Blogging Workflow Or, How to knock out a ton of posts before a vacation, quickly

Every blogger has their own style of workflow, and they’ve usually tweaked it enough to make it work really well for them. I’m no different.

I’m headed out of town for two weeks on various jaunts, but if I hadn’t told you, you shouldn’t be able to tell. With a few lovely tools at my disposal, I can write offline, schedule a whole whack of posts and walk away, worry free. So, how can you take a break from blogging and still keep the posts flowing?

Oh, one caveat before we start. I’m working on a PC (or, in this case, an EeePC, so all my tools are windows based. You Mac folk will probably want to go talk to someone who actually uses a Mac.)

I use Google Reader for my feedreader, and use the star feature to keep track of anything that I either have an opinion about, something to add, or that I just find interesting.

I’ve probably got about 250 posts stored up to chat about for both of my b5 blogs.

I added Google Gears recently so that I could read my latest 2,000 articles offline within FireFox, so now I’m not only set up with topics, I can write even if I can’t get to a wifi connection.

I’m also using Windows Live Writer, which allows me to draft my posts offline, save drafts and schedule, categorize, tag and add media to my posts easily.

So then, how to do this quickly and easily? Take a look at how long you’re planning on being away for and how many posts you need to write. For me, right now, that means 12 more just for BuzzNetworker.

I’ve got twelve topics in mind already, and preliminary opinions formed on all of them.

Pulling content from Google Reader Offline into WLW for a post is cake. for me, knocking out an opinion on something is not difficult. Hell, forming an opinion on anything for me isn’t difficult, as anyone near me will tell you.

The actual workflow for me is to:

• take a starred topic from Google Reader (off or online)
• Pop open a WLW window
• Title, opine, link, tag and categorize
• Add a picture if I’ve got an appropriate one
• set my publishing date based on the rough editorial calendar I have in my date book (however, for BuzzNetworker, I tend to just know how many posts I need to write for the blog and run from there. There’s more editorial calendar work involved in Drinks After Dark because we have themes and features, that I haven’t determined for BuzzNetworker yet)
• Move onto the next post

Et voila! You’re knocking out posts like a rockstar and can relax on your trip without stressing about your blogs.

Now, yes, I’ll admit, the actual writing takes time as well, but the set up sometimes can be as time consuming as the actual writing. If you can put your workflow into a routine, you’ll be well on your way to rapid fire posting.