Title: My blog workflow
Author: Solène
Date: 28 August 2022
Tags: blog life
Description: In this text, I share my experience as a blog author when
it comes to publish articles and get new ideas.

# Introduction

I occasionally get feedback about my blog, most of the time people are
impressed with the rate of publication when they see the index page. 
I'm surprised it appears to be huge efforts, so I'll explain how I work
on my blog.

# Make it simple

I rarely spend more than 40 minutes for a blog post, the average blog
post takes 20 minutes.  Most of them are sharing something I fiddled
with in the day or week, so the topic is still fresh for me.  The
content of the short articles often consists of dumping a few commands
/ configuration I used, and write a bit of text around so the reader
knows what to expect from the article, how to use the content and
what's the point of the topic.

It's important to keep track of commands/configuration beforehand, so
when I'm trying something new, and I think I could write about it, I
keep a simple text file somewhere with the few commands I typed or
traps I encountered.

# Write ideas down

My fear with regard to the blog is to be out of ideas, this  would mean
I would have boring days and I would have nothing to write about. 
Sometimes I look at packages repository updates in different Linux
distribution, and look at the projects homepages for which the name is
unknown to me.  This is a fun way to discover new programs / tools and
ideas.  When something looks interesting, I write its name down
somewhere and may come later to it.  I also write down any idea that I
could get in my mind about some unusual setup I would like to try, if I
come to try it, it will certainly end up as a new blog entry to share
my experience.

# Don't think too much

There are two rules for the blog: having fun and not lie/be accurate. 
Having fun? Yes, writing can be fun, organizing ideas and sharing them
is a cool exercise.  Watching the result is fun.  Thinking too much
about perfection is not fun.

I prefer to write most of the blog posts in one shot, quickly proofread
and publish, and be done with it.  If I save a blog post as a draft, I
may not pick it up quickly, and it's not fun to get into the context to
continue it.  I occasionally abandon some posts because of that, or
simply delete the file and start over.

Sometimes it happens I'm wrong when writing, in the case I prefer to
remove the blog post than keeping it online at all cost.  When I know a
text is terribly outdated, I either remove it from the index or update
it.

I don't use any analytics services and I do the blog for free, the only
incentive is to have fun and to know it will certainly help someone to
look for information.

# The blog software

This website is generated with a custom blog generator I wrote a few
years ago (cl-yag), the workflow to use it is very simple it never
fails to me:

* write the blog file in the format I want, I currently use GemText but
in the past some blog posts were written in org-mode, man page or
markdown
* add an entry in the list of articles, this contains all the metadata
such as the title, date, tags and description for the open graph
protocol (optional)
* run "make"
* wait 30s, it's online on HTTP / gopher / Gemini

The program is really fast despite it's generating all the files every
time, the "raw text to HTML" content is cached and reused when wrapping
the HTML in the blog layout, the Gemini version is published as-this,
and the gopher files are processed by a Perl script rewriting all the
links and wrapping the text (takes a while).

# Quick proofreading

Before publishing, I read my text and run a spellcheck program on it,
my favorite is LanguageTool because it finds so many mistake versus
aspell which only finds obvious typos.

# More advanced blog posts

It happens for some blog posts to be more elaborated, they often
describe a complex setup and I need to ensure readers can reproduce all
the steps and get the same results as me.  This kind of blog post takes
a day to write, they often require using a spare computer for
experimentation, formatting, installing, downloading things, adjusting
the text, starting over because I changed the text...

# Conclusion

If you want to publish a blog, my advices would be to have fun, to use
a blog/website generator that doesn't get in your way, and to not be
afraid to get started.  It could be scary at first to publish texts on
the wild Internet, and fear to be wrong, but it happens, accept it,
learn from your mistakes and improve for the next time.