Writing | 4til7

I keep finding there are times that paper is a better technology. There’s no need to ask which app will handle where my creativity is going to go. Plain words? Bold, highlighting needed? Drawing? Worse yet.. a drawing in the middle of the words? Oh wait… where’s that phone… When I’m I go into idea/sketch mode, I often end up on paper.

Which is “wonderful” when I end up with three or 20 scraps of paper that have to be turned into a blog. Until someone wires paper to go straight into whatever I’m using to write and edit, I’ve been using two basic approaches. First, plain old typing (or today thumbing). Second, use the phone on my camera to take a picture of each piece of paper then open what I’m writing in (e.g. WordPress) on my phone and insert the whole batch. Simple, easy, done.

I publish new pieces four days a week: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. Just over a week into the new schedule, and things are breaking down. Just not where I expected. The biggest break down has been around release. One piece, “We are Toolmaker” went from being one short article into a couple of posts into a series. And I kept forgetting to look over to the right and go ‘oh yeah’ and change the release date.

It struck me that having a lightning fast way to go to the step I’m handling in the new > draft > pending > scheduled > published workflow would be brilliant. Some searching of WordPress plugins turned up Admin Menu Editor which let me edit the menu on the left side of the admin area. With a little fiddling, ‘All Posts’ was gone from my Posts menu and ‘Add New’ was followed by each step in the workflow.

Here’s what I created with my fiddling. My writing workflow flows from the top left down just the way I read things, click, my Pending articles including this very article:

WordPress Menu Editor Plugin Results — A little visual WordPress Workflow

The tool is intuitive, especially for this. If I wanted to see the list of Pending articles, I pulled up that page (and sorted it the way I wanted) and copied and pasted the page’s url (the http://… address at the top) into a new item in menu editor.

Here, on the left, it shows we’re in the Posts section. On the right are the menu items under Posts including the Pending menu item. I like shorter links, so I trimmed the fluff off the front of the url for Pending:

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Tag Archives: Writing

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