Replying to: My blogging workflow
Robert Birming’s post about his blogging workflow came across my feed reader the other day (as well as the linked list of other people’s workflows . I thought I’d join in.
Before I begin I feel the need to disclaim. This is a snapshot. I enjoy writing for this blog, but I also enjoy tinkering around on the site itself, so this is all very much subject to change.
First, of course, I need an idea. This is highly variable. Sometimes I just think that I would like to write a post, and sit down at my computer until something pops into my head. Sometimes I get the ideas while I’m at work or on a walk or otherwise out of the house. I keep a pocket notebook and pen with me everywhere I go to capture some of those. What I write in there are prompts and titles. Broad subjects for a post.
Sometimes I write a first draft by hand, or at least an outline. Most of the time I don’t. I’ve been experimenting with note taking apps like Obsidian and Journelly lately, but I don’t compose my posts in them like I have seen other people talk about. Partly this is just because I have not been using them for very long. The other part is that most of the time simply do not bother with an outline or drafts. The majority of my posts are written in one go.
But wherever and whenever I get the idea, I have to take it to my desktop computer at home. That’s where I publish from. I don’t want to worry about keeping things in sync. And my blog is built with a static site generator, so it doesn’t have any facilities for updating it remotely from my phone. I consider that a feature. I think it is a good grounding to have blogging be something where I have to go to a place and sit down to do.
When I am ready to write, I open a new file in neovim. I don’t have many tools to manage this. Just a shell alias to drop me straight to my blog post folder. As I said above there is generally no drafting or outlining process at this point. I just start writing.
I build this site with hugo . I have another little script to run the command to build everything and upload it to my server, which is the cheapest virtual machine I could get on Linode in one step. It’s a very simple script, but I’ve forgotten parts of it before, and that’s why I put this together: so I don’t have to. There is no process so simple that you can’t forget a step.
At that point, the post is live. Everyone following me via RSS can see it, and I share a link to it on Mastodon to spread it a little further. I have a bookmark that prefills the hashtags for that that I got thanks to Seth Larson .
And then, finally, you click on my post, and, I hope, enjoy it.