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The Seven Deadly Signs of Blogstipation

I just noticed that my Windows Live Writer (WLW) drafts folder has 188 items in it, not counting this one.  Part of the problem is that WLW lets me accumulate drafts so easily.  It is very easy to use WLW blog drafts for note-taking.  There is this small difficulty that, um, the idea about blog drafts is that, er, they should turn into posts with some regularity? 

So, deadly signs.  These come to mind ...

1. I have more blog drafts (188) than the posts made so far this year (124):
• 25 at Orcmid's Live Hangout (where it is painfully easy to post images and screen shots)
• 63 at Orcmid's Lair (not counting this one or any that follow it)
• 27 at Professor von Clueless in the Blunder Dome (with most drafts being destined for here)
•   9 at Numbering Peano with much more called for here
    
2. I will soon have more marked-for-follow-up-in-a-blog feed reader items (2456) than all of the posts I have made (3289) since my first post on October 28, 2002.  It was about blogging, of course.   The backlog increases about 35 items every day.
      
3. Every time I open a draft to work on it, I find that there is always more to research and link to before I can finish it.  And, shudder, many drafts need to be broken up into multiple posts ... some day.
     
4. When I see something relevant to an existing draft, I cannot find what I've already written and obsess until I do.
     
5. There are so many drafts that it is unpleasant to use the Open Drafts menu in Windows Live Writer.  I have a shortcut to the drafts folder and I use Windows Explorer to scroll through the titles in detail view, double-clicking to open the winner in WLW.
      
6. I keep thinking that my problems would be cured if I started some new topic-focused blogs, or maybe a wiki or two.  How about some podcasting, videos and screen-casting.  Yes, that's the ticket.
      
7. It takes me 2-3 hours every day to scan through the morning's unread blog items in my 257 feeds.  The feed reader is getting pokey and tends to crash.  I am afraid to switch to folders other than the giant marked-for-follow-up list because it hemorrhages when I switch back.  So I can't easily find posts filed under particular categories that I want to review in completing any of my drafts.

Well, that is not very well thought out.  Maybe I should save this as a draft and search for related material in the blogosphere. ... You think?

Better yet, I will post this and then figure out what to get Vicki for her holiday gift while there's a little time left.

 
Comments:

 
Good luck, Vicki. Megan's in the same boat -- her husband's still pondering possibilities.

Orcmid, you are a prolific writer/thinker. I doubt many people have blogstipation of this magnitude. Keep 'em coming!

Being a bit of a geek about remembering dates, I happen to know I was in Tijuana the evening of your first blog post. Among other things, I was at a bar that caught on fire, and the staff, after putting out a roaring fire in the ceiling above the bar, set up a big fan to clear the smoke and then raced around giving everyone a free round of drinks so that they wouldn't leave. It seemed that wasn't their first fire during business hours, from the well-organized reaction.

# posted by  dmahugh: 20 December, 2007 17:26

 

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