When can you expect my next blog post?

Just in case you're one of those wondering whats with the series of posts in my blog over the past few days, yes I did make 4 posts in 3 days. Now, let me help you understand why and also possibly answer the question in this posts' title, by digging into some data in the background.

Since I resumed blogging early last year, I've posted 90 articles here. Lets first look at the rhythm of posting, something that I've written several time earlier about, and have been striving extra-hard to maintain. The posting pattern over the nearly 2-year period is as follows:

From the above its clear that I've managed to maintain some consistency over the months; an average of 4.04 posts per month. However, whats not obvious here is the posting pattern within the month. To understand potential effect of my self-imposed monthly deadline, we'll have to look at when the posts are made within each month.

I've split each month into 3 periods: 1-10th, 11-20th and 21st until end of the month. When the monthly aggregation is broken down into these periods, some patterns start emerging. I've made a small correction for the bulk-publishing of my back-packing diary, which incidentally was posted in the middle of the month (17th May '15), after weeks of writing. I've changed the value of '17 posts' on this date to an above-average number of '2 posts', as an approximation.

The below table is coloured to show which of the 3 periods within a month have most posts, over the last 2 years. Its obvious that I've hardly made any posts in the first 10 days of any month (red shaded cells below), while the last 10 days are fertile periods, showing up in green. Most of the posts are generally made in the last 10 days of a month, at times spilling over into the last few days within this cycle.

What this also means is that roughly two-thirds of all posts are made a few days before the deadline! Old habits die hard, so guess I'll have to change the deadline to a weekly one as opposed to monthly. Perhaps, that could help spread out the posts through the month.

Hopefully my next post would be earlier than the 30th of December, though the above analysis strongly suggests that as the possible answer!

Contemplating migration onto a new home

Early 2015 was when I resumed blogging after a long hiatus. A couple of months later, I was already contemplating migrating my blog out of Blogger, maybe onto a new, own site or some new-age platform. But having blogged just over 50 posts across 10 years, and with a largely erratic blogging pattern, I wasn't entirely convinced about the effort-outcome tradeoff.

So, I set myself a target of crossing 100 posts overall and maintaining an average of 4 posts a month (roughly a weekly rhythm), before moving the needle on this thought. Now about 1.5 years later, I have crossed 130 posts and also have hit the targeted monthly post average. And this is something that I'm immensely pleased about with myself! Perhaps, talking now about migration is justified.

Before getting onto options being evaluated, one thing I've been clear about is the migration out of Blogger. The Blogger ecosystem is metaphorically like a once-busy city, now in ruins, and not much left for the people who've chosen to stay back. There are newer avenues that have sprung up, each with its own theme, philosophy. And many of them are welcoming and thriving.

I was earlier more inclined towards a self-hosted site using Wordpress. Medium was a strong alternative as well. The more I read about pros and cons of Self Hosted vs Wordpress vs Medium, the more confusing it got. The cons aside, I've been quite excited about Medium and the way the site has been shaping up over the past 2 years. While it seemed to be a good platform for writing content without worrying about the technical aspects, Medium has gotten better at promoting stories, surfacing content and connecting people. The change is noticeable as I've been consuming several blogs off Medium, over the past months.

The option of using custom domains on Medium has recently been introduced and is seeing good adoption. This seems to offer the best of both worlds and suits most of my immediate needs. So, for now, I seem to be settling around a combination - Own domain name on Feedly. 

Blogging.. getting the content & posting rhythm right

I had resumed blogging around last year, after a long lull. Over the past year, I've published around 65 posts, thanks to an initial spurt of 20 posts from my North-East solo backpacking trip in April '15. I had subsequently set myself a target of roughly one post a week, which I've pushed myself hard to follow, for the past 8 months. 

And, last month I missed the rhythm and for about 45 days now, I haven't published anything. I've noticed that every post takes about 2 hours to write, edit, look up references and add links before hitting the 'publish' button. This is significant, considering that I sit down to write a post after I've fully deconstructed the topic and points mentally, and have pretty much written it first, in my head! 

Over the past month, I've scribbled a dozen ideas and even have unfinished drafts of a couple of posts. My realization was that the killer in this process was the 2-hour time to publish each post. Just as I thought about this, I came across this nice post from Mark Suster. I'm quoting a few portions of the article that resonates well with my situation here:

....I know that if I obsess over any individual post I would simply never write.... We often feel inspired to cover a topic and we sit at our keyboards until the idea is on the screen. Some days we nail it, others we think “meh” but in either case we hit publish and move on.

....“You’ll fail simply because you’re too smart. You’ve gotten to where you are by being a perfectionist. You will only want to write fully researched pieces. You’ll want too many people to read and comment on your posts before you hit publish. You’ll want to write long, thoughtful posts that make you sound academic. When you start you will publish 5 long posts filled with industry jargon and buzzwords and the process will kill you. By month three you will have stopped out of exhaustion.”

....“If I could give you one piece of advice it would be this. Take a topic, deconstruct it into individual parts and make each bullet point a post. Each topic should have 10 ideas and if you have 3 topics then you’ll have 30 posts ready to write before you even start. Keep each under 750 words, use no jargon, and at the end of writing each post hit publish. Publish or perish. You can always revise it later but frankly you’re better off moving to the next post. 70% of what you write will just be ok, 25% will suck and 5% will be inspired.”

I'm trying to cap the publishing time for every post to 30 minutes or less, and get done with posting it. There would be the occasional, longer ones fed by thoughts & drafts growing over time, but those would be exceptions. So, I will experiment with shorter posts, a tad 'un-edited' and with lesser research & references. But I guess that will keep the flow going.

PS: Its 25 minutes and am hitting the 'publish' button now!