My publishing workflow
Published: 2020-09-07 13:21:24

---
title: My publishing workflow
published: false
date: 2020-08-18 00:00:00 UTC
tags: 
canonical_url: https://www.gustavwengel.dk/publishing-workflow
published: true
---

I’m trying to get a little more structured when it comes to how I publish and syndicate the content I write.These are primarily my notes to myself about my process, but maybe you’ll find them interesting.

### 1. Write in Google Docs

I’ve tried a couple of different ways to write, including plain text editors, using markdown and using a collaborative editor like Google Docs.I used to author my posts in markdown, but I’ve since gone away from that for the following reasons

- It’s much easier to collaborate and get feedback and reviews. A markdown file published to github somewhere is much less accessible than Google Docs, where reviewers can leave actual comments.
- It’s just a little easier. In markdown you’re free to add spaces to the lines, but you also have to manual do line breaking, and you need a separate window open to check the output of your work.

### 2. Convert it into markdown

When you’re done writing in Google Docs, you can (reasonably) easily convert it into markdown, by using something like [clipboard2markdown](https://euangoddard.github.io/clipboard2markdown/).It’s not perfect, and e.g. it doesn’t convert headings automatically. But it will get you 95% of the way there, and the rest doesn’t take that long.It’s primarily about adding heading, checking everything through once, and adding some images if needed.

### 3. Publish to own website

When I’ve then made my post into markdown, I publish it here at [www.gustavwengel.com](www.gustavwengel.com).It’s a Jekyll based blog which uses markdown, so when I have the markdown from above, I’m basically good to go.I use the [jekyll-feed](https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-feed) plugin to automatically create an RSS feed based on my content as well.

### 4. Syndicate To Other Platforms

The main reason I write, is because it helps me to learn and that I enjoy it. With that being said - I get immense joyfrom someone telling me that they enjoyed something I’ve written.Because of that, I also try to syndicate the content to some different platforms to get a bunch of different eyes on it.

I syndicate content to:

- [Medium](https://medium.com/@geewee)Say what you will about the UX these days, but the Import Feature of Medium is very nice to use. Apart from code blockswhich the auto-importer doesn’t get, syndicating to medium is pretty frictionless.
- [Dev.to](https://dev.to/geewee)Dev.to is a nice developer community. It gives you the ability to automatically import your stories from your RSS feeds as drafts.This functionality works extremely well, and I almost don’t have to do anything to make the stories work on dev.to

I’m also considered syndicating to Hackernoon, but I never really got around to switching over after they moved off, of Medium.I also don’t know how big their reach is anymore.

### 5. Post on social media

I’m part of a couple of communities on social media, primarily twitter, hacker news and the subreddits /r/csharp and /r/programming.If I think the post might speak to an audience in any of these groups, I also try to share them there.