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Tamara Temple
Tamara Temple

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creating content vs. structuring content: how do *you* go from one to another?

By profession, career, and interest, I'm a software developer, at this point mainly working web applications (Rails, React, and GraphQL at this point).

I'm also a content creator, as in I write documentation, blog posts, produce images, and so on, for both myself and for work.

When I'm doing the latter, especially writing, I find it difficult to create content with markup embedded in it, so I write text almost exclusively in plain text, with a little markdown added (you know, how markdown is the markup we already know because we've been writing email this way for years).

I'm also aware that walls of text, even though interspersed with headings at different levels, a few bulleted lists, etc, can still be inaccessible without more semantic structural markup.

The markdown processors I'm familiar with (kramdown in particular) do a wonderful job of letting you intersperse HTML markup within the stream of markdown, so you can surround things with semantic markup. This works pretty well, in fact.

And yet, I think I'm looking for something even more intuitive that can be indicated swiftly without my needing to think about it while creating and editing the content in it's more free text form.

Perhaps there really need to be 2 steps to this process of preparing content for consumption.

What have you found? How do you work with content to get it to final form? I'm interested in your processes, tools you've found, ways of working, etc.

Top comments (4)

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antonrich profile image
Anton

I was reading you post and at some a very great idea came to me.
Here we have to first upload an image and then put a link to into square brackets. What if we just could drag and drop it. But when dragging it over text a black horizontal line would appear in place where you are putting it.

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tamouse profile image
Tamara Temple

Do you know what editor did this? DREAMWEAVER. Back in the late 90s. :D

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antonrich profile image
Anton

I've listened to an audio book called "Radical Honesty" by Brad Blanton. I don't if he mentioned that in the book, but there he said "If it is worth doing, it is worth doing it poorly, until you get better. I find that to be a good antidote to my perfectionism."

I think that happens because we don't have a feedback to rely on.
If you are a journalist no way it will be published if the editor didn't evesdropped on your article? You see red marks, or something else perhaps. I don't really know as I'm not a journalist. But isn't a great system to have someone on your ass ready to critique and give you candid feedback?

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tamouse profile image
Tamara Temple

Yeah, I use that quote often in teaching beginners. :) Still so true: we're (hopefully) all learning new things, doing them poorly, so we can get better. :)