Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Posting Process

The plan is to go south for maintenance either today after my flight or tomorrow morning, depending on the weather, and on last minute whims of the client, owner and airplane. This time it will be my turn to go slightly further south for a few days. I understand that there is more than one street at the place we're getting the maintenance done. I look forward to that, for sure. Or maybe I'm just going insane. You know the old Dickens line about income and expenditure and pounds sixpence and happiness or misery? There's something similar to do with pilots, being in the field, having enough to eat and going insane. Six weeks consecutive weeks in is around the tipping point for insanity for me these days.

Let me explain my blogging process: I take notes during the day--on my OFP, in a notebook, on the back of the box the brake pads came in, on anything that will hold the ink, and by taking photos just so I remember the thing I want to blog about. I copy the notes into a notepad file. I used to have a different notepad file for every day, but now I only start a new one every month. It's easier to ensure continuity between blog entries, refer back to things, and make sure I've covered everything when they're all in one place and I don't have to keep opening and closing files to check if I mentioned the hotel key problem or the broken TV yet.

When I have more time, I tweak the notes into a usable post with raw html tags, notations like e' and [photo] or [foxeatingcat.jpg] where I want non ASCII characters and photos. When I have both time and Internet access, I copy paste the text to the blog, make up a title, and then upload the photos and try to remember to expand the special characters. Let me know if I forget one or the other.

I assign each upload the next available date. I leave some gaps so I don't have to move EVERYTHING if I want to put in a more timely posting, and so that the already written entries last longer if I get busy and can't blog. It's better to have one post every two days reliably for two weeks, then to have a week of posts every day then nothing for a week. If there's breaking news I drop it in the nearest open space, moving posts around to get it sooner, if I can do so without unduly breaking up a narrative arc. Sometimes there is a post that I know in advance should go on a particular day: a holiday or date significant to the post, so those go in on those dates and I have to be careful not to accidentally move them as I shuffle things around.

Two or three days, occasionally get as much as a month ahead with queued posts. This summer I fell three months behind turning my notes into posts, then got lazy and didn't write them up as soon as I had a break.

This is the long way of saying that I have no idea what I did today, but it must have involved flying, because the next day I took the airplane to maintenance, and that was a memorable day, so I'll make you wait for it.

2 comments:

Marc C. said...

If you want to easily keep track of date and time of entries in a notepad file, do the following;
To create a log file in Notepad:

1. Run Notepad.
2. Type .LOG on the first line, and then press ENTER to move to the next line.
3. On the File menu, click Save As, type a descriptive name for your file in the File name box, and then click OK.

When you next open the file, note that the date and time have been appended to the end of the log, immediately preceding the place where new text can be added. You can use this functionality to automatically add the current date and time to each log entry.

jinksto said...

Wow, awesome tip Marc. I never knew Notepad did that. Testing this you just need the .LOG entry once as the very first line of the file and then you can edit it as normal... sorta. It gets a little wonky if you add text to previously entered text as it adds the date/time to the very bottom of the file rather thank keeping up with when you edited what.

Still, very nifty, if your just adding entries to the bottom of the file.

Aviatrix, I haven't kept up with what phone you're using but if it has any kind of smartphone abilities check out something called "evernote". They have versions for most phone platforms and both PC and Mac. The tool synchs your "noteboks" with all of your devices. Even at home it's easier for me to use evernote to transfer pics from phone to computer rather than connecting the cable.