How Do You Organize Your Blogging Workflow? 🤔

I’ve been blogging for a while on platforms like this one and Medium, but I’m starting to think about maintaining my own blog as well.

Here’s my situation:

I already write on Medium, where uploading images and formatting is effortless. (Bless those auto-upload features!)
On Dev.to, I use a Chrome extension to convert my Medium post to Markdown, and it’s easy to manage from there.
But for my personal blog (currently built with Hugo), I have to manually upload images to a CDN, resize them, and pray the theme I’m using doesn’t break with updates. Honestly, it’s a lot.
I love the idea of owning my own space on the internet, but I also want something that doesn’t make me feel like I’m running a tech ops team just to post an article.

So, I’m curious: How do YOU organize your blogging workflow?

Do you stick to one platform or cross-post everywhere?
How do you handle image uploads and formatting?
If you run your own blog, what tools or pipelines make it easier to manage?

Comments

[Cesar Aguirre]

Here's my writing workflow:

Do you stick to one platform or cross-post everywhere?

Recently, I started to follow: POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). My blog is my main hub. Based on the type of content, I republish a shorter version here on dev.to or republish on Medium, linking back to the original post.

Since often some Medium publications only accept original content, I publish there first and then the next day, I publish on my blog.

How do you handle image uploads and formatting?

Markdown all the way down. I keep my posts on a note-taking app on Markdown. Since I use GitHub to host my blog, it's just a simple Git commit and a push.
For images, I host them on GitHub itself. So I organize my images based on folders named after posts.

• To republish on Medium, yes, the import feature works fine, except for code listings.
• To republish here on dev.to, I use a template with CTAs and only fill in the post body.

If you run your own blog, what tools or pipelines make it easier to manage?

I'd suggest you to create a Python or Bash script to resize and upload your images to the CDN you're using. Use ChatGpt or Copilot for this. If you want to stick writing you should make it really easy.

Hope it helps!

[Olga Braginskaya]

Thank you for sharing! I’m eyeing Ghost as a CMS, possibly combined with Notion, but I’m also considering just going with Ghost Pro to make my life easier.

[Maurice Borgmeier]

I exclusively write in Markdown using Obsidian which lets me Copy+Paste images easily and also allows me to reference a bunch of notes during the writing process. Before publishing it, I run the post through Grammarly to fix some of my spelling and grammatical mistakes.

Once I'm satisfied, I occasionally let one of my colleagues proofread it and then I take the markdown and paste it into the blog repo for the company blog (Hugo based), take the images, move them into the static directories and update the links in Markdown. The last step before publishing is generating Alt-texts for the images using a tool I wrote about here:

Improving Accessibility by Generating Image-alt texts using GenAI

Maurice Borgmeier for AWS Community Builders ・ Aug 21

#a11y #aws #markdown #ai

Pushing to the repo triggers a pipeline that publishes the post on the company blog.

Next, I copy the Markdown and images to the repository for my personal blog (also Hugo based), update a field in the frontmatter, because the themes are different, add a backlink to the company blog, and publish it.

Last but not least I create a post here with a backlink to the same company blog post, it's a bit annoying that I have to upload the images manually again, but c'est la vie. If the blog is not work related, it just ends up on my personal blog and usually dev.to with a backlink.

(To avoid issues with updating themes, I just copied the theme at a version that I liked into my repository, no fancy integrations or submodules. Since it's static content anyway, security updates aren't really a thing and I don't mind updating it manually once or twice a year.)