, I released the WP Section Index WordPress plugin. Check it out and let me know what you think and how it works for you.
I find that, throughout the day, I get ideas for blog posts I’d like to write. Posts about music, WordPress or random thoughts that enter my head. Gradually, I start forming the skeleton of the post in my mind and, at times, the post gets entered as a draft in the administration console, eagerly waiting to be finished, polished and published. This approach, more often than not, doesn’t seem to work.
I formulate the idea, draft it out and then it sits. Waiting. Waiting for a finishing touch. The finishing touch that takes weeks to arrive as it simply isn’t on the tip of my fingers to login and finish the blog post. So there you have it. Draft posts simply don’t work for me. I find that, if I sit down and write a blog post in one session, the post gets done. A while ago, I wrote a blog post about making time to blog. I wrote another about blogging in general around a similar time. I’ve also tried several routines for blogging, such as my June 2009 blog-post-per-day idea, which lead to some interesting blog posts.
The aims of this post are to a) explore the concept of changing one’s location when online and how it affects productivity (currently blogging from the couch, by the way… super productive, actually) and b) to mention that this entire blog post is being written in one sitting with no drafts being manually saved (save the auto draft feature in WordPress, ofcourse). I’ll open the post up in a bit, do some linking and check things over, but generally speaking, the post is being written “on the fly”, as it were. It feels good and I think I may just keep it up… in between all the techie posts about all that coding stuff. 
So yeah, there you have it. A nice long ramble about where and how to ramble on your blog.
I haven’t had a chance to test the plugin out, but I’ve downloaded a copy and will take a proper look over the weekend
Thanks Chris. Keen to hear your thoughts on the plugin.
Draft post management really is an art. Here’s a couple of things I do:
If it’s a long draft, I clean up the outline and publish it as a page using my desired slug. That gets it indexed and starts aging it. I turn off comments for this. Later, if/when I finish it, I can “sell” it in a post, or turn on comments, or whatever.
For really short ones, these can go on a Posterous blog. Condense your outline into 1 well-written paragraph, add a relevant link back to related material here, offload it to Posterous. Later, you can mine Posterour for all sorts of great material. You may find 2 or 3 (or more) of these little posts easy to combine into a single longer post.
When it’s code, make it runnable/compilable with the text in the comments and post it as a gist on github. Later, you can pull the comments out for a blog post and embed the gist.
I could go on, but I’ll stop here.
This does remind me though, I have about 200 in draft at the moment, split between 2 blogs. Should take my own advice and clean ‘em up.
Actually I will, I’m cross posting this comment to Posterous!