Developing a Blog Process

For many individuals blogging is like a full-time job, in fact there are many who have made a career from blogging. They rely on their blog for their financial stability and livelihood. For those that are in this category, updating the design of a blog can sometimes be a headache if something goes wrong, as potential new visitors are turned away.

I have changed Technically Easy many times in the past year, and each time it could have been difficult, except for the fact that I have developed a process. This process involves using two blogs to help ensure updates to the design of the one blog goes smoothly.

Developing a Process

In the business world, the IT department is run, hopefully, by processes. These processes dictate how something is changed in production to reduce the impact on clients. In the blogging world, processes can also be used to ensure visitors aren’t impacted by a change to your blog.

In the case of your blog, you can develop a simple process that allows you to easily, and efficiently update your blog. The process involves developing in one blog, and then moving the changes to your main or production blog. A simple process such as this can be done on any blogging platform, including both Wordpress and Blogger. Not only will this work for design changes, but it can also be used for testing posts to ensure they have been spell and grammar checked, and that they appear correctly.

In the next section I will go into more detail how you can accomplish this.

The Development Environment

To begin creating and managing the process, you will first need to create a second blog. This new blog will be your development environment where you can test changes to your actual blog without impacting visitors.

Once you create the blog, you can change it at will without affecting your production blog. Then when you change something that you like, and you have determined that it works properly, you can eventually copy it to your production blog.

The one thing that you need to keep in mind with the development blog is the search engines. Unlike your production blog, you wouldn’t want the development blog to be listed in search engine results. This is especially true if you have the same posts published in both blogs. Many platforms let you prevent search engines from indexing your blog, and for your development blog you should enable this feature.

That is the basic overview of your development environment. You can create a test blog as well, to make it more true to how businesses usually deal with production changes. You may want to keep it simple with just a development and production blog.

The Updating Process

In order to make use of both your development and production blogs, you will need to develop a process that works for you. As mentioned above, you can also incorporate a testing blog as well, but it isn’t necessary.

Two processes (one for design changes, and one for posting) is outlined below.

Managing Blog Design Changes

1. Start with a copy of the production blog. Simply copy the template from production into your development environment. This will help you to track the necessary changes to update your production blog.
2. Next, make the needed changes in the development environment. Always remember to view the changes in multiple browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari) to ensure that the blog is displaying properly.
3. Copy some of your production posts to your development blog to ensure that your tables, text, and images all appear as they should. You want to ensure the look and feel of your blog stays uniform throughout your posts. Keep in mind that you prevented the search engines from indexing your development blog, so you shouldn’t have any issues with duplicate posts in the search engine results.
4. Once you are satisified with your changes, you can then schedule a date to upload the changes to your production blog. I wouldn’t update your production blog right away. You should ensure that you know what needs to be changed to reduce the amount of errors that could occur. Take a few days to continue to test your changes, and then update.
5. Once the production blog is updated, open it up in a browser and read through some of your posts. While you do this, look for design flaws, and at your widgets to ensure everything is correct. If it is then you are finished. If not you will need to make the necessary changes.

Managing your Blog Posts

1. Write your blog posts offline, outside of your blog. I find a simple text editor is much easier to use than the editor in a blog platform.
2. Once your post is written, copy it into a wordprocessor for spelling and grammar check. It may not catch all mistakes, but it will find some of the mistakes. Make the corrections in your text editor.
3. After the initial check, copy the corrected post to your development blog. Publish the post so you can see it in your development blog.
4. Navigate to your development blog and read your post. Check for spelling and grammar as well as for any design issues, such as the wrong font, an image that is not in the correct location and that the text is positioned correctly. Make any corrections in the editor within the development blog.
5. When you are satisfied with the post, copy the post from the development blog to the production blog, and when it is time, publish the post.

You have now spell and grammar checked the post, as well as checked for any design flaws before your visitors had an opportunity to find the mistakes.

Summary

In this post I have outlined a simple process that you can use to ensure you prevent design and post flaws from reaching your visitors. I currently use the above methods with Technically Easy.

I am curious to know about any process you use for updating your blog. Let me know in the comments.

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