Reader poll - How should I organize my blog posts?

  • Article

Here's a question for everyone:

Since switching over to using Markdown for writing my blog, I've been pretty happy with the overall workflow:

  1. I use an existing post as a template, often the source for my general page on all my extensions, since that contains links for everything (I'm also considering a link database feature for my markdown extension, specifically because of this).
  2. I edit the post in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, using the Markdown Mode and Spell Checker extensions.
  3. At least once (and probably more than once), I commit the updates to a git repository and push that to github.
  4. Once I'm ready, I use the "Copy HTML to clipboard" button on the Markdown Mode toolbar, come to this blog, and paste the HTML into a new post. I usually do one or two last proofreads (though those are pretty short, since I can see the previous as I type and the spell checker catches the most egregious mistakes, like that I can't spell "egregious" correctly without its help), and then I "post" the content for a date in the future, usually a Monday or Thursday.
  5. After I've posted the article, I'll update it occasionally (locally), but not very often, and I rarely update them on the blog.

Now that I've written a few posts (about 15 total, not all published and not all pushed to github), the "place everything in a single folder" approach is starting to get a bit hairy, especially with the default sorting by name. Alphabetical ordering is sometimes nice, e.g. for posts in the markdown series which are named in a way that lends itself to ordering, but it isn't especially helpful otherwise.

My question, then, is this: how do you all arrange information like this?

I can always, with my current approach, sort by Date Modified in the File->Open dialog, Explorer, or Finder, but it doesn't help me keep track of yet-to-publish and already-published and doesn't help me when I'm looking at things on github. I've considered using a separate folder for "not yet published" and leaving the published stuff in a giant mess, but I don't know how much that will help. I've also considered putting month-year in the name to marginally help out the default sorting, but haven't taken the plunge yet (I'm not too excited about renaming my existing posts).

I suppose this is another opportunity for new features for Markdown Mode, though I'm somewhat loathe to solve this problem with a custom tool; if I do stop using Visual Studio to edit these posts, will I have to write a plug-in to handle my magical blogging format? It doesn't seem like I'd come up with a general enough solution to warrant a tool/feature to handle it. On the other hand, the database of common links that I mentioned before would save me enough time to be worth the mostly throwaway nature of the solution. This is Larry Wall's laziness, I think/hope.

My general belief is that tools exist to make jobs easier, but the job should never require the use of a tool. Having Markdown Mode provide handy features is nice, but I could get by writing my blog without it (is is just text, after all). However, if my organization depends on having a custom tool to make it work, then that makes me a sad panda. So my hope is to solve the organization problem in a way that tools could possibly make it easier, but doesn't require the use or creation of a new tool.

Anyways, answers/thoughts in the comments, or on twitter (@noahsmark), if you can fit your advice into 140 characters. I'd appreciate any thoughts, as my organizational skills are, well, garbage.