Mailbag: Tools To Keep Consistent

Meg from Ohio (go Ohio!) asks the following:

You blog three times a week about tech. How do you keep doing that?

I schedule posts.

Chris Lema doesn’t, bless him. I started with about 10 posts I had in mind, sat down one day and made myself a buffer, and thought that it would be better to space them out to every other day. It actually started as twice a week, but then I bumped it to M-W-F, and since I’m kind of wordy, I’ve been able to keep up with it. Sometimes I write a post because I solved a problem, which happens pretty much every day, and sometimes I toss out a remark on twitter that people want to hear more about.

Much of it comes from listening and reading a lot. But I don’t just schedule posts. I use the plugin Editorial Calendar to keep tabs on what my schedule is, when things are being posts, and at what time, because I actually really hate the posts lists.

Here’s your default posts list:

It’s pretty bare bones and functional, but one of the things that’s always bothered me about the whole post list is how useless it is. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a list of posts, and it does that really well. But with the moving target that is what we use WordPress for, it’s become rather frustratingly bare bones for me and it really does impact my ability to get work done when I have to bounce back and forth between multiple screens just to see what the status is, verify I updated everything, and by the way, where are all my posts.

So, in the grand WordPress Tradition, I enhance it with plugins.

Admin Featured Image shows the featured image in the posts list, which is really good for one site to make sure I did too set an image and what it is.

UI Labs I’ve actually forked. I need to remember to ping John about this, because I took his (great) plugin and modernized it. If you’re interested, that code is up on my github UI-Labs repo. It’s slowly being improved to make things a little easier for me and to work on WP 4.0 and up.

Editorial Calendar, as mentioned before, gives me a great view for what’s scheduled and when:

The drag and drop interface lets me reschedule on a whim.

Speaking of… Schedule Posts Calendar fills a void that has pissed me off for years. Just look at the comparison:

First, there’s the calendar by the month, then there’s the date, and finally the epic button ‘today’ to let me fast fix posts messed up by the WP iOS app.

So how do I keep posting so often? You ask questions, I answer them, and I have some tools to make it simpler for me.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

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