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 tend to write shorter posts. I think in terms of chunks of ideas. I write each post so that it covers one idea, either something I want to share or something I want to learn. Sometimes I cover a little more ground, if I can chunk the sub-ideas enough to hold them in my brain at the same time. Sketches help me a lot when it comes to developing thoughts further.

I rarely write larger posts that bring lots of things together. I guess it's because I tend to write about:

• things I've just learned: publishing small chunks helps me get my notes out faster
• things I'm figuring out: nibbling away at questions helps me make sense of them
• answers to specific questions: small chunks and clear titles makes it easier for me to find things and share links later

What are some examples of longer posts and resources I've worked on?

• There's How to Read Lisp and Tweak Emacs, which I published as a four-part weekly series and also as a single file.
• There's the No Excuses Guide to Blogging, which I published as a PDF/EPUB/MOBI. I linked the source blog posts into a series so that people coming across the posts in the archives can still navigate between them.
• I post presentations like The Shy Connector as slides and a full blog post. That said, I usually try to keep my presentations to about 10-15 minutes anyway, so the resulting posts are not enormous.
• Interviews or videos with transcripts can get really long because I talk quickly. For example, this Emacs Chat with John Wiegley is pretty long. I've experimented with breaking transcripts up into logical segments, but keeping the entire transcript together seems to make more sense to me.

What would it be like to experiment with longer posts that cover more ground? Based on the blogs I like reading, I think it might mean writing more thorough guides like the ones on Mastering Emacs – things that people would bookmark and refer to a few times.

Organized guides help beginners a lot because they don't get lost trying to figure out the next step. They can keep scrolling down. On the flip side, it might take a bit more work to make long guides friendlier for intermediate and advanced users: a table of contents, links to alternative paths or related content, closer and more coherent discussion…

Hmm. I feel a little odd about drafting a long resource (takes time to write and takes time to read), and deep-linking into part of a blog post can be a little difficult.

I think I like working with short chunks that I can link to or assemble into different pieces. Maybe I'll spend a little more time planning outlines and series of related posts so that I can link posts together and fill in the gaps. For now, I'll leave the ultimate-guide-writing to other people who are better at linear organization (or to future Sacha when she writes books).

Onward to better writing and sharing!

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 of the page. I write most text in Emacs/Org Mode/Org2Blog because of the better outlining and writing tools, and then I used sacha/org-copy-region-as-html (which you can grab from my Emacs configuration) to copy the HTML markup and paste it into WordPress. Of course, I use Emacs for source-code heavy posts that make the most of its syntax formatting support.

Someone asked me recently about how to post and update blog posts with images through Org2blog, and if I had any recommendations for workflow. I'd dropped Windows Live Writer since it was flaking out on me and the WordPress web interface had improved a lot, but before recommending just using WordPress to add images, I was curious about whether I could improve my blogging workflow by digging into Org Mode and Org2Blog further.

It turns out (like it usually does in the Emacs world) that someone had already solved the problem, and I just didn't have the updated version. Although the upstream version of Org2Blog didn't yet have the thumbnail code, searching for “org2blog wordpress thumbnail” led me to cpbotha's Github issue and pull request. Punchagan's version had some changes that were a little bit ahead of cpbotha's, so I dusted off my ancient org2blog repository, cloned it onto my computer, and issued the following commands:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/punchagan/org2blog
git pull upstream master
git remote add cpbotha https://github.com/cpbotha/org2blog.git
git pull cpbotha image-thumbnail

and tested it out on a blog post I'd already drafted in Org. It took me a little while to remember that the file URLs didn't like ~, so I specified a relative path to the image instead. But then it all worked, yay! A quick git push later, and my Github repository was up to date again.

So now I'm back to running a Git version of org2blog instead of the one that I had installed using the built-in packaging system. The way I make it work is that I have this near the beginning of my Emacs configuration:

;; This sets up the load path so that we can override it
(package-initialize nil)
;; Override the packages with the git version of Org and other packages
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/elisp/org-mode/lisp")
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/elisp/org-mode/contrib/lisp")
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/code/org2blog")
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/Dropbox/2014/presentations/org-reveal")
;; Load the rest of the packages
(package-initialize t)
(setq package-enable-at-startup nil)

This allows me to mostly use the packages and to satisfy dependencies, but override some of the load paths as needed.

Hope that helps someone else!

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 shared interests.

On one hand, it's good that other people are putting together resources, and sometimes these things lead to interesting new conversations. On the other hand, grist for another's mill, and I generally don't enjoy reading short, too-standard answers.

So if I'm going to do stuff like that, I want to focus on the things I like. I never promise to write answers, and I don't commit to a specific date. I mull over the questions and cherrypick the ones I find interesting. Not very generous of me, I suppose, but it keeps me happy. <laugh>

People are usually curious about the past: how one got started, what was helpful, what would you change. I tend to focus more on present and near-future, since that helps me a lot, and I'm not quite ready to hold my life up as an example that other people should be inspired by or follow. It's good to take notes along the way, though, since it's hard to reconstruct from memories afterwards.

So I'm okay with describing things and I can see the value of having a gallery of different approaches… What's the core of this, then? Maybe I'm not keen on the Q-and-short-A format. Might as well be a sketch so that I can practise that. Might as well try to wring out ideas for the future, notes to self – which don't make as much sense outside the context of my blog, I guess.

Hmm. I think there might be something there. In the context of my blog, it's clearer that life is a work in progress, and people can come across updates. I can link to things back and forth, and it's easier for me to keep track of comments.

I like it when people link to or excerpt my blog posts, since most of the time, bloggers make it easy to get back to the context. They put more of themselves into the post, too, sharing what they liked or what they think. It's different from having a short bio at the end.

Oh! Maybe that's something else that's playing into this… I tend to feel meh about most of the guest posts I read, the generic-ish articles with short bios written for link-building and audience-building purposes. We might be a small tribe, but it's okay for us to grow slowly through remarkable ideas rather than from exposure.

So I'll still take people's questions under advisement, but I'll reflect on those questions on my own schedule and to the extent that I want to, and I'll share those reflections on my blog. If people want to excerpt/link back, they're welcome to do so. Let's try that out…

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 transcription. People can do so much, and they can learn even more.

2014-02-26 Thinking about delegation and projects

Writing is one of those tricky tasks. I can't stand generic link-building, keyword-stuffing articles. You know, the ones bashed out by SEO robots or humans doing a reasonable simulation thereof. Hasty writers hodgepodge snippets from various places. They may change words just enough to avoid plagiarism, but how can they add anything to the conversation? They don't have the experience you have. They can't tell the stories you can. They have a surface understanding of your field.

Still, I'm curious. Can I outsource part of my writing without feeling like I'm breaking the promises of my blog? Can I use people's strengths instead of bumping into the weaknesses of outsourcing?

I have a personal blog, not a corporate one. I have no problems filling every day with things I'm learning. People find my writing readable. I don't need help… but maybe I can learn how to make the most of it anyway.

For example, I've started making myself delegate web research tasks. This is tough. I keep thinking, “It'll take me five to fifteen minutes to do this research myself.” I read at a blistering speed, and the research process helps me reformulate questions. It's faster. I don't have to wait.

But it turns out that delegating research means I have to be clear about what I'm looking for and how important it is to me. I can learn from other people's search keywords and summaries. And each little bit of knowledge leaves its traces on two people: the assistant and me. Before, I was the only one who learned from any research I didn't capture as blog posts. With delegation, the two of us learn, and the summary becomes something I can share.

Example web research tasks:

• Find pre-show interview tips for podcasts
• Find best practices for encouraging conference participation from female speakers

So web research is one thing that might be worth delegating, even if I think I can do it faster myself.

What about drafting and writing? One of the challenges of writing is empathizing with people who are new. When I write while I'm learning, this is easy. I struggle with the same things people struggle with. But what about the things that people ask me about, the things that I already take for granted? This is where other people's questions and words can help.

I've assigned people to write about a topic I've outlined or sketched. I like the way that my outline becomes something both recognizable and different. Here are a couple of examples:

• TOBLOG How much does it cost to get started with virtual assistants?
• TOBLOG Dealing with mistakes while delegating

I really like the way people go beyond what I might think of doing or asking on my own. For example, this Trello tutorial is funnier than I probably would have made, and I like it.

What's beyond that? Maybe more conversation. Speaking can be faster than writing. I struggle with speaking because it feels so unstructured. I'm not used to dictation yet. Maybe I'll grow into that, in time.

I've been practising through interviews and transcripts, but not a lot of people host shows. Maybe I can ask my assistants to interview me about topics. That way, we'll get a recording out of it as well (for people who prefer to listen or watch). They may ask follow-up questions that I wouldn't have come up with.

Writing through other people also helps me learn more about my individual style. When I edit their work and give them feedback, I get a better sense of how I say or organize things. Maybe the differences will inspire me to pick up tips from them, too.

$20-30 seems a lot for a blog post that I can write myself, especially if I also invest time to outline and revise it. Still, I'm intrigued by the possibilities of learning from other people's perspectives. I like the way that I can assign topics of mutual interest, so that both my assistant and I grow through writing. It's worth exploring.

What would wild success look like? During this delegation experiment, I think it would be great to get to the point where I can make a list of questions I'm curious about. Assistants dig into those questions further. They interview me and other people along the way. I review their drafts, experiment with the ideas, and enrich the drafts with stories and results. We all learn.

I think some of the promises of my blog are: I will post things that I care about. I hope some of them will be useful for you. I won't clutter your feed reader or inbox with bland, impersonal articles that you could find everywhere else. I won't resort to clickbait headlines. I'll share what I'm learning.

Maybe delegation is compatible with those promises. We'll see. Here are two posts I've written with some help:

• Don't be afraid of mistakes when delegating
• How much does it cost to get started with virtual assistants? See the card for previous versions

What do you think? Can there be an authentic way of blogging with other people's help?

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 and have more than 6,500 posts. There's not a lot of information on how to manage a large archive. Most blogging-related advice focuses on helping people get started and get going. Few people have a large personal archive yet. I love coming across other bloggers who have been at this for more than ten years, because information architecture is fascinating. Here's what I do, in case it gives you any ideas.

1.  I set up Google Chrome quick searches for my blog, categories, and tags. This means I can quickly dig up blog posts if I remember roughly where they are. (Gear > Settings > Search > Manage Search Engines):
   • Blog (b): https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Asachachua.com+%s
   • Blog category (bc): https://sachachua.com/blog/category/%s
   • Blog tag (bt): https://sachachua.com/blog/tag/%s
2. I create pages with additional notes and lists of content. I use either Display Posts Shortcode or WP Views, depending on what I need. See the Emacs page as an example.
3. I've started using Organize Series to set up trails through my content. It's more convenient than manually defining links, and it allows people to page through the posts in order too. Read my notes to find examples. I'm also working on maps, outlines, and overviews.
4. I've also started packaging resources into PDFs and e-books. It makes sense to organize things in a more convenient form.
   
5. I converted all the categories with fewer than ten entries to tags. Categories can get unwieldy when you create them organically, so I use categories for main topics and tags for other keywords that might graduate to become categories someday. I think I used Categories to Tags Converter or Taxonomy Converter for this. Hah! Similar Posts reminded me that I used Term Management Tools. Awesome.
6. I manually maintain a more detailed categorical index at sach.ac/index. This makes it easier for me to see when many blog posts are piling up in a category, and to organize them more logically.
7. I set up short URLs for frequently-mentioned posts. The Redirection plugin does a decent job at this. For example, people often ask me about the tools I use to draw, and it's great to just be able to type in http://sach.ac/sketchtools as an answer.
8. I post weekly and monthly reviews. The weekly review includes links to that week's blog posts, and the monthly review includes a categorized list. I've also set up daily, weekly, and monthly subscriptions based on the RSS feeds. This is probably overkill (more choices = lower subscriptions), but I want to give people options for how frequently they want updates. The weekly and monthly reviews are also helpful for me in terms of quickly getting a sense of the passage of time.
9. I use Similar Posts to recommend other things people might be interested in. There are a number of similar plugins, so try different ones to see which one you like the most. I tried nRelate and the one from Zemanta, but I wasn't happy with the way those looked, so I'm back to plain text.
10. I show recent comments. People often comment on really old posts, and this is a great way for other people to discover them.
11. I use post titles in my next/previous navigation, and I labelled them “Older” and “Newer”. I think they're more interesting than
12. I customized my theme pages to make it easier to skim through posts or get them in bulk. For example, https://sachachua.com/blog/2014/02 lists all the posts for February. https://sachachua.com/blog/2014/?bulk=1 puts all the posts together so that I can copy and paste it into a Microsoft Word file. https://sachachua.com/blog/2014/?org=1 puts it in a special list form so that I can paste it into Org Mode in Emacs. You can also pass the number of posts to a category page: https://sachachua.com/blog/category/drawing/?posts_per_page=-1 displays all the posts instead of paginating them. These tweaks make it easier for me to copy information, too.
13. I give people the option to browse oldest posts first. Sometimes people prefer starting from the beginning, so I've added a link that switches the current view around.
14. I have an “On this day” widget. Sometimes I notice interesting things in it. I used to put it at the end of a post, but I moved it to the sidebar to make the main column cleaner.
15. For fun, I have a link that goes to a random post. I used to display random post titles in the sidebar, which might be an interesting approach to return to.
16. I back up to many different places. I mirror my site as a development environment. I back up the database and the files to another web server and to my computer, and I duplicate the disk image with Linode too. I should set up incremental backups so that it's easier to go back in time, just in case.
17. I rated my posts and archived my favourite ones as a PDF so that I'll still have them even if I mess up my database. Besides, it was a good excuse to read ten years of posts again.

Hope that gives you some ideas for things to experiment with! I'm working on organizing more blog posts into trails and e-books. I'm also getting better at planning what I want to write about and learn. If you're curious about any of the techniques I use or you want to bounce around ideas, feel free to e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com or set up a chat.

Do you have a large blog? How do you manage it?

Do 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 them–or spend hours drafting, only to decide that it's not quite ready for posting?

I know what that's like. On the subway, I jot a few notes for a post I want to write. At home, I add more ideas to my outline. Sometimes when I look at those notes, I think, “What on earth is this about?” Other times, I write a paragraph or two, and then my attention wanders. Over the years, I've gotten a lot better at getting posts out there. I still have more ideas than I can write, but at least a few of them make it into my blog! Here's what works for me, and I hope it works for you too.

Capture your ideas. Write them down somewhere: a text file, an Evernote notebook, a piece of paper, whatever fits the way you work. You don't have to write everything down, but it helps to have a list of ideas when you sit down to write. I use Evernote to take quick notes on my phone, and I use Org Mode for Emacs for my outline.

“Oh no! Now I have this huge list of unfinished ideas!” Don't be intimidated. Think of it like a buffet – you can choose what you want, but it doesn't mean that you have to finish everything.

Pick one idea and turn it into a question. Pick the idea that you're most curious about, perhaps, or something that you're learning. Turn it into a question so that you have a focus for your writing and you know when you've answered it. Questions help you keep both your perspective and your reader's perspective in mind. Remembering your question will help you bring your focus back to it if your attention wanders. Remembering your readers' potential question will help you empathize with them and write for them.

Break that question down into smaller questions until you can actually answer it in one sitting. For example: “How can you blog more?” is too big a question. In this post, I want to focus on just “How do you get past having lots of ideas that you don't turn into blog posts?” Make the question as small as you can. You can always write another blog post answering the next question, and the next, and the next.

When you find yourself getting stuck, wrap up there. That probably means that your question was too big to begin with. Break it down even further. Figure out the question that your blog post answers, and revise your post a little so that it makes sense. Post. You can follow up with a better answer later. You can build on your past posts. Don't wait until it's complete. Post along the way.

I often run into this problem while writing technical posts. I start with “How do you do ABC?”… and get stuck halfway because of a bug or something I don't understand. Then I turn my post into “Trouble-shooting XYZ” with my rough notes of how I'm figuring things out. I'd rather have written a complete guide, of course, but mistakes and false starts and rough notes are also useful in themselves.

Don't think that you have to know everything and write everything perfectly the first time around. In fact, blogging can be more interesting and more useful when you do it as part of your journey.

Perfectionist? Take a close look at that anxiety. See if you can figure out what the root of that is. Is it useful for you, or is it getting in your way? There's an advantage to being outwardly polished, yes, but there's also an advantage to learning quickly and building relationships. One of the tips I picked up from the book Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work (Heath and Heath, 2013) was the idea of testing the stakes. Make a few small, deliberate mistakes. Ooch your way to better confidence. (See page 138 if you want more details.)

Tell me if this helps, or if you're still getting stuck. More blogging excuse-busters here!

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 head – a path to publishing

Here are even more excuses, and some tips for dealing with them. =)

Excuse: “I don't know what to write about.”

Write about what you don't know.

Pay attention to what you're learning.

Figure out what you think.

Ask for feedback.

Deal with writer's block

Find tons of topics

Excuse: “There's so much I can't write about.”

Focus on what you can't help but sharing.

Excuse: “But I'm not an expert yet!”

Share while you learn

Excuse: “I don't want to be wrong.”

Test what you know by sharing

Excuse: “I feel so scattered and distracted.”

Don't worry about your strategy

It's okay to write about different things

Plan, organize, write, improve

Excuse: “I have all these ideas, but I never finish posts…”

Turn your ideas into small questions, then answer those.

Excuse: “I don't feel like I'm making progress towards my goals.”

Be clear about your goals and possible approaches.

Excuse: “It takes too much time to write.”

Make sharing part of the way you work.

Excuse: “I'm too tired to write.”

Figure out what you can write better when you're tired.

Excuse: “No one's going to read it anyway.”

Focus on selfish benefits.

Get other people to read your posts.

See also other tips for new bloggers, and other posts related to blogging and writing. (Plus this list of WordPress plugins I use, if you're curious about tech!)

Feel free to comment or email with more excuses and tips!