Matthew Lang

Coming up with new blog post ideas can be difficult if you’re the kind of person who likes to post on a regular basis. I’m trying to write a blog post every weekday but I’ll admit there are days where I am just not getting any spark to write about something. Not wanting to have another miserable blogging month like May where I missed a number of days, I wanted to start writing my blog posts ahead of their scheduled date they will be published.

I needed to generate a slew of ideas for blog posts and I needed it fast. Enter the mighty mind map.

Right so let’s get something out the way first. My mind map might not look like a typical mind map, but space was limited in my notebook and rather than squeezing something unreadable in, I opted to list the final collection of blog posts in the bottom middle section of the mind map.

Let’s get started

Okay, so you want to mind map ideas for blog posts. Why not just get started then? Well, mind maps work well when you have related ideas. That’s the benefit of a mind map. It can let you generate related ideas and keep these ideas together.

Rather than simply adding blog post ideas to your mind map, take a minute to think about the categories on your blog. Can you generate more ideas for these categories? If not, then think about generating ideas for a series of related blog posts. A series has the benefit of having similar formats, with just the content being slightly different from one post to the next. It might sound like a cheat but keeping your posts short means that they’ll havea better chance of being read.

So on your mind map, draw an image in the center for the central topic of your mind map, if you’re not the artistic kind then simply the words “Blog Posts” will do.

Basic ordering ideas are the first level of branches that we add to our mind map. In our case each basic ordering idea branch is a blog post series or a category from our blog. Now for each basic ordering idea, simply add a branch for each related idea you can come up with for your blog.

My mind map has basic ordering ideas for the following series or categories:

1. Blogs you Must Read
2. Building a Blog Dashboard in Octopress
3. Review posts
4. Bike posts

Lastly I wanted a list of blog post ideas that were unrelated to any of the above series. With very little space left on my mind map, I decided to simply list the blog post ideas at the bottom. Mind map purists will be screaming at their screens at the moment, saying that this isn’t a true mind map. Does it matter? As long as it works for you.

I set myself a time limit of 10 minutes to do this and managed to generate 30 blog post ideas. Don’t worry if you can’t generate this number of blog post ideas. With practice you’ll be able to quickly generate more ideas with mind maps.

Take action

Now we have a list of ideas, what next? That’s down to you. Add them to your to do list, start outlining them or even mind map each blog post idea!

I have my own method. In order to reduce the element of resistance (I’m lazy), I’m going to create draft files for each of these ideas in my blog. That way I can get started on writing them straight away and as each one is completed I can schedule it in for a specific date.

Your mileage might vary with a mind map. Some people get them, others don’t. I’ve long been a fan of mind mapping so it is easier for me, however don’t give up on it before you have tried it!

Every day is a school day. I love that phrase.

As a programmer and daily resident of the Internet, it really does apply to me. Not a day goes by where I don’t learn something new. It might be a new method in the Ruby language, or a new trick in Rails. It might even be just learning that your favourite App.net client for the iPhone does allow you to save drafts. Really, I just discovered this last week.

The thing is though, I’m usually working at such a pace where I learn something, use it and then forget about it. No more.

You only learn from the things you write down. If you don’t, trying to remember it with the million other thoughts that go through your head that day just makes it impossible. So with that in mind I am aiming to log a today I learned (or TIL) a day.

Mostly this will be programming stuff, but it should feed the my blog for potential development and programming posts. I might even post a summary of the week here if it becomes more than just programming stuff.

I’ll be keeping a log in Journalong for this. I’ll let it you all know how it goes after a month.

If you’re reading this post through an RSS reader, then you probably won’t be aware of the fact that my site went under a little makeover at the weekend. Tired of the very familiar Octopress layout I wanted something simple and easy to read.

I’ve long admired sites like Patrick Rhone’s blog, the Medium post layout, and others like this. They’re simple sites that focus on the content of each post.

In the past I’ve also favoured having a sidebar where I could display related posts and other information from other services I use but over time I’ve grown to dislike the sidebar. It’s too much information that draws the reader’s eyes away from your blog post.

So what I wanted was a simple one column layout that makes my posts easy to read.

In the past I have kept a beady on the Octopress wiki. Being a lazy developer I wanted to use an existing theme rather than build my own from scratch. The look and feel of my blog isn’t on my list of highly important projects so using an existing theme was the way to go. The problem was that I couldn’t find anything that I liked that I could just install. In the past week, I’ve been hacking on existing themes to get try and get it to fit my requirements with varied results.

Before starting work on another existing theme, I did a check of the Octopress wiki for any recent changes and I was thrilled to see a new theme added to the wiki that fitted my requirements nicely. Leanpress (code).

As you can see it’s a minimal single column theme that has been designed to adapt to other devices like tablets and smartphones. The only change that I need to do was add icons for App.net, Github, Linked and the RSS feed for my blog.

It’s the first time in a while that I’ve really enjoyed the simplicity of a single column theme for my blog. I can see me sticking with this for a long time to come.

I originally read about Leo Babauta’s text playlist at the start of the year. The idea is that you keep a list of articles that you read on a regular basis and keep them in easy reach. I was sold.

I wanted to create my own text playlist but the problem I had was that I had hundreds of articles to pick from. My Pinboard account gets links saved to it daily and at the last count I was at just over 1300 saved links. Where do I begin to build my list? Searching through my Pinboard links was going to take time.

I let the idea of a text playlist slide for a while until I came across an article that I wanted to add to my playlist and over the last few months I’ve browsed through a few tags on Pinboard looking for articles that I’ve frequently read in the past.

At the start of the week I had a breakthrough. Stef Lewandowski’s article on creativity was my first article on the playlist and today I recalled a few other articles of the same high quality that I wanted to add. I love this idea of a highly valued list of articles that you can refer back to on a frequent basis. I like to think of it as my “Best of” from my saved links in Pinboard.

So without further ado, I give you my text playlist.

… every day.

A must read.

… for all that’s part of you with Nicholas Bate.

Nitin Khanna has been enjoying Journalong:

So you like to note down your thoughts but don’t want the complexity of a proper journaling software like Day One? Journalong is now free, so just hook it up to your Dropbox and start using it to write down your thoughts in txt or markdown, maybe even several times a day.

You can too.

I might not approve of Curtis McHale’s choice of journaling tool (just kidding), but I do approve of his reason for journaling.

I’d like to think that they will want a better picture of what I was in my 30′s as my family was starting. I’d like to think that I’m interesting enough to leave a legacy for them that they’ll be interested in.

via Pedal Consumption

I have a new hobby, sort of. Last weekend I bought myself a new set of golf clubs and last night I took my oldest son to the driving range for a boys night. He got to fine tune his swing and I got the chance to become familiar with the first set of golf clubs I’ve had in 20 years. It’s sure been a long time since I played a round of golf, so I wasn’t sure what to expect with a new set of golf clubs. The surprising thing was that I could actually hit the ball reasonably well.

This new hobby isn’t about me though, it’s more about my son. Being a great little golfer means I want to get him on the course as often as possible, but access to golf courses for kids isn’t easy, especially when you thrown in the unpredictable Scottish weather. Also he’s a bit young to be out playing a round on his own.

So I decided to arm myself with some clubs and get into this golf thing with my son. Hopefully over the summer and autumn I can get him onto some public courses near us, but more importantly he can teach Dad how to play golf!