After watching this TED Talk by Josh Kaufman, I decided to take on a 20-hour challenge: to (start to) become a professional blogger.

This is part 1 of two entries. I'll follow up after July 1 to see whether I met my general goals.

The big reason I'm writing this post is...

After posting, I'll have reached my twenty hours!

Note: There are references below to a static site generator to be named. Stay tuned...I hope to release it in the next month or so.*

Define Success

My initial thoughts:

  • Publishing articles five days a week
  • Articles referenced by others
  • Writing articles for other sites
  • Ideally, earning some money

After research:

  • The classic definition is just like music: professionals get paid

By July 1, write 60 blog posts and have 5K unique pageviews per day

Resources

Definitions of professional blogger

Measuring Traffic

How To

SEO

PLATFORM

  • [Site-Generator-To-Be-Announced] (or other?)
  • Comments?
  • Measure traffic, daily and per-post. Need to know which posts are most popular.

Plan

What do I really like?

  • Methods, especially for self-improvement.
  • Certain tools, like Git.
  • Systematizing

Add Google Analytics to blog

  • Page views by date
  • Page views by post

Finish [Site-Generator-To-Be-Announced] enough to run as separate .exe
This is the first step to make the posting experience simpler. What I eventually really want is a UI that lets me:

  1. Quickly start a post for either Software Meadows or FlattLand
  2. Quickly continue a post
  3. Easily publish a post

Make [Site-Generator-To-Be-Announced] template(s) mobile-ready
Most people read on their phones. This is a must.

Gather blog post ideas and keep them on desktop
So that they're readily available, and easy to add to. Also use Keep for ideas, and consolidate weekly.

Write shorter posts
It's OK to write posts that are a few paragraphs. In fact, more people will read them.

Journal

2018-03-22 11:41:19

Gathered some resources, started trying to define success and pare down my goals.

2018-03-26 14:50:55

More planning, including tasks of adding analytics, and what needs to improve in [Site-Generator-To-Be-Announced] and the web sites.

2018-03-27 14:10:18

I've pulled my backlog blog ideas. Now off to Keith's to review/organize.

2018-03-27 16:30:38

Finished blog post about image resizing to target dimensions.

2018-04-04 16:00:00 Publish FlattLand post "Clean Keep using labels+archives"

2018-04-14 14:44:26

I needed [Site-Generator-To-Be-Announced] to be a single Exe. FodyWeavers (strange name) was the solution. I'm not even sure what this does, but there's a extension called Costura that packages up all the assemblies into a single .exe. Nice and easy!

https://github.com/Fody/Fody/

https://www.nuget.org/packages?q=Costura.Fody

2018-04-14 15:44:06

[Site-Generator-To-Be-Announced] command line is working fine. I wanted to use the Markdown Monster scripting addin to automate managing posts (at least temporarily), but no good. I suppose I could use LINQPad....

2018-04-15 13:03:26

I have Markdown Monster set up using the C# addin to quickly create and publish blog posts. It's a good interim solution!

2018-04-20 20:00:00 Begin time boxing post

2018-04-21 10:38:05

It's been a busy morning. I posted about my current time-boxing approach. Lots of research!

2018-04-21 21:22:46

Adding Google Analytics to a website? Easier than pie. Ten minutes from starting research to completion.

2018-04-27 15:33:54

About two hours of research into how to delete child entities in EF.

Writing a blog article now.

2018-04-27 18:58:47

Article is done. This weekend is about making the site mobile-friendly.

2018-04-28 06:22:09

Thank you, w3schools.com! You always seem to have the best simple introductions to a subject.

2018-04-28 08:13:13

It may not be the best, but it didn't take long to get my sites working for mobile (at least on my phone).

2018-04-28 10:10:47

Reviewing my ProBlogger progress. I'm about ten minutes from my 20 hours.

2018-04-28 10:31:08

Post part 1 of becoming a ProBlogger.