As it comes up in conversation many times as to what my process (or dare I say, methodology?) is for writing blog posts on The Hot Iron, I thought it in itself would make a great post. Whether I am working with clients of Dunkirk Systems, LLC for whom we have developed blogs or having a conversation with colleagues, there is a method to the madness.

First Comes Inspiration

Ah, the true magic of blog posts. Ideas usually come to me when I am not at my desk, so I am usually leaving some paper or digital note for myself. These range from something I am passionate about writing to fleeting thoughts that could become something worth writing. Those that don’t get written up right away get added to my idea list, and on occasion I go to it for inspiration.

Pen to Paper

You read that correctly – pen… paper. Call me old school, call me low tech, but I find the best way to write is literally to write. Well, in my case print in my poor penmanship. I don’t write all of my posts out long hand (for example, likemind announcements). And I make no apologies for this, especially after reading James Whatley does the same, and he is much more “wired” than I, not to mention younger than me too.

Type, Post, Promote

Once written, I type up the post in Word, spell and grammar check it, then manually mark up with HTML tags including images and a footer message (see below). As I have been coding HTML since 1993, it works best for me.

At this point I log into ExpressionEngine, the power behind The Hot Iron, and preview and submit my post. I also tag it to categories and set a date and time, especially when I write blog posts ahead of time.

From there, Feedburner, FriendFeed and Facebook do their thing to promote my post. I will also manually tweet on it depending on the topic, as well as submit to social bookmarking sites.

So Far, So Good

And there you have it. This process has worked well for me over the past 2.5 years plus, and now through 500 blog posts!

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