Saving Ideas With Drafts
If you’re anything like me you get inspiration from all manner of things throughout the day that leave you thinking “I ought to write a blog post about that”. The thing is however that often when I sit down to actually DO the writing I was thinking about earlier I find that I’m stuck.
Frequently it’s because I don’t remember the website where I saw something that inspired me or the exact bit of text that I wanted to talk about (even if I don’t quote it).
Fortunately there’s something in WordPress blogs that can help. If you log into your dashboard and click “Settings” and then “writing”, you’ll find a section of that page that talks about “Press This”. It’s a “bookmarklet” that you can click and drag onto your bookmarks.
To use it, when you find something on a web page that you want to refer to in a blog post, Just highlight the part of the text you’re interested in and click your “Press This” bookmarklet.
It will copy the stuff you highlighted and a popup will appear with it pasted into a edit post form. It will include a link to the page you copied it from and the post title will be set to the title of the page in question. From there you can jot down a few quick notes and then hit “Save Draft”.
This will save that post as a draft that you can go back to later when you’ve time to flesh it out into a full post.
The way I do it is to open the draft in one tab and then in a second tab, write the new post. Once I’m done and the new post is published, I’ll then go back to the draft tab and click “Move to trash” because it’s not needed any more.
Granted, this only works for when you’re online, you’ll still be well advised to keep a pen & paper handy for saving ideas that happen when you’re away from the computer (or use some smartphone app).
I was reminded of this trick only recently when I was wanting to save something I wanted to write about and make sure it would be in a place I’d find it. Doing this puts it in the best place… right on the blog I’m going to write it in.
This trick can be especially handy if you connect to your blog from more than one computer.
