Blog planning with Scrivener

I thought that others might be interested in hearing how I’ve started to setup Scrivener to plan out my blogging. This is all new for me, blogging on a regular basis and using Scriv to plan with.

To start with, I create a new project called “Blogging”, because I might do the same for other blogs, I decided to place everything for traceyambrose.com inside a folder. I then created two other folders called “Planning 2013” and “Ideas” (the later folder contains my previous posts and various odds and ends I just don’t want to look at right now).

Inside the planning folder I have created months May, June and July. I basically setup May first and then duplicate that for the following months (you obviously need to do the duplicating before you add any additional details or else you will have to delete those bits).

I use the corkboard view for folders, this means that I can see a sort of year planner view when I have the “Planning 2013” folder selected or a month view if I have a particular month selected.

In the image above you can see that I currently have the May folder selected and thus I can see each day for that month. If you right click on note you can select a “Label” for it. I created three labels, “Journal (red), Image Inspiration (pink) and Flash Fiction (green). I then worked out that the 1st of May was a Wednesday which means Image Inspiration day for me. I then went through and coded each day of the month.

I also wanted to know when a post had been finished and scheduled for publishing or had been published, and could thus be ignored. To do this, I used “Change Icon”, and selected a red flag in “Way-stations”.

The last thing I did was to write on the cards:

Title:
Progress:
Scheduled/Posted:

I wanted to be able to quickly add a few details such as the title, where I was at with that entry and whether it had been scheduled or posted yet. I’m keeping the content here simple, such as:

Title: Blood Charm
Progress: Finished
Scheduled/Posted: Yes

If I want to, I can actually write the blog post itself into the cards main text section by expanding the folder for the month I want and then selecting the day in question. If that particular days post is stored somewhere else, like my Short Stories project in Scriv or written straight into WordPress, then I can add notes to that day to tell me where to find the info. You can create  internal “Links” inside Scriv, but only to items within that project, I wish I could create links to items in other Scriv projects, that would be awesome. But at least I can create links to things like the image I’m using for a Wednesday post. I store these in the “Research” folder, so that’s handy.

I can also use other Scriv features for storing information for a post such as any websites I want to link to meta data, keywords, notes etc etc. It’s such an amazingly powerful tool.

I believe this is going to be a fantastic way for me to keep focussed and organised. I love being organised, little boxes for everything, woohoo.

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More stories by Tracey Ambrose @ traceyambrose.com
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