How I keep drafted blog posts organized

When I started to write this blog, my drafts quickly became a chaos and it was difficult to go through all the blog posts that were published, planned or what I had just started to ideate. I wanted to keep all my blog posts and ideas in one place, because knowing myself, I wouldn't have remembered to go through any notes that would be located elsewhere.

I have tried keeping a Trello board, having a Google Keep labels or a notebook for blog posts and I just never kept it up to date. So eventually I created a system which helps me to keep ideas, drafts, finished and published blog posts organized here in Dev.to platform and I thought I want to write a post about it so maybe it will help someone else who is also struggling with something similar.

Identifying different blog post types

I noticed there are few different types of blog posts on my dashboard: ideas, started but not finished, finished and published.

Ideas are something I have though might be a fun idea to start writing about, but haven't actually done anything yet. There might be some bullet points to make the idea more clear, but not any actual written text.

Started but not finished are blog posts that I have already started working on but that are not yet ready to be published.

Finished blog posts are the ones I have read through and fixed grammar. These are ready to be published.

Published blog posts are the ones I have finished and already published.

Adding tags to the blog post titles

After I identified the types of blog posts I have, I started adding tags to the beginning of the post title. There's IDEA, WIP and READY

Whenever I use the tag IDEA, I know there is no text written yet. When I start to work on the post, I change the tag to WIP (Work in Progress) and this way I will immediately know it's a blog post that I have started, and probably want to continue writing before taking a new blog post marked with IDEA.

When the blog post is then finished, I mark it with tag READY. This makes it easier for me to see which posts are ready for publishing. When I publish the blog post I just remove the tag from the beginning.

Adding more details to titles

Sometimes it's not possible to actually finish a blog post for some reason, so then I might add some more details to the title. For example, when I write a tutorial series, I can't add a link to the previous blog post if it's not published yet.

Then I add an extra detail after the READY tag so I immediately see if the blog post is missing some detail that I need to add before making the post public.

Extra detail might also be something like "add image" if the image of finished project is missing from the blog post.

Clear list of planned blog posts on dashboard.

I hope this gave you some inspiration on how to keep your dashboard organized!

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Comments

[Santosh Kumar]

I usually keep my ideas in Google Keep. Some of those ideas turn into more than 100-150, I move them to a markdown file which is part of my blog.

Final stage of any of my post is to prepare OG image for the post.

Before posting I make sure that each post has an anchor sentence in start and a CTA at tast. Anchor is something which create a connection between the reader and me. CTA is mostly about telling them to subscribe or following me on social media.

[whatminjacodes [she/they]]

Sounds good!

[Andy Piper]

I like this IDEA :-) I'm doing two things myself - I have a few draft titles sitting here on DEV, but I also have a notebook in my note-taking app of choice (Joplin) for writing ideas, and keep one note called "Quick Hits" which are just the titles for shorter knowledge sharing posts, and then individual notes fleshing out longer ideas as full posts to use in the future.

Super handy suggestion here, thanks - I like the capital letters making it quick to scan the left side of the list for the different stages of your posts.

[whatminjacodes [she/they]]

Thanks! And your way sounds good too :)

[CuriousDev]

Thanks for these suggestions. Of course you can also try to finish posts before you have too many drafted posts.

[whatminjacodes [she/they]]

That's not an option for me :D I get inspiration from everywhere, even when I'm writing a blog post, so I need to write the idea down so I won't forget it. So that's why I have so many IDEA posts waiting for their turn to be written :)