Looking Back for All-time Blogging

I started blogging in fall 2009. The table shows how number of articles and word count vary from then till the end of 2019. The scattergraph shows data points representing all the word counts of each article from first to last. A thick swath between 400 and 600 words indicates my favored word-count range. The word-count graph with year labels is another way to view word-count densities.

 

Closer Look at Word Counts

The high-word count graph shows more year-to-year variation than low-word counts. (The average and median don't look veer from each other by much.)

The all-time article word count stats:

High: 1701, Dec 30, 2019 ("Assessing My Christmas 2019 Lemon Meringue Pie")
Low: 114, Oct 12, 2019 ("Halloween Scenes Around")
Average 638 (all word counts added and divided by 258)
Median 587.0 (midpoint between high and low word count)

Coincidentally, 2019's stats match high and low word counts. However, 2019's average (568.0) and median (540.5) run lower. Explanation? High amount of videos and pictures in the articles that year. Also, becoming more involved with videos that are not associated with articles. More details farther down.

Another word-count related graph shows 1000+ word-counts more in the last half of my blogging history.

Topic

A somewhat challenging task I slogged through in preparing for this article was assigning a topic type. I've had stages of writing about recipes, info, music, some how-tos. When I started assigning labels, I had a conflict on whether a food recipe was food or how-to. After I tallied items, I found "food" to be a huge bucket, so I separated them between food and food recipe. As for "misc", I didn't see how to call them anything else.

A couple of standout categories by year are "plantlife" for 2013 and "buglife" for 2017.

Of the 24 articles in 2013, my "plantlife" topic was composed of my 16-week series about a triplet of century plants. I took pix when I first spotted them, and returned weekly for subsequent pix until the last one's demise. (Start with "Century Plant Triplets--Stalk Starts".

Of the 24 articles in 2017, most "buglife" articles were about insects, spiders, and cicadas. I titled 16 of them with a "Leggy Bugs". Open the links at the Blog Archive index (lower right side of blog window) for 2017 to view various buglife titles.

Graphics Type

Images show changing trends over time for topics, graphic type accompaniments. Word counts and number of blogs by the year might not be easy to infer. From 2014 on, I decided to publish twice a month, a pace of 24 annually. That quota contrasts with my annual output in 2010 (36), 2011 (12), and 2013 (32).

Initially had no or few images. Without giving much thought, I started providing images (some drawings, some stills), later providing videos. Several of my blogs include both images and video links.

My video toe-dipping year started in 2013 (1). I skipped doing any in 2014, and put out a paltry 3 in 2015. My 2016 and 2017 articles each included 9 video accompaniments. Although my articles for 2018 included only five video accompaniments, pix abounded aplenty.

Most Popular Article and Accompanying Video

My most popular article is "Stuck Blender Blade?", from October 2015, which might have cleared 4600 views by the end of 2019. Funny thing is that I created and uploaded the video, about three weeks later. By 2019 end, it was just 13 views shy of 24000. (It apparently cleared it late Jan 1 or sometime Jan 2.)

The Blogger stats for articles that match YT titles don't synchronize well for popularity—pretty much only the blender blade topic. Blogger views and YouTube view counts can vary wildly from each other.

More into YouTube

Last June, I started creating and uploading videos that didn't originally accompany articles. I called them "Eye-caught Snippets", totaling 13 by near the end of December. I did incorporate some of the snippets into article-associated videos. I'd consider most of the snippet videos topic buckets to be "deer", "buglife", or "plantlife".

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Links to each article are at the Blog Archive index (lower right side of blog window.)

Looking Back for 2019 Blogging

As part of looking back on 2019, I also cast a backward look toward my entire blogging experience. More on the farther-back look (10+ years, from September 2009 to 2019) in Looking Back for All-time Blogging". The table shows stats for 2019 for each of the 24 articles (twice a month)—word count, topic, and graphics type. Links to each article are at the Blog Archive index (lower right side of blog window.)

Word Count

The Word Count column shows number of words for each of the articles in 2019.

High: 1701, Dec 30, 2019 ("Assessing My Christmas 2019 Lemon Meringue Pie")
Low: 114, Oct 12, 2019 ("Halloween Scenes Around")
Average 568.0 (all word counts added and divided by 24)
Median 540.5 (midpoint between high and low word count)

Topic

My most-viewed  topic was a toss-up between deer (5) and plantlife (5), followed closely by buglife (4). This was an extraordinary year for deer; I did not write at all about any in previous years. Maybe 2018's rains brought on all sorts of eatin's that attracted loads of deer and spawned fawns. The topic tally is as follows, from most to least:

deer, 5
plantlife, 5
buglife, 4
how-to, 3
food, 2
parody, 2
avian, 1
music, 1
seasonal, 1

Graphics Type

Videos and pix accompanied more than half the articles. Shot lots of deer, plantlife, and buglife. Plants were various, indicating 2018's rains were good to them. Buglife included mostly cicadas, amazingly, a prolific year for them.

Last June, I started creating and uploading videos that didn't originally accompany articles. I called them "Eye-caught Snippets", totaling 13 by near the end of December. I did incorporate some of the snippets into article-associated videos.

5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 4

This article is the fourth (and final) one in my series about having blogged continuously for five years. I discuss the process of collecting my blogging data and reporting them in tables and graphs, but this time, the process differs from the quartile methodology that I cover in Part 2. That article emphasizes spread of word counts, and this article emphasizes high/low word counts and distribution over 10 word-count intervals.

The top pixstrip shows a table with the basic information that I put in Excel for creating the column graph. In the table, the first column lists the word count divisions, and the second column lists the number of articles for each word count category. In the graph, the word count divisions are in the x axis, and the numbers of articles are in the y axis, represented by the blue 3D columns.

The distribution and percentages of articles show that the largest group of my articles ranged from 400 to 499 words—27, a smidge more than 20%. Combined with the other three largest groups (range from 400 to 799 words), my articles totaled 82, 63.1% of the 130 articles over five years time, from September 2009 through August 2014.

In the three previous articles that I wrote about blogging for five years, I listed various steps for collecting information and generating visual results. For bloggers and other interested parties who might want to create your own similar info, the basic steps are as follows (also noted in Part 3 of my series):

1. In Excel, log the article titles.
2. Open each article, and copy/paste verbiage into MS Word, noting the word count at Word's lower left corner.
3. In Excel, copy the word count number into the cell adjacent the appropriate article title.

You might want to insert empty rows to separate significant time periods. You might even copy the set to another spot before putting in separators.

The following pixstrip shows the Excel window for sorting, and the partial image of the Period A sorted table. The Excel window opens after clicking Data tab > Sort and clicking Add Level for obtaining a second sort criterion. At the table, I added reddish outlines at the highest and lowest word counts.

The following image shows high and low word counts for periods A through E, with red outlines at the absolute lowest and highest word count numbers.

It might seem odd that I place the graphing process pixstrip before the other images. Usually, my images are sequential. For this article, the results image is more eye-catching at the very top. FYI, my tools in my series have been Excel, MS Word, Windows 7 Snipping Tool, and my ancient PaintShopPro 7.04.

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Links to the series

1. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 1
   Focus on single- and five-year views for total articles, articles with images, and recipe articles.
2. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 2
   Focus on numbers of words in articles and graphical representations.
3. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 3
   More details on collecting the data.
4. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 4
   Emphasis on data sorting and distribution of word count groupings.

5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 3

This article is the third one in my series about having blogged continuously for five years. It describes how I collected the basic data for my five years of continuous blogging, used some elementary Excel calculations, and graphed some results.

The pixstrip shows a truncated Excel tally sheet and a partial Word-paste window. The Excel portion has a red rectangle around the recipe article that I did the word count on. The partial Word paste shows truncation of the recipe text. The lower left of the Word window displays the word count without needing to open menu options or use shortcut keys. How convenient!

Creating a spreadsheet with initial data
I tiled the Word file of my catalog next to a browser view of my blog site to create the following columns in Excel:

1. Article titles ("Article Title")
2. Word count ("# Words")—more on that farther down the article
3. Image, y/n ("Image, 0 or 1")
4. Recipe, y/n ("recipe, 0 or 1")

I differentiated the time periods (September to August over five years) by changing font colors. If you choose to try assessing your own blog over years or other time periods, you can try differentiating by text color, bolding, italics, border looks, etc. (For recipes, I flood-filling rows for quick visual cues.)

In retrospect, the catalog was helpful for quickly confirming recipe status, but not crucial. The most important compilation tool was the index in the blog. It grouped by years and months, and linked to all the articles.

Although I created a column for word count early on, I collected the word counts after creating the rest of the spreadsheet. It seemed more sensible to do word count as a separate process than going through each cell of each row. The word count process follows.

EZ Word Counting
For multiple article word tallying, it was helpful using a wide-screen monitor for tiling my blogsite on one side, the Excel tally sheet on opposite side, and MS Word somewhere else. I performed the following steps:

1. Opened the blog article webpage.
2. Selected the content—excluding title, superfluous info, images, keywords, and reader comments, and pasted it into the clipboard (Ctrl+C).
3. Opened Word, pasted the clipboard contents onto the page (Ctrl+V).
4. Noted the word count at the bottom left of Word window, and typed it into the appropriate Excel cell for word count.

I repeated the process of opening a blog article, copying, pasting into Word, and entering the word count into Excel. However, when bringing Word back to the foreground, I selected the existing text and pasted the new text in its place. I continued with this copy/paste process till finished.

Using Some Very Basic Excel Commands
Using formulas is not necessary in the info gathering, but interesting to calculate totals, averages, highest and lowest word counts (endpoints), and medians (midpoints). Creating graphs require two main layouts of info in Excel—1) calculated values in cells in grid form and 2) and "physical" cell distribution.

The only formula that is necessary for creating the graphs for contrasting numbers of articles over n years is summing. In the Excel window, select the cells, and select the summing icon—
Formula tab > Autosum icon.

Expanding the icon displays options for Sum, Average, Count Numbers, Max, Min, and More Functions. Besides using the summation formula for obtaining the data for creating the graphs in Part 1 of my article series, I also used the percentage formula for creating the table.

Note: I copied some of the data and placed them in another clear area so I could select adjacent cells and use graphing features Insert tab > Chart > 3-D Clustered Column and Chart > Line, respectively. Right-clicking in various areas provided additional options, such as displaying data labels, and modifying titles and other labels.

In case you are a blogger and have not yet tried collecting info on your own articles but might want to try—well, the tools are in the three parts I've written. Click "1" and "2" for the first two articles. For "5 Years Continuous Blogging, Part 4", I will share article links and stats that resulted from my trip down memory lane, my memory lane that I created for myself.

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October 31, 2014: Links to the series

1. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 1
   Focus on single- and five-year views for total articles, articles with images, and recipe articles.
2. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 2
   Focus on numbers of words in articles and graphical representations.
3. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 3
   More details on collecting the data.
4. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 4
   Emphasis on data sorting and distribution of word count groupings.

5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 2

In my article about blogging 5 years (part 1), I emphasize quantities of articles over the last five years. This time, I emphasize numbers of words for articles. The images indicate distribution in scatter plots, a line chart, and a box-and-whiskers chart.

The scatter plot for the third year indicates a narrower stream of word counts than the other years. However, it's also the year with the fewest articles. The spread between high and low for word count is as follows:

Sep 2009 to Aug 2010	1323
Sep 2010 to Aug 2011	895
Sep 2011 to Aug 2012	613
Sep 2012 to Aug 2013	1277
Sep 2013 to Aug 2014	852

The line chart shows data points for high, average (mean), median, and low word counts. The box-and-whiskers chart displays the bunching of data. The "whiskers" in the box-and-whiskers graph display the end points to the "box". For each unit:

• The box represents the middle 50% of the word-count range.
• The whiskers each depict the other 50%—25% at each end.
• The line inside the box depicts the median of the word count (spreadsheet-sort of word counts by article and establishing the midpoint).

For each year's period, the line chart numbers for most words, fewest words, and medians coincide with end points and medians in the box-and-whiskers chart. Note that the fifth year "box" (smallest of the five year periods) shows that half the articles fall between approximately 400 and 600 words, with the median around 450.

Some handy resources on graphing, with the first two being the most helpful for me:

• Scatter Plots in Excel
• How to Create a Box and Whisker Plot in Excel 2010
• Box and whiskers plot
• Standard Deviation Calculator
• Handy Dummies website for visual reinforcement: Box-and-Whisker Charts for Excel

Excerpt from Box plot that summarizes "whiskers":

lines extending vertically from the boxes (whiskers) indicating variability outside the upper and lower quartiles

For "5 Years Continuous Blogging, Part 3", I will go into more detail about the road I traveled in obtaining and processing my data.

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October 31, 2014: Links to the series

1. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 1
   Focus on single- and five-year views for total articles, articles with images, and recipe articles.
2. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 2
   Focus on numbers of words in articles and graphical representations.
3. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 3
   More details on collecting the data.
4. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 4
   Emphasis on data sorting and distribution of word count groupings.

5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 1

I initially started blogging to create writing samples in addition to samples I have for my technical writing portfolio. Every month for the past 5 years, starting in September 2009, I have published something. My monthly count has been as few as one and as many as five. I know the quantity does not come anywhere close to many prolific bloggers, but I know of many bloggers who were sporadic or stopped.

For me, a motivator for publishing was imposing a schedule for myself. Initially,I posted three times a month. During one contract writing/editing job, I cut the posting to once a month throughout 2011. Since then, except for a 16-episode of weekly century plant posts in 2013, I have posted twice a month.

Not sure I'd return to more often if and when I again exit the working world. In any case, when I publish, the motions remind me of the clock reset (countdown timer) in the Lost TV show.

My graphs reflect the stats for the 5 periods for September through August (2009 through 2014). Wanting to generate stats, formulas, and graphs sent me scurrying to some Excel how-to Google searches. (I hardly ever use Excel.) Was I rusty! Couldn't remember how to assign repeating rows, create a formula, or generate a graph! Conveniently, during my research over my 130 articles, I ran across my SurveyMonkey article, which I had foresight to list some Excel formulas.

A couple of handy Excel-info webpages:

• How to Add Header Row in Excel
• How to Create a Graph in Excel

The images show 5 years for total posts, posts with images, and recipe posts. Although the 3D graph is cute for the depth looks, I feel the line graph actually shows better contrasts among year-to-year and also type-to-type trends.

I had a bit of fun playing with Excel in creating the tables and graphs, then playing with them in my ancient PaintShopPro 7.04. In Excel, I became reacquainted with inserting some basic formulas and creating graphs. I rediscovered graphing options for type (bar, line), inserting numbers and titles, and moving numbers. In PSP, I further played with moving pieces, cropping areas, and combining the charts.

Related posts, besides the one about SurveyMonkey and using Excel:

• My Blog Article Methodology Inception2finish
• Pixstrips in Blog Articles

For "5 Years Continuous Blogging, Part 2", I will focus on word counts and number spreads.

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October 31, 2014: Links to the series

1. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 1
   Focus on single- and five-year views for total articles, articles with images, and recipe articles.
2. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 2
   Focus on numbers of words in articles and graphical representations.
3. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 3
   More details on collecting the data.
4. 5 Years of Continuous Blogging, Part 4
   Emphasis on data sorting and distribution of word count groupings.

Rear-viewing Year of Blogging

I started blogging just about a year ago, having decided my output would be three times a month, which breaks down to one about every ten-day period. For some people, that's way too seldom. Well, that's the pace I can live with. I want to put out quality, well-thought-out writing that frequently includes links, which are often time-consuming to vet.

Journey start
I joined my writing clublet, TheWriteJob, a little over a year ago to meet other writers and would-be writers. The community blog sparked my interest in contributing to it, and to eventually launch my own blog. After having published six articles there, I registered for my own blog. I ported my previous articles over (truncated and linked the earlier articles); and have been publishing here since.

Theme
In setting up my blogspot, I thought about my theme. I came up with "writing mostly for language enlightenment, entertainment, and a-muse-meant". It became more of a guide for me to determine my article topics. Low standards—if I fulfill any of those broad categories for an article, I succeed in achieving my topic goal.

Theme expansion into categories
A few months ago, I added a line to the theme, as I felt categories were starting to pop up. My category labels—language, tech communications, EZ recipes, food, wordplay, humor, music, tech topics, and how-to's—also form the basis of my article today, compiling and analyzing stats of my year in blogging. I'm omitting discussion of Google Analytics. I use them, but don't have enough of a fan base or readership to report anything impressive. :-)

First compilation file
*LinkedIn membership required to view this file*
Awhile back I had created an compilation file that included the article title, linked url, publish timeframe (early, mid, late part of specified month), and summary. The format was 2-column landscape. Recently, I decided to redo the compilation file. Numerous times of adding and removing column breaks with every update to make the file look nice started to irk me.

Second compilation file
(Newer! Improved! Now with category descriptors!)
*LinkedIn membership required to view this file*
The impetus to change the formatting was wanting to categorize the articles, logically the descriptors I thought of. Also, I knew I'd want to write and time an article pertaining to the 1-year milestone. I removed the column formatting and breaks, then converted it into an 11-column table. The first column has the title, URL, and summary, the second column has the date I published, and the rest of the columns have the category descriptors and check marks. Because food is near and dear to my heart, I highlighted food rows in yellow to make them stand out.

For each article, my new compilation file has check marks in the categories I consider appropriate. For further enhancement, I highlighted the rows that had food themes. I did pause over designating some category names for a few articles. For instance, can a food article be a tech article? Yes, I decided "Wanted Unholed Lotta Bagel" fit the descriptor of tech topics because of history, techniques, and related background.

I waffled (food!) over articles about language and technical communications. Most that fit in one category also fit the other category. In looking at my table (place for food!), language was more predominant than my profession of tech comm (writing, editing).

Stats (drum roll! yum!)
Since September 6, 2009, I have published 36 articles. I don't include the current article in my stats, although I will have updated my table to include it (code green). Deciding categories was the longest part of the process. The fun part was tallying everything—the number of check marks for each descriptor, the number of checkmarks for each article—first for each of the five pages of my printout (yes, hardcopy!), then adding them up. Natch, if I had a LOT to tally, I would have put everything into Excel. I used Word. (Gasp!)

Category	Qty check marks
Language	20
Tech communications	14
EZ recipes	8
Food	11
Wordplay	15
Humor	21
Music	10
Tech topics	16
How to's	18

Articles with the most descriptors—a 3-way tie with 6 descriptors each
Fish Fries Telephone
Wanted Unholed Lotta Bagel
Technical Communications Means

Articles with the 2nd most descriptors—a 5-way tie with 5 descriptors each
Vocabs of Steel
Greater Less Fewer More Thans--More or Less
Bad-Prose Rants from Lady Wawa
Pronunciations Heck with Hermione and Homage
Color N R Lives

Rest of article quantities (titles omitted)
Note to novice statisticians: I tic-marked the article quantities and added them up to confirm they total 36—no duplicated counts and no undercounts.

Qty articles	Qty descriptors
2	4
10	3
4	2
2	1

Categories for this article
For this article, I would categorize it into technical communication, food (coupla nibbles!), humor (minor rib ticklers!), tech topics, and how to's. I don't consider light mentioning of the other categories to quite warrant checking off all the descriptors. :-) Although I did not include numbered steps that indicate a process, I think there's enough of a road map feel here for people who want to put information on a grid.

Pixstrips in Blog Articles

My convenient-recipe blog articles show series of progressive pictures at the top, from start to finish of each recipe. Each recipe pixstrip (the assembled image) contains eight images except for one that has nine. Clicking a pixstrip opens a new window with an enlargement. Nice of Blogspot to have that easy-access feature.

This article describes the process—staging the shots, processing the individual pictures, assembling them into a pixstrip, and uploading it into the article. The settings I use (outlined with red rectangles) appear in the image above. (I omitted the in-progress and completed images, as those stages should be obvious.)

The first time I made the decision to include pictures was for the spinach-cheese taco recipe. During preparation, I took pictures as follows:

1. plate
2. tortilla added
3. cheese added
4. spinach added
5. contents microwaved
6. more cheese added
7. contents microwaved
8. taco folded, with fork above it

My other convenient recipes I put pixstrips in are "A Convenient Cake Mix Cooky Batch" and "A Convenient Cake Mix Cooky Batch--Easter". The first cooky recipe is for Valentine Day cookies, which results in red cookies. The second one is for Easter-theme cookies. Both recipes use the basic ingredients of a box of cake mix, one-third cup of oil, and two eggs. I recently retrofitted "A Convenient Quiche" with a pixstrip. I took about a dozen pictures, winnowed the collection down to nine shots, then created the strip.

Principles for Pictures

• Take more pictures than you'll need—preferably in the order of the actions. If you think you might use any shots, take them. Better to have the pictures and not need any than need any and not have them.
• Find a decent-sized staging area that has minimal clutter or visual distractions. Most of my areas have been a countertop where I don't need to move many items more than once or twice. (I'm not a professional photographer; just using gut feelings.)

Gathering the Recipe Items

1. Gather all the ingredients.
2. Gather as many utensils as you can remember. Basic ones are bowls, spoons, spatulas, pans, and utensils to blend with. Secondary ones are cooling rack(s), oven mitts, egg timer as necessary. (I use the term "utensils" very loosely.)

Taking Pictures During the Recipe Process

1. Stage ingredients and utensils for big-picture effect if it makes sense. Take a few pictures from different angles if unsure of how the items look together.
2. Take pictures in the logical order of action. If possible, take the pictures from the same angle and distance. (Note: I stand on a stepladder about a foot away and shoot my pictures using my camera's highest resolution and quality.)

Storing and Processing the Pictures—Camera Off-loaded Set, Processing/Processed Set

1. Offload the pictures into a folder; keep these originals in one place.
2. Copy the original pictures into a different folder for modifying them. Typical modifications will include cropping and lightening as necessary, then saving them. (I save as .png to avoid losing picture quality.) Occasionally, cropped enlargements help.

I create a folder called "images". I create two subfolders—one I call "fromcam" for the pictures I off-load from my camera, the other I call "inprocess&finished".

Generating the Final Image (the Pixstrip)

1. Resize and save each image to save filesize space. I resize to about 15%, or about 150 x 150 pixels.
2. Enlarge the first image's canvass wide enough to accommodate the other images in order.
3. Copy/paste the images as desired, then save the pixstrip, using a reasonable name.

Note: An alternative is to resize and save each image first (skipping the first step), follow the second and third steps, resize the entire strip, and save the reduced pixstrip under a different name.

Uploading the Pixstrip

1. After logging into the blog account, select or create a blog article.
2. Use the blog image-upload command to upload the pixstrip.
3. View the image at the top of this article for the settings I use in Blogspot. YMMV for your own blog site.

My Blog Article Methodology Inception2finish

My article is intended for beginning bloggers, would-be bloggers, and sporadic bloggers. I have been blogging since September 2009, inspired by TheWriteJob clublet to explore my inner creative writing. After awhile, I noticed a pattern emerging on how I generate a blog article. Recently, I made a presentation to the clublet regarding my process as follows:

principles I advocate regarding blogging, how I choose my topic, my output scheduling, supporting info (or not), stream of consciousness, content organization, editing methodology, publishing, and publicizing

Principles:
I have heard bloggers present the first two principles as bases for writing; I subscribe to them as well. I present the third principle as a nudge.

• Write about something you know about.
• Write about something you're passionate about.
• Think of writing as pumping iron to achieve or improve written output. It's analogous to an exercise program—you don't attain the conditioning by just watching an exercise video.

Stages (and Publicizing):
For me, there are three stage locations for inception to publishing. Other bloggers might use only two or even just one:

Stage 1: Initial drafts
I start with a working space in my emailer application. I always have it open, and I can save the drafts instantly without needing to commit to a filename or directory structure.

Stage 2: HTML file
I copy my emailer content over to my HTML editor, code the draft, review for mechanical edits, and tweak as necessary to prepare the article for the blog site.

Stage 3: Blogsite post(s)
I copy the final draft onto the blog site and preview it. If I tweak it, I tweak the HTML file also. As part of the third stage, after I publish to the blog, I create a truncated version in TheWriteJob community blog.

Post-article publicizing
I announce the new article.

How I Choose My Topic
Influences are timeliness, inspiration, something in my accordion file folder, or a combination. Inspirations have included a song, a holiday, a recipe, an event, a crossword puzzle, a conversation, … Related: If I think of something, I scribble it, then file it into the folder, for which I have taped a scribbled index inside the flap.

My Output Scheduling
I make it a point to post three times a month. (One month I put up four posts.) Three posts divide pretty neatly into monthly divisions of first 10 days, second 10 days, and whatever is left of the month. For me, self-scheduling is a good motivator.

Supporting Info (Or Not)
A good amount of my assertions and information comes from Google search results. If I have a series of results for an article, I tend to mention main sites. A benefit to citing URLs is ease of finding similar sources for future articles.

Stage 1: Initial Drafts
I create a workspace in my emailer program.

Stream of Consciousness
I key in topic content in a stream of consciousness using my emailer program. I have it open more than any other application, and can save drafts without commitment to filenames. When keying in stream of consciousness, if poking around URLs, I log them near their related content in case I list them in the actual article.

Content Organization
The stream of consciousness can overlap with content organization.

1. During organization, I generate an opening paragraph or story lead-in. Example thoughts include the following: How the topic come about, a conversation, a song, a news article, something I witnessed, something I've been thinking about for awhile, etc.
2. I organize the content for flow. I arrange, rearrange, reword, rework, move snippets to the bottom in case I use them or decide to discard them.
3. I create a closing paragraph, which can come near the end of the organization process. (My shortest closing paragraph had only one word, which is in my article about the Spinach-Cheese Taco.)
4. I create a label list to insert into the blog label field.

Stage 2: HTML file
I create a webpage for the blog article in an HTML editor. I serialize it, along with its folder. (I create a folder that starts with the number of the article I'm getting ready to post, which is where I house the html page.)

Editing Methodology (Mostly Technical)
Content organization can overlap with editing methodology.

1. After I copy the contents over to my HTML editor, I fine-tune the article. (I have never been able to totally just copy over without tweaking later.)
2. I tag the content (paragraphs, lists, …), tweak the URLs as applicable. I occasionally view the article using the design view or browser view for formatting, punctuation, looks, and correct site destinations.
3. I review for passive vs. active voice. (Active is more engaging.)
4. I check for subject/verb agreement for number (singular vs. plural) and tense.
5. Especially for lists, I check for parallel structure—noun, verb, phrase, etc.
6. I check punctuation.
7. I spell check.

In this article's case with numerous subtopic titles, I also checked and revised for title-case capitalizations.

Stage 3: Blogsite Post(s)
I publish to my blog site, then publish a truncated version to the community blog site.

1. I log in to my blog site.
2. I select for new post, then I copy the formatted article to the wysiwyg view. (I also fill in a new-title field, which becomes the article title and gets associated with the post's URL.)
3. I paste labels to the blog label field.
4. I preview, then publish when the article looks right.
5. I put a truncated article in the community blog as well as my own blog. (This is an anomaly that applies only to me; however, adopt if feasible.)
1. After I have published my full article to my blog, I note the URL. In my html editor, I then save my full article as [samearticlename]-truncated.
2. I find a strategic place in a paragraph to select and truncate.
3. I open a previous-article truncated file and copy boilerplate reference info onto my new truncated article.
4. I replace the old URL with the new article's URL and save it.
5. After I navigate to http://thewritejob.blogspot.com/ and select the option to post a new article, I paste the truncated article and labels, then publish it.

Post-article Publicizing
I announce the new article in various social media and email lists.

**Topic Ideas**
The following section lists potential topics for blog articles.

• Suggestions for inspiration topics:
• What was the best thing that has happened to you this week?
• What thoughts occurred to you Thursday 2/18 about the plane crash?
• What was something memorable for you in January?
• What was at least one Olympic event or news that captured your TV time?
• What was something new you did or learned in 2009?
• For bloggers, when did you publish your most recent article? (This is not really a topic, just a nudge.)

• Suggestions for passion topics:
• food—cooking, eating, eating out
• family—immediate, extended, relationships
• recreation—sports, shopping
• other topics