A Secret to My Posting Style

I’m busy, and I wouldn’t claim I’m able to post on a very frequent basis, and always promised everyone I will be “coming and going like the wind”, due to my uncertainty of being able to keep up, but I’m still able to do so nonetheless. My guess is that it’s probably due to some of my blogging habits and schedule – which had already formed an unique blogging style of it’s own.

My blogging style makes good use of technological and internet improvements. First-off, a quick run down of all the relevant portable devices I owned – I have a smartphone: Galaxy Note, and a W8 tablet: Dell Latitude 10. What do I do with all these portable devices?

I blog on the go.

The android wordpress app is incredibly useful, the only downside to it is that if you forgot to set your posts to “draft”, which is can be very easily missed due to the design, you will be posting your unfinished drafts out of nowhere – I literally made some mistakes like that. As I don’t have an apple device with me, I don’t really know how apple’s wordpress app works so I can’t make any comparisons here. Windows RT’s wordpress app is horrible though, you can’t post/edit anything, you can only view your written posts. Fortunately I can use the all familiar desktop-interface for my Dell Latitude 10 so I don’t have to rely on RT fully.

Now, more than half of my posts were written on the go – my android wordpress app is used quite heavily. Whenever an idea sprung into my mind out of nowhere, I just pop up the app on my phone and write the title of my idea and if I can spare some time, I jot down a few key points. I then try to manifest and join these fragmented ideas into a coherent article; also may done on the go, but I still use my home desktop for this.

Once, I’m done writing the posts on the go, I may make some final edits on my article there and then, or I can just wait until I get back. When I’m back, I will also usually do the finishing touches on my desktop computer – formatting, finding the right pictures, editing them and uploading them. It’s something I think my phone can manage, but it’s just too inconvenient a task to be done on the phone.

Through this method, I made a number of “spare posts” – completed posts with formatting and pictures done, but only sitting in the drafts section at the moment. I kept them as spare for a number of reasons – first off, it’s to post them only when I know I will be too busy to even touch my computer, or my phone, so that these emergency spare posts will help liven up the blog during it’s inactive moments. Some consideration are taken into account into what I think are good spares, for example, discussion on topics that will stay strong for a long time is a good spare. Commentaries/editorials on current anime are something I won’t be keeping as spares, and will prioritize posting them up the first chance I get.

Second reason why I keep spares, is a bit of an odd one – it doesn’t fit with the sequence of posts I had in mind. For example, posting reviews back-to-back isn’t something I like doing, and tried to avoid it if it is possible. As my blog is the cross-blog type, I like each of my post to have a bit of variety, so I can go to my spares if one of my posts there fit with the sequence of my other posts.

Which brings us to the next point – the content I wrote in my spares doesn’t always fit the sequence I wanted 100%. If you had seen some of my update and announcement posts, I think I mentioned a number of times that I won’t be gone completely (not to the point of hiatus), but my posting rate will be very unstable. Part of the reason is that if none of my spare posts match the sequence I had in my mind, then I might be compelled to post something completely new, which will make my posting rate suffers.

Another thing here of note is that a lot of my ideas are connected to one another. If I finished a post, I may find that writing the other related post as a sort of prerequisite will help redefine and reinforce the idea I had in my current post. So I ended up storing this post as a spare and work on my other related post. This is another relevant factor to the sequence of posts which will effect my posting rate as well.

And thus, this is the secret to my posting style, a style making good use of portable gadgets, and a style which would help me even in the more busier moments.

What’s your posting style?

P.S: Indeed, this whole post was written on the go with my phone as well, aside from the pictures.