Monthly Archives: February 2021

How I Write My Blog Posts

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I thought it would be interesting to write a blog post on how I go about writing a blog post. It’s so I can see how it changes over the years, which I know it has over the years.

Where Do I Save My Ideas

The first thing I do is come up with ideas for the blog posts and then write them down. I place them in SimpleNote.

What I Do with My Ideas

For the posts I deem worthy of writing, I then outline them some more in SimpleNote. Some of that is done during my lunchtime or after-work walks. I do some outlining then too. I like thinking through how I want to say something in the post and work through how best to phrase or order my thoughts?

Once that’s done, I tend to throw those parts into something SimpleNote too.

Next’s It’s on to WordPress

Next, I use WordPress to write the first draft of my post. During my writing process, I try not to edit as I go besides maybe fixing some spelling. I want to be able to get the idea out of my head.

Editing Drafts

Once I’m done with the first draft, I then open up the Hemingway application. Usually, I use it, more importantly, to break up my run-on sentences from the first draft. The Hemingway application is useful to me to tell me the following type of things.

  • How many complex and hard-to-read sentences there are.
  • The number of words, sentences, and paragraphs.
  • The reading grade level, etc.

Once I’m done with Hemingway, I paste the text into Grammarly, and then I do more editing. Grammarly does a better job of grammar checking. It even does a better job with spell-checking than the Hemingway application.

I repeat that process once or twice more between the two applications.

Once I feel like I’m done, I then paste my text back to WordPress to read through what I wrote as a whole. More to read through it to make sure it’s understandable and is logical.

When I’m happy with things, I then add categories or tag words in WordPress. Then I will add headings where it needs to be broken up the long sections of text.

Cooling Off Period and More Editing

I let the posts sit for a couple of hours or till the next day before reading it over again. I then reread it and do more editing if necessary.

If I end up changing things, I use both Hemingway and Grammarly to check the updated parts of the post. I tend to want to double-check things.

When the Post is Done

Once all that’s done, it’s time to create any links that need to be added. I don’t want to have to re-add them if I add them too early.

Then it’s time to publish my blog post.

Posting Everyday in January, 2021

In January 2021, I published a post every day. I found people tended to read my posts if I tweeted about them around noon or early afternoon on weekdays. On weekends it depended on what the post’s subject was if there were more readers, according to the Twitter statistics.

No Real Statistics and Future Posts

I don’t have any official numbers on how many people read my posts because I took Google analytics off my website and blog years ago. I did that, so Google wasn’t tracking everybody that would come to my website or blog posts.

Now I looked to post at least once a week and maybe two a week or a total of five or six posts a month.

More Blogging and Any Suggestions

So here’s hoping this was useful to all that red to get a better understanding of my process.

If you have any suggestions for other writing applications that might make writing blog posts easier. Please leave a comment.

Overview on How to Use the W3C Link Checker

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I thought I would write up how I’m checking broken or redirected links on my website. Or more importantly, on my list of places to eat at Gotta Eat Here.

For many years I have been using the W3C Link Checker to check one page/URL at a time for Gotta Eat Here or many on my website or slides.

The tool has a few options that you can play around with, but I leave them as the default. You can even check a box to save the options as a cookie, which I assume stores your choices if you decide to use them.

The one option I use would be the “Check linked documents recursively, recursion depth:”. That has an INPUT field of how many levels you want to go down in your website.

After entering a URL in the URL field, you can decide if you want to check more than one page or not. To do so, then check the “Check linked documents recursively, recursion depth:” field. NOTE – You can only check pages that are not behind a firewall.

I can’t remember exactly, but it used to let you check 200 or 250 pages at once time. This is great if you want to submit it and let it wander through your website looking for broken links.

I use that feature when I’m checking my entire website. You can also submit your website in chunks using the folder structure you have set up and start with them.

I haven’t paid attention if doing so will jump out of that folder. or not if links go to other places in your website. Here’s hoping there’s an option for that in the list of checkboxes.

How it works is the W3C Link Checker goes through all the links on a page. The tool will tell you if the link is broken or redirected, not allowed to be checked by tools like it, etc. An example would be Google maps does not let you check or Twitter, etc.

For the redirected links, it’s great to point out issues on your website. For example, that a Twitter link might still have the URL as HTTP instead of HTTPS.

I have found that most redirect issues are either the website is now using HTTPS, or they changed platforms. Meaning they switched to PHP from HTML or something like that. Or maybe the website in the case Gotta Eat Here the restaurants got better URLs. That is either shorter and easier to remember or got they got the .COM of what they used to have.

The W3C Link Checker gives you a summary of how long it took to check all the links on a given page or set of pages. The report lists the page(s) it’s processed and what it found. Then at the end, it has a total time to process is doing more than one page.

Using the W3C Link Checker is excellent for the Gotta Eat Here website. It allows me to check my list of restaurants, be that by city or state. The tool gives me an idea that the place might have closed during the pandemic if the URL is broken.

It’s Been a Year Since My Last Drink

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As of yesterday (February 11, 2021), it’s been over a year since I last had a drink.

The reason for that is I have never been one to drink at home by myself. So during the pandemic with being home by myself and not visiting with friends, I haven’t had a reason for a drink.

I’m a wine person 95% of the time anyway and don’t open a bottle to drink it myself. I would prefer to open a nice bottle and share it with friends than drink it by myself. In my mind, wine is to be shared with friends with a meal or whatever.

Last Drink

So on February 11, 2020, I went to the DC wine and cheese group event. Where two good friends were putting on a tasting at the group, we all used to belong too.

There we had, I think it was four red wines and a dessert wine, two kinds of cheese, and crusty bread, all for $25 or was it $30.

It was nice to attend the event and see other’s I hadn’t seen in years.

Other Times Prior

Before that, the last few times I had a wine/drink was Christmas Eve dinner at a friend’s in 2019. Then at Thanksgiving at their place the month before.

Before that, it was, I think, the last week of September 2019, right before my car died at my buddy Tony’s house. Typically on Tuesday evenings, we would get together to hang out. Have some wine, cheese, and sometimes a meal if someone was in the mode to cook.

Possible Next Time

So at this point, I think I’m going to wait until I can safely get together with my wine friends.

Yes, I have wine friends.

Here’s to Celebrating a Good Friend

Where we celebrate the life of my buddy, Tony, who was one of those two friends giving the class. He passed away the week of Christmas 2020.

So here’s to all of us making it through the pandemic and then having a drink with friends when it’s safe for all of us to do so.

Blogged Daily in January

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In mid-December, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could write a blog post every day in January.

After looking at my blog, I noticed it had been almost two years since I last posted (late January 2019). Before that, I wrote one post in July 2018 and nothing in 2017.

Posting Daily

Posting every day allowed me to write a bunch at first about things from 2020 and the pandemic. Along with some things I wanted to say and others that came up.

Part of the issue was I tended to write longer posts with example code. Which needed to be coded semantically and accessibly, of course. So it took a long time to write them and then post them if I ever did. So I stopped for the most part.

Shorter Blog Posts

So I decided the posts would be short. In my mind, that meant 500 to 1,000 words. It seems most of the blog posts in January 2021 ended up being between 300 and 600 words on average.

The longest post was the first one on January 1st at 926 words. The shortest one was 197 words about a week ago.

What Were the Numbers

I went back and wrote down the number of words for each post in January. The total words I wrote were 14,789 for an average of 477 and some change per day.

NOTE – I only had to add all the words per day up three times to get totals to match twice.

It’s Tough Blogging Daily

After writing a post every day for a month now, I’m not sure how Austin Kleon and others find the time to post daily. Or have ideas most days. Occasion they skip a day or so. Either way, I have found it to be hard to do every day. It’s a lot of work to do it more than a few times a week.

Posting Weekly

After posting every day for a month, I found it took about an hour to two hours daily for each post. Some days three hours if I was working on more than one psst.

Meaning I would come up with an idea or two, outline them, maybe even write the first draft. Or the next day, finish the post and edit it. Then post it or if I was writing on the weekends or had the time started one for a few days in advance.

I think spending four or five hours a week writing a post or two would be good.

Doing so would give me eight or ten hours back. That I had been using to write, edit, and post for other things like time to read and learn to improve my skills. Say in JavaScript, CSS Grid, etc. Or maybe cooking, coding, relaxing, etc.

Or even spending time thinking about what I want to be when I group.