I currently have 84 drafts of posts in Movable Type right now. There’s also another entry that is a draft that has over 100 ideas for entries that weren’t developed enough to create a draft from them.
Does anyone else do this or am I alone in my draft-happy state?
My basic method is this; whenever I see an interesting link, or think of something I would like to learn more about or write about, I create a new blog entry containing a rough draft of the idea.
When I make my daily post (well, most weekdays at least), I search for all draft entries and pick one to work on. Depending on the content, the research required and the length of the post, it usually takes 15 minutes to an hour to finish it off. Then I spell check and send out a notification.
The reason I have a backlog is that it only takes 30 seconds to add a new draft and I’ll sometimes create three or four drafts in a day. However I usually post only one entry a day, so you can see how they can accrue.
Why not post all of them on that day? Two reasons.
First, I don’t like to post multiples a day. I want each entry to get the attention it deserves and I don’t like to bump a new entry from the prime real estate at the top of the page before anyone has even had a chance to read it . If I make one post a day, each post gets to sit at the top for a day, and people can read it and comment on it without having to scroll down to see what’s new.
Second, it takes time. I don’t usually have the time to post more than one entry at a time, but I don’t want to forget my idea, so I use the drafts as a storage mechanism.
My dilemma is that today marks the one year anniversary of the oldest blog entry. That’s right, I created a draft on May 20, 2003 and it remains a draft to this day, one year later.
I’ll have to keep thinking about what I can do to alleviate this drafting problem, because at my current rate, I’ll have enough drafts to fuel my blog for six months. Then there’s the issue of drafts going stale.
Any suggestions would be welcome.
I do the same thing with drafts. I’ll write a bunch of posts all at the same time whenever I get a few minutes free and I’ll save them all as drafts. I also don’t like posting more than once a day, mostly because most of my posts are really lengthy (though this one of yours isn’t a lightweight).
I don’t have quite as many as you; I only have around 20 or so right now. Every once in a while, when they start to really pile up, I’ll go through them and cut the ones that are irrelevant, out of date, no longer interesting, or have been the topic on another blog. I find this cuts down on the drafts I keep quite drastically.
Look on the good side: if you ever decide to go on blog hiatus, you can use MT Trickle to post all of those drafts for you while you’re gone. [BTW, your post about MT Trickle was the reason why I deleted my draft about MT Trickle. :)]
Nope, I’m not a drafter. I also scroll down a blog’s main page until I get to the entry where I left off, so I don’t consider the top spot to be prime real estate because that’s not how I use it. But that’s apparently just me!
Jan: I thought about that, but none of the drafts are ready to post. I would have to clean each of them up, flesh them out and add relative links before I could do that. I’m glad to hear you use drafts in a similar way.
Meredith: I will usually scroll down, and with RSS readers I can see all the posts since the last time I visited. Maybe it’s just a psychological thing.
I think perhaps I’m a bit out of the norm when it comes to blog entries. I used to write drafts but then found that I seldom published them, either because I was unhappy with the subject matter or the material just became stale. My entries, more often than not are a direct result of what I’m feeling at that particular moment. And since my total writing time when creating an entry is about 5-10 minutes, I can whip them up without alot of effort. Plus, the subjects I write about are all over the place, I would have a hell of a time keeping it all organized. IMHO, writing is a spontaneous thing that comes from emotion, not days of editing and multiple revisions and drafts.
If I had enough ideas these days to keep drafts, I would actually have something new on my blog. Alas, my mind has been occupied elsewhere. I will return to activity at some point, though.
Jason: I don’t think you’re that much out of the norm, and there’s definitely a different type of entry when you do that. I do that occasionally where I just write what I think and publish it, and I think sometimes it results in an interesting blog entry, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.
Levi: Perfectly understandable, and with RSS, I don’t have to go to your site to see if you’ve posted or not.
I have never draft and I think it’s out of pure annoyance, but I have done it by accident and that’s when I’m too busy trying to get it posted.
But it would work great say if you had like a Friday post about what’s happened in the past week, like I’ve seen done on some other sites.
But thanks for stopping by Dan and wishing me good health. Lovely blog you have here :)
Jen
You’re quite welcome Jen. I was referred to your site by DavidMSC.