Behind the blog

Hi friends, I wanted to take a little break from talking about recipes to talk about how I put a post together, and how I keep this thing moving every day in case you find it interesting.

When I started my blog last Spring, I honestly had no idea how to blog. I quickly learned WordPress, and learned how to make a post, but wasn’t really sure how I would plan my posts and definitely didn’t know how long I’d have content to write about! I still don’t know what I’ll be writing about each week, but keep notes to stay organized.

Each Sunday, I scribble down notes for the days of the week, sometimes I only have three ideas, which gets me to Wednesday. It could look like “Monday-notes from a weekend run, Tuesday-cookies I made on Saturday, Wednesday-dinner from Monday night.” And then I have to figure something out for the last two days of the week.

I also read a lot! I have about 45 blogs in my Google Reader that I try to stay on top of. Some I skim, some I read in detail, and sometimes I print recipes, jot down ideas for a recipe or blog post, and sometimes I skip ones completely. In addition to reading other blogs, I skim cookbooks if I have an idea for a dish like “we haven’t had turkey burgers in a while, let’s find a good one to try.”

I also keep sticky notes on my computer desktop for things to try, a rough plan for the week, and other odds and ends to do.

I blog part with a desktop program for Macs called Ecto, and part through the WordPress dashboard. It’s not ideal to use two programs, but it works for me. Because of the size of my pictures with my newer camera, the dashboard won’t upload them, so I use Ecto to drag and drop, and then the dashboard to format and schedule posts.

For photography, I prefer to shoot in daylight, as most people do, so I like weekends for daytime baking or late afternoons during the week before the sun sets. I edit photos in iPhoto, except I don’t really know what I’m doing, just basics. I also read a few photography blogs for tips and pointers, and also expose myself to beautiful food photography on other food blogs to learn staging and lighting. I try to think about how I would shoot their food and notice angles or colors they incorporate. It has really helped with my own photos (in my opinion).

I try to put together an actual post in stages. Like I might cook something one day, then upload and edit another day, and then build the post at another time. Posts with more writing are easier and quicker for me to create, ones with more photos and instructions take longer.

Once a post is live, I promote on Twitter through an automatic update, and I manually send to Facebook (only about 1-2 times per week for my favorites), and I manually send to StumbledUpon. For photos when I think something is really good, I manually submit to Food Gawker and TasteSpotting. Then I spend the day a post is up promoting more on Twitter mostly.

Were you surprised about anything here? Ready to start your own blog?

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