When to Hit Publish
As I begin this blog-writing experiment, my first instinct is to just write, ramble, type whatever, and hit publish. Which I did with my last post here. But after re-reading it, I realized it read in a messy, disorganized way. And while I felt I got some of my ideas out there, it didn't come across the way I was actually thinking about it.
As this thought lingered in my head, I started poking around the BearBlog discover feed which brought me to this person's blog post where they talk about their blogging workflow. Blogging workflow? You mean, people just don't write something straight through and just publish the initial draft? As I thought about this, it of course made sense. Here I was unhappy with this post I had written when I could have saved it, refined it, and then posted. I'm sure other people want to put out something respectable as well. Sure, you might get it on the first draft sometimes, but it's likely not going to happen every time.
From there it sent me down the spiral of researching other people's blog post workflow which led me to Robb Knight's cool website. He has many cool things there which I'll talk about in another post, but he too has a blogging workflow. So, this got me thinking of how I'll take more time in my posts. Sure, some, like this one, are just one-off thoughts that I can likely post right away, but others, like my other post deserve a little extra time and refinement.
I decided to rename that post as The Skill of Writing (First Draft), rather than unpublish it (which admittedly, I did briefly). This way, I can have both out there in the world for me to compare. Who knows, maybe that will help somebody else in some way.
Even re-reading this post, I can see the writing is not that great. I seem to have trouble finding the right words, or flow. It just doesn't happen right away on the first try for me every time. However, it's at least organized enough where I think it's ok to go ahead and hit publish. I'll at least give this one more read. Not perfect, but here we go.