How I keep drafted blog posts organized
Tags: tutorial, meta
Published: 2022-02-04 14:54:12

When I started to write this blog, my drafts quickly became a chaos and it was difficult to go through all the blog posts that were published, planned or what I had just started to ideate. I wanted to keep all my blog posts and ideas in one place, because knowing myself, I wouldn't have remembered to go through any notes that would be located elsewhere.

I have tried keeping a Trello board, having a Google Keep labels or a notebook for blog posts and I just never kept it up to date. So eventually I created a system which helps me to keep ideas, drafts, finished and published blog posts organized here in Dev.to platform and I thought I want to write a post about it so maybe it will help someone else who is also struggling with something similar.

## Identifying different blog post types
I noticed there are few different types of blog posts on my dashboard: **ideas, started but not finished, finished and published**.

**Ideas** are something I have though might be a fun idea to start writing about, but haven't actually done anything yet. There might be some bullet points to make the idea more clear, but not any actual written text.

**Started but not finished** are blog posts that I have already started working on but that are not yet ready to be published.

**Finished** blog posts are the ones I have read through and fixed grammar. These are ready to be published.

**Published** blog posts are the ones I have finished and already published.

## Adding tags to the blog post titles
After I identified the types of blog posts I have, I started adding tags to the beginning of the post title. There's **IDEA, WIP and READY**

![Blog post with IDEA tag in the beginning of the title: "IDEA - how I keep drafted blog posts organized"](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/1seclpgxw4dlf9s3by5e.png)

![Blog post with WIP tag in the beginning of the title: "WIP - how I keep drafted blog posts organized"](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/i6k9bvk3b2dxr0gkgn2u.png)

Whenever I use the tag **IDEA**, I know there is no text written yet. When I start to work on the post, I change the tag to **WIP** (Work in Progress) and this way I will immediately know it's a blog post that I have started, and probably want to continue writing before taking a new blog post marked with IDEA.

When the blog post is then finished, I mark it with tag **READY**. This makes it easier for me to see which posts are ready for publishing. When I publish the blog post I just remove the tag from the beginning.

## Adding more details to titles
Sometimes it's not possible to actually finish a blog post for some reason, so then I might add some more details to the title. For example, when I write a tutorial series, I can't add a link to the previous blog post if it's not published yet.

![Blog post with READY tag and add url extra details: "READY - add url - how I keep drafted blog posts organized"](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/k4pwowsyqyt952j7e5r8.png)

Then I add an extra detail after the READY tag so I immediately see if the blog post is missing some detail that I need to add before making the post public.

Extra detail might also be something like "add image" if the image of finished project is missing from the blog post.

![A screenshot of Dev.to dashboard displaying different blog posts tagged with WIP, READY or IDEA](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/1cxhyg6tj351zvm1uojd.jpg)
<figcaption>Clear list of planned blog posts on dashboard.</figcaption>

I hope this gave you some inspiration on how to keep your dashboard organized!

Give me a follow if you want to see more tutorials! You can also follow my Instagram [whatminjaplays](https://www.instagram.com/whatminjaplays/) if you are interested to see more about my days as a software developer and a gaming enthusiast!