My Publishing Workflow

I’m trying to get a little more structured when it comes to how I publish and syndicate the content I write. These are primarily my notes to myself about my process, but maybe you’ll find them interesting.

1. Write in Google Docs

I’ve tried a couple of different ways to write, including plain text editors, using markdown and using a collaborative editor like Google Docs. I used to author my posts in markdown, but I’ve since gone away from that for the following reasons

• It’s much easier to collaborate and get feedback and reviews. A markdown file published to github somewhere is much less accessible than Google Docs, where reviewers can leave actual comments.
• It’s just a little easier. In markdown you’re free to add spaces to the lines, but you also have to manual do line breaking, and you need a separate window open to check the output of your work.

2. Convert it into markdown

When you’re done writing in Google Docs, you can (reasonably) easily convert it into markdown, by using something like clipboard2markdown. It’s not perfect, and e.g. it doesn’t convert headings automatically. But it will get you 95% of the way there, and the rest doesn’t take that long. It’s primarily about adding heading, checking everything through once, and adding some images if needed.

3. Publish to own website

When I’ve then made my post into markdown, I publish it here at www.gustavwengel.com. It’s a Jekyll based blog which uses markdown, so when I have the markdown from above, I’m basically good to go. I use the jekyll-feed plugin to automatically create an RSS feed based on my content as well.

4. Syndicate To Other Platforms

The main reason I write, is because it helps me to learn and that I enjoy it. With that being said - I get immense joy from someone telling me that they enjoyed something I’ve written. Because of that, I also try to syndicate the content to some different platforms to get a bunch of different eyes on it.

I syndicate content to:

• Medium
  Say what you will about the UX these days, but the Import Feature of Medium is very nice to use. Apart from code blocks which the auto-importer doesn’t get, syndicating to medium is pretty frictionless.
• Dev.to
  Dev.to is a nice developer community. It gives you the ability to automatically import your stories from your RSS feeds as drafts. This functionality works extremely well, and I almost don’t have to do anything to make the stories work on dev.to

I’m also considered syndicating to Hackernoon, but I never really got around to switching over after they moved off, of Medium. I also don’t know how big their reach is anymore.

5. Post on social media

I’m part of a couple of communities on social media, primarily twitter, hacker news and the subreddits /r/csharp and /r/programming. If I think the post might speak to an audience in any of these groups, I also try to share them there.