Doing The Daily

 In celebration of the twentieth year of this blog, I have a few tales to tell. This post is one of them. This series will occur off and on throughout this anniversary year, I hope to illuminate some behind-the-scenes stories and highlights from the blog during this time. Enjoy!

 Every day for nearly twenty years this blog has posted an article, message, or pictures pertaining mostly to bicycling. Most years I post far more than 365 posts in a year. Last year I set a "PR" in this regard with 392 posts for 2024. 

You might be wondering how I manage to do this. 

One of my biggest fears. From Facebook in 2018.

Well, first of all it is a miracle that this blogging platform still exists and is free. Without this resource the point is moot. There would be no daily blog here. So, a big "thank you" to Blogger/Google for allowing this to be a thing for over two decades. 

There were "glitches" and times when my home PC went crazy. That always is a big stressor. A couple of times I upgraded the PC and when I turned the new one on the blog was "gone"! That was a fun time! I guess I care, maybe too much, that my audience is not denied a daily fix. 

I know some people have expressed a thing called "writer's block". I wrestled with that once. Usually I never have a hard time coming up with something to write about here though. There are times still where I have no idea what is going to come out until I sit down in front of the keyboard, but something comes out, and it keeps happening so.....

A lot of ideas come to me during rides.

Many times a ride is the inspiration, or an idea for a post comes out of a ride, or just during a ride I think about a topic that ends up being a post, but not necessarily about the ride. 

Readers give me post ideas many times via comments. Social media gives me plenty of content ideas, and there are press releases as well. Although that may be drying up this year. 

The biggest thing for me is the ability to schedule posts. This frees me up to write whenever I want, publish it at a future date, and keep the que filled a few days ahead so I can have time to think about things. I didn't always do the blog in this manner though. 

In the first several years of this blog, I would wake up very early, sit down and write a post, and so on for each day. I then switched up to doing the post the evening before and publishing it when I awoke the next day. 

But with post scheduling I can be as far as three to four days ahead, inserting and rearranging post schedules as need be, and then having time to write whenever I want. Although it usually ends up being in the morning, I do write in the evenings yet also. 

The scheduling also allows me time to edit. I generally go over each post at least three times and sometimes a lot more than that. I have been known to rewrite entire sections of a post, and at times I have deleted entire posts after writing them because I deemed them unnecessary and unwise. 

And some of you may know this, but I only type with two fingers. I really do not know how to type! I make a ton of mistakes. Misspellings, hitting the wrong keys, and just really bad grammar happens all the time. This means I have to go backward a lot. The "back key" on my keyboard gets a lot of use! So, just in this paragraph I misspelled four words, I had to back up to clean up other mistakes at least ten times, and I stopped to think a bit three times. 

This takes a lot of time. So, on any given post I might spend an hour to three hours at a crack just writing it, and this does not include later editing. And I still get stuff wrong! Hey! I'm trying over here! 

I hope this gives you some insight on just how I do this blog daily, and sometimes more than daily. Thank you for reading Guitar Ted Productions!