The Art of Managing Draft Blog Posts
This little post was originally written on as a comment on matty.co.za, but the blogger there moderates comments, and I have no idea whether the comment was published. Note to bloggers who moderate: If you want discussion on your blog, don't moderate comments. Akismet will catch most of the spam, really, it will. But never mind that, let's talk about draft blog posts. Draft post management really is an art. Here’s a couple of things I do: If it’s a long draft, I clean up the outline and publish it as a page using my desired slug. That gets it indexed and starts aging it. I turn off comments for this. Later, if/when I finish it, I can “sell” it in a post, or turn on comments, or whatever. For really short ones, these can go on a Posterous blog. Condense your outline into 1 well-written paragraph, add a relevant link back to related material here, offload it to Posterous. Later, you can mine Posterour for all sorts of great material. You may find 2 or 3 (or more) of these little posts easy to combine into a single longer post. When it’s code, make it runnable/compilable with the text in the comments and post it as a gist on github. Later, you can pull the comments out for a blog post and embed the gist. I could go on, but I’ll stop here. This does remind me though, I have about 200 in draft at the moment, split between 2 blogs. Should take my own advice and clean ‘em up.
