blog.mattgauger.com

This is a Problem

Posted: 04 January 2010

I’ve hit a snag in my workflow for writing blog posts. As I’ve written about before, I’m using Jekyll, which creates static HTML files for this blog when it is run. That should be fine, except for a few issues.

The first is how Jekyll is designed. Published posts go in a _posts/ directory, with a filename of the form

	YYYY-MM-DD-title.md

This presents me with two immediately problems. I have to finish the post in the day I start it. This rarely happens. Most of the time, I start a blog post with a few ideas that I’d like to flesh out. And the file sits, unfinished, until I come back to it. While I’d love to follow release early, release often as described in the inaugural post, a few notes to myself do not add up to something that anyone else can read. I’d like to occasionally draw a useful conclusion from my thoughts, even if it doesn’t result in a long essay.

The second snag in this system is usually the lack of a title. Or that I have a title and no content to go with it. I’ve had both problems. Sometimes, without a good title to go with a post, I’ve sat at the New File dialog box in Textmate and given up. And more than once on my old blog, I had a couple neat, catchy-sounding blog post titles that sat as drafts with no writing whatsoever. Because there wasn’t a blog post to go with them, just a catchy title.

Here’s what I’m talking about, a screenshot of my old blog’s Drafts folder:

Note that at one time, these all seemed like good blog post ideas. Now, they don’t, really.

I suppose I can always rename files, but that’s missing the point. The point is that there’s a speedbump to getting blog posts out there that I need to get over. Maybe it’s a mental block when I see that New file dialog box. Maybe I’m just making excuses. But I certainly feel like I’m failing at a simple task here.