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A no-excuses guide to blogging
UPDATE 2014-02-05: Download the PDF/EPUB/MOBI: A No-Excuses Guide to Blogging (free, pay what you want) What’s getting in your way when it comes to writing? 2014-01-31 Getting good ideas out of your...
View ArticleHow to develop your ideas into blog posts
This entry is part 13 of 19 in the series A No-Excuses Guide to BloggingDo you find it easy to come up with lots of ideas for blog posts, but then find it difficult to sit down and actually write...
View ArticleMore notes on managing a large blog archive: 17 things I do to handle 10+...
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to manage a large archive to encourage discovery and serendipity, and to make it easier to fish out articles so that I can send them to people. I started in 2001-ish...
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Thinking about how virtual assistants can help me with learning and writing
I’ve been challenging my assumptions about what I have to do myself and what could be better with help. It would be a waste of time and talent to limit virtual assistants to just data entry or...
View ArticleQuestionnaires from people
As part of blog series or e-book compilations, people sometimes ask me to answer questionnaires they’ve put together. Sometimes they mention the size of their audience. Sometimes, they focus on our...
View ArticlePublishing WordPress thumbnail images using Emacs and Org2Blog
I often include large images in my blog posts since I use sketches as another way to think out loud. I’d gotten used to using the WordPress web interface to drag and drop them into the relevant section...
View ArticleThinking about word counts and chunks
I was talking to Frank Chen about blogging, and he mentioned that he’s experimenting with word count goals. That made me realize that I don’t pay much attention to word count when I write, and that I...
View ArticleBuilding a better time machine
I’ve written before about how a blog is like a time machine, reflecting on my growth as a speaker or looking back over the past decade. It’s wonderful having all these notes. I often find myself...
View ArticleMaking personal blogs useful for other people too
When people ask my advice on starting a blog, I encourage them to start a personal one. I don’t mean that they should focus on writing about what they had for lunch or ranting about something that...
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Drawing thoughts on index cards
I’ve got quite a backlog of posts I want to publish, but I’ll squeeze this one in first. I want to think about how I can make the most of this new old (2011!) index card habit, and whether I should...
View ArticleWriting: Open loops, closed loops, and working with forgetfulness
I think I’ve written about something before, but I can’t find it. I have thirteen tabs open with Google search results from my blog. I’ve tried countless keywords and synonyms. I’ve skimmed through...
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Clear out your drafts by scheduling Minimum Viable Posts
Do you have dozens of drafts languishing on your blog or on your computer? I sometimes hear from other bloggers who say they just don’t think their posts are good enough. Maybe they’ve written a few...
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Help your readers discover more posts by organizing your content with a...
You’ve written lots of blog posts, and maybe you’ve even organized them using categories and tags. But your readers are still getting lost. They like the posts they’ve found using search engines, but...
View ArticleShifts in my writing
Sometimes, when I sit down to draw my five index cards of the day, I have a hard time delineating five interesting thoughts – things I want to remember or share. They often seem so inward-turned. I was...
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What do I want instead of or in addition to advice roundups?
I occasionally get requests for advice to include in an “expert roundup.” It’s one of those quick content generation / search-engine optimization techniques, and often goes something like this:...
View ArticleFixed paragraph breaks in WordPress, no more wall of text
While trying out the “after” filter I just added to my blog, I noticed that my paragraph breaks were missing. I hadn’t noticed it for a while because I’ve been building up my weekly and monthly reviews...
View ArticlePosting more thoughts
I can write on my phone while nursing, which is probably a far better occupation for my mind instead of scrolling through Facebook or Reddit for the nth time. It’s not my ideal writing setup – I can...
View ArticleThinking about my frequency of annual reviews
I’ve been doing annual reviews a few times a year: my birthday in August, the new year in January, and experiment-related reflections in February. It’s a little excessive, perhaps. My weekly and...
View ArticleWhat do I want from an annual review?
I’ve got most of the pieces for an annual review: monthly reviews in visual and text form, my time records, and a recent flip-through of all of my sketches. I’d like to bring my ledger of income and...
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Daily, weekly, and monthly journals: my Memento + Google Sheets + Tasks Free...
Journaling considerations: A- nurses a lot in bed. I keep my phone handy and I write when she doesn’t want to let me go. I also jot quick notes throughout the day so that I don’t have to keep them in...
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