Process

In the early days in the life of this website, I never had a writing workflow. Each post was dumped from my brain to the keyboard with a shrug and a push of a button to send. Over time, I picked up tools such as converting all-in to the Apple ecosystem and accompanying software that manifested into a more thoughtful and organized work path.

First things first, I need ideas. These come from various input/output sources, such as reading frequently, or having multiple creative outlets. From here, ideas formulate and sometimes appear after connecting a string of previously consumed inputs/outputs to connect the dots. These go into a file on my personal database, Grey Matter. I’ll let them percolate in my brain for a bit, do some research, check sources and relax. Now I have something to write about.

These ideas generate from multiple inputs such as a book I am reading, RSS feeds from other’s personal websites, X, formerly known as Twitter, Substack, et al. Once I see an article I’d like to return to I will send it to Matter to read it later and delete the rest. Inside Matter, I will return to a saved article, highlight the interesting bits and add my notes and initial thoughts into the marginalia.

Now it is time to sit down to the MacBook Pro, open up the Ulysses writing software and draft an outline. That’s the skeleton of the article, so it’s time to flesh it out. Here’s where everything from the inputs, the outputs and my thoughts just start flowing into this massive article, not caring about grammar, spelling or formatting yet. Eventually, there are words and paragraphs that need to be paired down and culled. Inside Ulysses there are helpful tools that checks for grammatical mistakes, typos, punctuation, etc., and prompts me to make the needed changes before publishing the draft to my website.

Now that the draft is in, it’s time to format and design of the article because it is a mixture of design, photography, etc. To get an over-all visual I run a new branch in Git that runs a new file with metadata such as title, author, date.

—

title: ${title}

date: “${date}”

type: ${type}

tags:

notoc: true

cover: cover.jpg

coversocial: social.jpg

path: /blog/${path}/

description: write description here

—

write content here

—

Afterward, the header image is added — always in black and white to maintain consistency and an overall clean look. Colors can be too distracting, I think.

Once the article is ready to post, I ensure whether to distribute as an article, to my newsletter subscribers and always out to RSS.

According to Ulysses, this article will take you almost two minutes to consume on your device, less if you are scanning, so you can hurry and go check your social feeds (lol.)

I was enjoying this playlist while editing this article: