My Blogging Workflow

Much like the cycle of app defaults posts, I’ve landed on another interesting round of posts from bloggers about how they blog. Thanks to Manu for bringing me into the fold with his post, and to Robert for starting the fun and linking to the posts around the web.

I keep a Markdown file of things I’d like to write about someday. That list varies from just loose ideas in a few words to something more thought out if I don’t want to lose the details if it’s something I’ve given more thought to. Occasionally, I’ll add bits to existing ideas, but most of the time the way they go in is the way they stay until I write out a post.

I have a couple of Shortcuts that I’ll use to start a post off to make the YAML frontmatter and template easier. That goes into a folder in iA Writer called drafts. I’d consider a draft to be anything partially written and not scheduled for posting at a future date. I will occasionally write something and have it go out in a few days or weeks. This is because sometimes my writing comes in bursts, but I’d like my RSS feed to be slower for readers. Most posts started in this way get finished in one sitting. Occasionally, it will take time. I don’t feel a pressure either way. When the post is done, I use the LanguageTool grammar checker and then paste it back into iA Writer, update the YAML values and move it to the Posts folder.

The only deviation to the above is linkposts. I don’t post them as much as I used to, but the workflow is similar. I use a different shortcut that formats things specific to my linkpost template. I used to sync my highlights from my read-later app of choice, Matter, to Notion where I’d categorize which site I wanted to use for the linkpost. That workflow went away when I merged all my sites into Tangible Life, and I’m glad it’s more simple now. I’ll tag things in Matter that I may want to use for a linkpost or a newsletter in the future, but most of the time I just create the linkpost at the time I’m consuming whatever it is and post it.

I’ve been reading up on webmentions recently. I am not sure whether they’d completely replace my linkposts, but I’m considering implementing them in the future.

…and those are my flows! Reach out if you have any questions about my workflows.

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