I had a great conversion with Seth Clifford one night at WWDC, about writing and blogging. We all want to get better at writing and posting more frequently. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the best way to improve anything is to do more of it, more often.
I believe there are two important facets to microblogging. The first is the timeline experience: a reverse-chronological list of posts from your friends, like you see on Twitter. The second is that posting should be effortless: if there’s less friction between your idea and publishing it, you’ll write more often. So a big part of posting regularly is just having a system that makes it easy.
Seth updated his iOS blogging workflow by using Drafts and WordPress’s email-to-blog feature. As a nice bonus, he gets Markdown files of each post saved to Dropbox:
“Drafts allows you to send email as an action. WordPress allows you to post into the system via email. Using a combination of the action and the Jetpack plugin’s email functionality, I can go from idea to published in seconds, without touching the WP iOS app (which continues to get better, but still isn’t fast) and get my local copy stored away.”
Also this week, Ben Brooks has switched his core Twitter posting to go through WordPress. He has a standalone microblog at benb.me where the posts live. They go out to Twitter automatically via IFTTT. Posting to a blog first and then Twitter second seems like a simple idea, but it is extremely powerful. Years from now you end up with an archive of all your short-form writing at your own domain. Not as an afterthought, but as the default.
The great thing about blogging is there’s no one correct way to do this stuff. I’m really happy to see these solutions from Seth and Ben, and I know other folks are working on similar workflows.
