Historically I’ve had a bit of a problem: Blog posts either get finished immediately or die. My drafts folder is more or less a wasteland of things I’ve never finished and am never going to finish, so almost all of my blog posts get written and published in one sitting.

But the recent experiment with Programmer at Large has made me realise the obvious solution that somehow in more than ten years of blogging it never occurred to me before that I could do.

Which is that I can finish the blog post and then not click publish.

Yes I’m embarrassed that I didn’t think of this before too.

The result is that instead of a wasteland of unfinished posts, my drafts folder becomes that place where I have a buffer of things that are ready to publish at any time but if I want to I could spend some time editing and improve a bit first.

Then, when it’s time to publish a post, I can just find an example from the queue which I like and click publish on it. Done. Yay. I can also shortcut and publish something new immediately if I like, but I don’t have to.

So I’m going to do this. It’s going to be great.

What this means for you, dear reader, is the following:

1. Expect post quality to go up because more editing will be happening
2. Expect post rate to go down to more or less precisely track the Beeminder goal rate (currently 1.48 posts per week – it’s derived from the monthly Patreon income).
3. If you want more than that, donate to the Patreon. As well as increasing the publishing rate, I’ll be sharing drafts on the Patreon feed with anyone donating $2 or up. I’ll share these as soon as I have a first draft I’m more or less happy with, so they’ll go up more or less at the level of finished that blog posts currently go up at.

Despite the link to Patreon, this isn’t just me holding my blogging to ransom for money. One of the things I’ve been meaning to work on for a while is my ability to edit prose – I’m much better at writing the initial draft than I am at editing – and this is a great way to start working on that.