My blogging workflow

Robert told me about this blogging workflow trend that’s currently happening in a bunch of blogs around the web and since I thought it’s a neat idea I’m gonna share mine.

I’m gonna split it into two because this blog serves as both my home on the web as well as a home for the People and Blogs series.

My posts

I have two types of posts on this site: regular blog posts and “moments”. Moments are my personal Instagram, posts with an image and a short caption. As the name suggests, those are moments in time and so there is no real planning behind them. This is how it works:

  1. I take a picture with my iPhone
  2. I do some light editing using Snapseed
  3. I log into my site’s dashboard
  4. I create a new post
  5. I write a title that always starts with “A moment...”
  6. I upload the picture and I write the short post directly on the admin interface
  7. I hit save

There’s no proofreading involved, no drafts, no nothing. I take a photo, I upload it, write something and move on with my day.

As for the regular posts, those are handled a bit differently. My blog has no structure behind its schedule. I post about whatever I find interesting at any point in time. I have a to-do list with a bunch of random ideas that usually appear in my head out of nowhere when I’m outside for a walk. Those entries in my to-do are either a single line—for example Taxonomy of personal websites—or a combination of title + short description—Good conversations: What’s the ideal workflow for a good conversation online.

When I feel in the mood to post something I either pick one of those entries or, like I’m doing now, I write about something else, usually in response to something I read somewhere else. The workflow is the following:

  1. I open iA Writer
  2. I write my post
  3. When I feel I’m done I copy-paste into Grammarly to check for typos or other silly issues
  4. I open my site’s dashboard
  5. I create a new post
  6. I copy-paste from Grammarly and I hit publish
  7. I then log into Buttondown.email, create a new email, paste the content of the new post and hit send because there are some 100 or so people who want to get my posts via email

Again, I don’t do drafts, don’t do editing. I have an idea, I write it down, check for silly issues with Grammarly and then I post it online. That’s how my blog works.

People and Blogs

As I mentioned before, my site also hosts the People and Blogs interviews. The workflow for those posts is a bit different and it goes like this:

  1. I have a list of potential guests on Airtable
  2. I cold email a bunch of people and ask if they want to be part of the series
  3. If they say yes I send them the questions
  4. When I get back the answers I create a new post
  5. I format their answers in markdown and add the intro and outro and store it as a draft
  6. On the week the interview is scheduled to go live I send a link to the draft to the guest to give them time to do a final check and to also give them a final chance to add or remove anything from the answers
  7. Once the interview is good to go I log into the Buttondown account, create the interview and schedule it to go live on Friday
  8. 5 minutes before it’s time to go live a reminder rings on my phone to make sure I don’t forget to publish the post
  9. I log into my dashboard and hit publish

And that’s how it works for P&B. Could I add an auto-publish feature on my site? Sure. Would that save me time? Maybe 20 seconds a week. Is it worth it? Absolutely not.

And those are my workflows. Nothing fancy, very few tools and very little automation. As always if you have questions you can ping me via email and if you haven’t already go subscribe to People and Blogs!