Working on some Tools

I have discussed this in other posts, and I want to provide more details for others writing content regularly. Today, my tools are quite simple. The post starts on a digital paper tablet. From there, I use the export to a text file function. With that text file, I copy the contents to Grammarly’s web editor to polish the content and in a state to be publish. Finally, I go find an older post with a title image that has not been used recently. I will copy the file and manually update all the contents for the new post. The only remaining components of the file are the header properties and the contents of the image configuration. Everything else is updated for each post. As you might have guessed, the secondary processing of a post is not my favorite piece of the writing puzzle. Since it is all manual work, there are many ways to introduce issues that get pushed out to the site. For example, the time I copied an existing blog post, then proceeded to update the original file. Publishing it in the past with the incorrect content, and effectively re-publishing the old content. Or the time I published a post with a header image that was used for the previous post too. Of course, these mistakes are not ideal. To combat this error prone process, I am working on a couple if small tools to help me out.

To start, I wanted to make a tool to help in picking out an image for the post, I already have several images cropped and sized for the hero image. Given this pool of images, to help solve this problem, it was logical to make a tool that would look at all the existing blog post and report on which images have been used the least and the last date they were used. I then use this report in choosing the file to copy for the latest edition. With the issue of images solved enough, the next issue to solve is remove the manual copying and pasting of data. For this, I chose to make a tool that will populate a template blog post. I have a structured template populated with tokens for replacement. Currently, I still have to manually enter the post information. However, this tool does create a new file in the correct directory, populates and formats the information correctly. In future iterations, I intend to experiment with generating tags for the post, selecting a random image from the collection, and potentially generating an image for the post that uses the context of the post in the generation process. Other interesting tooling I would like to explore is applying a consistent tone and voice in my new posts that mimic the tone and voice of my existing body of work. That type of tool is strictly nice to have at this point in my writing journey.

Tooling that I would never consider using is AI-generated content. In fact, I have an empty AI chat tool off to my right from Grammarly. I write because I want to write. I'm not doing it for any accolades or recognition. I have no one to impress, no traffic metrics to meet or exceed. I have Google Analytics connected to this site, but I never even open it. I enjoy writing to process my thoughts and capture information for future me. If it helps someone else, all the better. The manual process I have built for myself in this writing journey could last me the remainder of my writing career. The tooling above is to take out the least desireable part of writing and put more time on the writing component of writing. If you are interested in the tools I am working on, feel free to send me a message on LinkedIn!