Keeping a backlog of 'ready-to-publish articles' is useful as it provides you with some material to post when you feel less inspired or have no time to work on new material.
What's your approach? Do you prepare posts in advance?
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Hi Madza, good question. I still do not have 'ready-to-publish articles' backlog because I was throwing everything I have at milanlatinovic.com to make "initial content".
However, this is something I will do in 2021. Idea is to have 5-10 ready to publish posts so I can have continuity in the 1-post-per-2-weeks approach. :)
I do have a backlog of drafts already. This is interesting as well. I write drafts only with headings (and subheadings) and bullets. Then, when I have the whole story that I want to tell, I would go through the article and write it in a nice way.
If you open my blog and start analyzing some of my latest articles you will recognize that they are very well planned, organized, and linked. This is because of the "draft backlog in bullets" approach if that makes sense. :D
Hopefully, someone else will find this helpful.
This is more or less what I am doing as well! When I started my blog I set out to do a post every two weeks, but I found myself forcing it pretty darn fast. So I started 2021 with keeping a backlog of ideas. They're either just titles or outlines like you described.
If I'm feeling inspired, I'll take some time to write something and let it rest so I can come back to it and re-write it in a nicer way if I can. I think I'll be ready to start posting the first one sometime in the next two weeks, so I'm pretty excited about that.
Yeah, that is cool, 2021 looks like a good year to start writing and produce some meaningful content :) Actually, the whole topic of "backlog of ideas" and "where to keep drafts" sounds like a good topic for a blog post. I think I will do something like that and then make a survey at the end to ask how others are doing it, or simply ask here on dev.to :D
It would be interesting to hear the other's approaches.
I had actually put the topic in my backlog already! Would love to read your thoughts on it once you've written a post about it! I'm always curious about insights / approaches from other people regarding the same topic.
Very good :) In that case, I will let you know when I have it done, give you a link here.
Afterwards you are welcome to add any content (or do a guest post if you want) with link to relevant content from you site as well. I have added you on Twitter and follow you here just to keep in touch.
Exactly what I do, as well 💯😉
Hi Milan, I liked your idea of keeping drafts, i have so many of those in my OneNote, i think i should start putting them on the portal directly , might be helpful in motivating me to complete them.
Yeah, exactly! It was the same with me, I had OneNote notes, Notion drafts, ideas all over Google Drive, same idea on multiple places, etc. Then I figured out to put everything to one place - my site and to keep Drafts and simply take them one by one.
I still have to find a way to be more organized too.. 😉
Currently, my notes are all over the place - notion, trello, evernote, etc 😀😀
Thanks the way to go 👍😉
I have lots of time for writing on the shanghai subway. So I use the mobile app
WriterP, because it has markdown and organize the content in a folderstructure.When I have an idea, I just open a new document and write the headline with some additional ideas.
Sometimes then I go to google, and see
what others searchandsimilar search terms, these are good for sub headlines.I like the other idea here in these comments already about collecting screenshots. I always have very few pictures but code snippets.
Do you keep a foldable keyboard with you or something? Writing on a mobile/tablet could be quite a challenge I imagine 😉
writing in subway, often standing,... I just write it down, often I just leave the typos and keep going. My blog is hexo, and in vsCode there is a spellchecker showing all typos, but I still prove read it.
so matter if keyboard or mobile, my thoughts are faster than my fingers.
Hey Mazda,
Currently, I do, for specific reasons, I'm going away for a weekend camping with no reception and after that, I will be flying for a full day, so had to have a backlog.
For now, it's 7 days long, which gives me some room to travel, they do however get used quite fast.
So I hope to write some articles while in the plane (some softskills ones)
I believe having a backlog increases the quality of posts too 😉
The reason being if I have many drafts and ideas I always try to post only the best ones, what would not happen if I would write and publish one by one 😉
True, even now when trying to think what next, I pick the one with most potential/win
I don't necessarily have a stash of 'ready-to-publish' articles since I get too impatient when I write an article and I just post it. But, I do have around 30 drafts of articles that I want to write with just the titles and tags filled in.
Hahah, I can relate 😀😀 I usually don't even fill tags, just jet down the title and save it as a draft 😉 That's why I need the platform I work to be fast, that DEV is ⚡
Haha, exactly!
My crappy website setup wouldn't let me keep a backlog, because I have to rsync the whole site and cannot pick and choose.
I used to have this capability when I'm using FTP upload, but I didn't bother to setup FTP since the 2017 rebuild.
I keep at writing an article or developing a website feature until it's finished and published, before starting the next one.
I select article topic carefully so that I would not have to scrape an incomplete article.
Photos and screenshots and command lines and GPS coordinates prepared for a future article are technically not a draft of the article.
These are kept in Nextcloud.
I have a pool of articles I'm working on and I queue them when they're done, or that's what I try to do, most of the time the queue is only 1 or 2 finished articles and the work-in-progress pool is about 4 to 6
Yes, for the last 2 years, I always had at least 4-5 articles ready to publish. As I publish once (sometimes twice) a week, I'm always good for a month if something hits in.
I have unfinished articles that are waiting for a boost of inspiration to come 😄
Yup, tracking down the ideas is the key 😉
You can expand them later when the inspiration strikes ✍
I pretty much just have a backlog of partially written articles. I plan on working through them this year.