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.