Category: Writing

Are we stuck with the mental model of blog posts as pieces of content that are just published and then not touched again?

Or can we treat a blog post as a "work in progress" that will continue to evolve and expand over time?

I have been asking myself this question in relation to my quest to tear down some of my own barriers to doing more blogging. The model that we have had since the early days of blogging has been one more similar to traditional news media - you write an article, you publish it, you move on to your next article.

You "fire and forget."

Sure, you might go back and update the article if something was wrong or if later information changed the story a bit, but even in the latter case it is often more common to write a new story with the updated facts and then link to the new story from the old one.

But what if we just posted a blog post as a first draft knowing that it would change and evolve over time?

Almost something more like a wiki. ... perhaps a "blicki" :-)

Where you post knowing full well that you will be editing... and then you do so.

Interestingly, I have been seeing news sites doing this. In the rush to be the first one out with a story to get the tweets and retweets and links, they will publish a stub story with "more details to come" - and then they will in those details in the subsequent minutes and hours.

Can we do that as individual writers though? Can we give ourselves permission to post a partially done piece? And can we have the discipline to go back and update it?

An Implied Contract?

To expand on this a bit (and practice this kind of editing myself), I wonder:

Do we have an implied "contract" with our readers?

Do they expect that the content will not change from when they first read it?  Or at least not change dramatically?

Many of us, myself included, seem to feel there is this implied contract and so when we do go back and update a post, we'll often put those updates at the top or bottom of the article with some kind of marker like "UPDATE:" to clearly show what was been updated.  Or we will use strikethrough to indicate that text is removed.

But what if we just wove all the updates in together to make a cohesive article?

Would readers find that troublesome?

What if the initial content is only a few paragraphs... and then over time it evolves into a lengthy document going on for several pages?

What about the "integrity" of a piece?  If someone else quotes an article or references an article as containing a specific quote or bit of information... but then the article gets modified so that that quote or content is no longer there... what does that mean for the original reference?

For these reasons we tend to think of writing that gets posted online as "fixed"...  but what if we move away from that and let posts evolve over time?

What About The Aggregators?

In the comments to this post, Michael Richardson asks "what will my aggregator think?" And indeed that is a good question. Many people read blog posts in aggregators / news readers / other clients that often pull copies of the articles down onto the local system for the user to read. However, once the article is retrieved, the aggregator may or may not go back and retrieve the article again. And so the user may be sitting there reading an article that is now outdated.

Even with my own aggregation site, danyork.me, where I aggregate pointers to all of my writing, I have it set to pull in the RSS feeds from all my sites and store the contents in that WordPress site. (The site is not indexed by search engines to avoid "duplicate content" issues.) Now, in the particular syndication plugin I use, I have set it to merge in and overwrite any changes that come in from the RSS feeds. So as I update this post, the changes should be reflected over on that site. But I don't believe that was the default setting. I think the default was to ignore any changes in the RSS feeds... so the aggregation site would be out-of-sync with the real content.

For all these reasons, it's not clear to me that we should move away from the way we work today. But could we?

I don't know... it's a shift in thinking.

What do you think?

P.S. You may also be interested in reading "Subcompact Publishing" by Craig Mod. It's a long piece that is exploring a different question, that of our mental model of a "magazine" online, but a similar kind of thought experiment...

What if a blog post is simply text? No fancy images. No links to additional articles... except maybe one or two that might provide the immediate context (and perhaps not). Can I truly write that way?

As I wrote about last week, one of the steps I will be trying this next while will be to do exactly that - write posts like this one that are just... simple. Perhaps even... (gasp!).... brief!

In this case, I am using the Blogsy editor on my iPad. For tonight, I am not going to go out and find just the perfect image that illustrates simplicity. I will leave it as a block of text.

Can I eliminate all the trappings of what I consider to be "what should be done" in a blog post? Can I instead embrace the simplicity and just let my words flow?

Stay tuned... this will be an ongoing test... :-)

Are the tools you use one of the barriers to your blogging? Is it easy for you to jump in and write a post? Or does the system you use make it complex or slow?

In a response to my last post in this series over on Google+, Jeff Porter left this comment:

I don’t wish pre-empt your next post, but the biggest barrier for me is the blogging system itself, in my case WordPress. Combine with writing (and coding) the perfect post, and that pretty much explains why my blog can sit idle for a month or more.

Seriously considering switching to a simpler system that allows me to save Markdown files in Dropbox and auto-publish from there.

To be honest, I was not originally going to include this topic in my list of barriers to blogging, because for me I've pretty much solved this. I have a fast system... at least on my laptop and desktop - blogging on my mobile devices is a different matter.

But Jeff's comment was a good reminder that this IS a big barrier for many people, and still is for me on the mobile platform.  

As I noted in my post about writing the perfect blog post, if you want to have all the various elements in a post such as images or links, you need a writing interface that makes all of this simple and easy.  Even for just blowing in text, you need an interface that makes it quick and easy to do.

Once I was helping with a site that had such a klunky interface that it did take seemingly forever to get to the point where you could write.  Once you finished an article or page the process of then publishing it was equally painful.

So much latency and inefficiency in the publishing process that, yes, it dramatically slowed down building out the site. 

I personally find the WordPress user interface fairly easy to use, but I do admit it has become increasingly laden with options as WordPress has evolved over time from a simple blogging platform into a full-blown content management system (CMS). This is perhaps the reason there was such a huge interest in the "concept" of a "lite version" of Wordpress called Ghost that would simplify WordPress and return it to its blogging routes.  Now who knows whether Ghost will actually be created, but there certainly is interest in the idea.

The point is, though, that the tools should just get out of the way and let you write.

My own solution for speed is to not use any of the web-based editors and instead use a dedicated, standalone blog editor on my laptop or desktop.  This allows me to have an app that I can just flip into and start writing.  Over time I have built up my own set of keystrokes, macros and other commands that speed up my writing.  I know by heart the keystroke to drop in a link, and to edit a link and to add various formatting I frequently use.  I can just drag and drop an image in and it works.  I can be writing several different posts in different windows.  I can have local drafts in progress.

The other great aspect for me is that I have one user interface across the different blogs I write on.  For instance, this Disruptive Conversations and my Disruptive Telephony sites are hosted on TypePad.  Voice of VOIPSA and my Code.Danyork.com, as well as my books, are hosted on WordPress.  The Internet Society Deploy360 Programme's blog is on WordPress.  I have some older sites floating around on other platforms.

I don't have to care about their user interfaces - I just use my editor and write my posts.

Simple. Easy. Fast.

Most of the time... there is a caveat that I often need to write my post in the blog editor and send it to the blog site as a draft because I need to actually publish it using the web interface.  For instance, when the blog site auto-publishes the post to Twitter and Facebook, I want to be able to change the text of the tweet to include hashtags.  I need to do that through the WordPress UI.  So there is this extra step I need to go through.

For me on the Mac, the offline blog editor I choose to use is MarsEdit, and it rocks for a whole number of reasons I should probably write about in a post sometime.  Over on Windows, I used to use and love Windows Live Writer, and I still hear good things about it.  There are other good apps out there, too, but these are the ones I have used and can recommend.

Still, all of this may be too complex for some folks.  A developer friend of mine just posted that he is ending his use of WordPress and just writing his articles in text files with a light form of markup and publishing them via a git repository.  He'll lose out on many of the functions of WordPress like the social sharing, commenting, etc. ... but he just wants a simple system that lets him write.  John Porter in his Google+ comment mentioned looking at other simple systems as well.

I am still looking for the best solution for me on mobile platforms.  The WordPress app on the iPad/iPhone app is okay, but that only helps me for the WordPress sites. I've not been a fan of the TypePad app for iOS.  I've been experimenting with Blogsy on the iPad and that seems pretty decent.

The key for me is how to make it fast to write.  On the mobile side, I'm still looking.

You need to figure out what works for you.  How can you get the tools out of the way and get to a point where you can just write?

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You have to START writing an article/post.

You can have ideas floating around endlessly inside your head. You can talk about ideas with people. Write the ideas down on scraps of paper, or in a Moleskine-type notebook, or in an online tool like Evernote. You can collect all the ideas you want.

But until you start the article, those ideas are simply that. Ideas. Fragments. Unformed. Incomplete.

It is that act of beginning that can be the hardest.

Writing the first sentence. Starting the process of taking those half-baked ideas and forging out of them a whole. Taking the fragments and figuring out which fit together well, which need to be simply discarded and which should be put aside for another day.

But it starts with a sentence. With a word, really.

Turning a blank window into one with content.

Even perhaps before that with an action. Opening up your blog editor (my weapon of choice, MarsEdit, is pictured on the right) or logging into WordPress and clicking "New Post". Or opening up your mobile app... or website admin panel... or whatever tool or window you use to actually write your posts.

Starting the process of creating a post.

And then from there... committing yourself by entering the first words.

Most of the time once I have the window open this is easy for me. Sometimes it is in fact trivial. Text springs from my brain, sometimes even fully-formed and my hands become almost as a channel for flowing in the words and thoughts that are exploding out of my brain.

Other times it is not so easy. I struggle with how to begin the post... or sometimes I'm already thinking - and struggling with - how to end the post. Sometimes a story arc is immediately clear to me and the post almost writes itself. Sometimes no narrative arc is clear... and very often posts do evolve on their own even as I write them.

And sometimes... sometimes... that blank window stares back at me... mocking my inability at that moment to turn ideas into prose... taunting me with its emptiness. Perhaps I'll have a title... but what comes next isn't clear.

That's rare for me, but it does happen. Usually I put the idea aside for a while... or alternatively, and this may sound bizarre, I crank some heavy metal/hard rock music and let my brain wander for a bit.[1]

The key is simply to... start.

Start somewhere... anywhere... write sentences... write paragraphs... you can always edit away later.

But you need to... start!

[1] Bizarrely, but perhaps it hearkens back to my growing up in the 70s and 80s, I've found that the Scorpions do wonders to help me move through writer's block. :-)

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Beyond the distractions of the Internet, another barrier I find to hitting "Publish" (or even to getting text together) is a desire to have a "perfect" blog post. Well, perhaps "perfect" isn't right... but "close to perfect". I want a blog post to have:

1. compelling writing that people will find interesting, educational, helpful, useful, etc.
2. a catchy title that people will notice in the overwhelming mass of content and links coming through their various feeds
3. a strong beginning ("the hook") and ending of the text
4. at least one photo that somehow either illustrates the point or complements the text in some way
5. links to other articles I have written on related topics that might help provide additional context and information

In truth, it is the latter two points that tie me up the most. Often I have the ideas and can put together the article text. Whether it is compelling or not is something you all will have to judge, but I think that often I can put a good piece together. Titles, too, are fairly easy to come up with. Given that I've been writing online since 2000 and using Twitter since 2006, my brain is pretty wired to think in terms of short phrases that can be tweeted out. The strong beginning and ending are aspects I'm always working on but don't deter me from writing.

Including Images

It's the other two points that get me. As I start working on a post, I wonder what image I will use with it. I like to have at least one photo for several reasons:

• an image breaks up a wall of text
• an image can help you tell your story or illustrate a key point
• your posts look much nicer in sites that aggregate content (including my own aggregator) as those sites typically grab an image to use as a thumbnail
• when your posts go out in social networks like Facebook, Google+ or Twitter, they will all grab an image and show that. No image in the post, no image in the social network.
• people interact more with posts that include images (I think because they NOTICE those posts more easily)
• I just like the look of posts that include images!

But finding just the right image can take time. It also adds time to the process of creating the post. If I'm on my laptop, I have it down to a pretty fast process - once I find the image. I use the old version of Skitch Pro, and it works extremely well to let me rapidly re-size my image and drop it into MarsEdit, the tool I use for most of my writing. (And it is precisely because my system works so well that I was so outraged when Evernote ruined Skitch with their "upgrade".)

If I am mobile, though, it's harder. Sure, there are tools that let me write on my iPad or iPhone and include images. But then this goes back to me being a bit of a perfectionist about how my posts look. I want to easily resize the images and put them where I want them. And I want to resize the image file so that it is smaller, not just resize the image dimensions in HTML. I've not found a tool that makes it quite as fast. Blogsy on the iPad is getting close to what I want.

But having said all this, it is the desire for an image that sometimes holds me up. Sometimes it is thinking about the image... sometimes it is the process of getting an image.

Including Links

Similarly, I like including links to other posts I write. See what I did in those paragraphs above?

Most of that desire to add links is a function of wanting to provide more context and background to the points I am making in a given post. If someone is intrigued by a point and wants to learn more, I want to help them along. In any given post, I want it to have a focus and so I don't want to include every single related point. An article would simple get too long. So instead I want to link out to pieces where people can learn more if they want to.

It's my natural teacher side, wanting to help provide the foundation for those who may be learning about something for the first time.

And yes, I could run any of the zillion plugins or other services that provide lists of related links at the bottom of a post... and I have considered that on several sites. But I also want the links within the text.

There's also the SEO-minded side of myself that says if someone has found my post through search or social networks, I would like them to check out some of the other pieces I've written. So purely for that factor I want to include links to my other content.

But, like adding images, adding links takes time. You have to find the link and then insert it into your current article. Now, this has gotten easier over the years. The WordPress web interface provides a nice way to search for the content in your blog. MarsEdit makes it easy to copy the URL for any post you've written in recent times on your blog.

But still... it takes time.

And that time can mean that I don't hit "Publish" because I'm still waiting to add in links.

"Good Enough"

As we know, though, courtesy of Voltaire:

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

In the pursuit of perfection we lose out on the publishing of what might be a perfectly "good" article. It may be "good enough" to get our point across, to stimulate discussion and/or to engage with our audiences.

To this end, I'm thinking that I will take two actions in the time ahead:

1. Try to embrace simplicity in blogging. You may see more "text-only" posts that do NOT have images or links. I may just publish ideas and thoughts... as I have them... from whatever platform I am on... wherever... whenever. Trying not to get hung up on adding all the trappings to the post, but more focusing on getting the text online.

2. Start to treat a blog post as a "work-in-progress". When I write and hit "Publish", I think of it as "shipping a finished product". The post it done. Finished. Out. Sure, I will go back in and update a post if I find out that something was wrong or if something needed more clarification. Sometimes I will edit a post and include points raised in a comment - or links to newer articles I've written that update the post.

But generally, once a post is up, it is "done".

What if, instead, the post was published in more of a draft form? Or to be more precise, what if the text were published first... and then an image and links, etc. were added later? (Quite similar to the way that many of the news sites operate like TechCrunch, GigaOm, Mashable, TheNextWeb, etc. - publish quickly, then update later.)

It's something I'm thinking about. I struggle a bit because I know that you only get people's attention for a moment... and when a post first goes out and through social networks, you have THAT moment to catch people's attention... and I don't want to lose it. But perhaps there, too, I change a bit... publish a post and do NOT auto-post it, but do that later... or do it again later after more content is added.

In the end, my goal is to get more of these stories that I want to write published. Some I may do in my regular longer style (like this post). Where I can, though, I may see what I can do to just get the post out.

What do you think? Do you struggle with this, too?

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Today begins the November 2012 edition of "National Blog Posting Month" a.k.a. "NaBloPoMo" as it is referred to over on BlogHer, where this daily blogging project currently has a home. In truth, NaBloPoMo now happens every month as a project to encourage people to write daily. But, as mentioned in the announcement about NaBloPoMo for November 2012, this month is special:

The time has finally arrived: it's November's NaBloPoMo, the birthday of this blogging project. Let's get this blogging party started.

November is the only month that doesn't have a separate theme. Instead, the theme for November is blogging for blogging's sake.

Currently 738 blogs have signed up to participate this month... and that number is at least 739, as I've now signed up this blog as well! :-)

Why?

Well, primarily because I have a huge queue of posts that I'd like to post here on Disruptive Conversations, but I've been having a hard time making the time to write here given all the other places I need to be writing. (Including, most obviously, Deploy360, where it is my job to write there.)

So I will consider this my personal challenge - can I keep up the pace and have daily posts coming out here throughout November?

We'll see... :-)

It might have been better to perhaps give my danyork.me site as the address, as that aggregates content across all the sites where I write, but hey, why not do the challenge for this individual site, particularly given that I wrote zero posts here in October 2012!

Want to join in to the November 2012 write-a-thon? There's still time to sign up until November 5th.

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