Using Wordpress or Txti to Create An Organized Catalog of Your Posts

winstonalden (64)in #blogging • 7 years ago

Organize All Your Hard Work!

Sometimes it's easy to forget just how much we write here on Steemit. I just went through my feed and realized I've shared 62 posts in just about as many days. But getting to some of those older posts can be a challenge.

It's the nature of this platform that content goes by in a flash, and anything more than a few days old is likely to drop into the memory-hole, never to be read again. It's ironic, because the nature of the blockchain is to live forever.

Even if my older posts are well past the age where they can be up-voted for payout, I'd still like to know that my words are out there, and potentially useful to someone.

It would be handy to have a simple link I could provide if I wanted to share my body of work. It would also be nice to have a quick list of posts on a given subject which I could cut and paste at the bottom of a post in order to point folks to similar material they could find useful. A lot of great bloggers here on Steemit do this, with persistent "signatures" at the end of their work that become an important part of their brand. As far as I can tell, though, there aren't tools available to do this within Steemit itself.

This is why I decided to put up a page with links to all my content on a wordpress site. I've copied linked titles to all my posts over to this page, and grouped them into general categories.

Some of the categories don't match the Steemit categories they're filed under. For example, it makes more sense to me to group a many of my photography posts under "Science and Nature," when I've taken the time to research and write a bit about the animals I've photographed. And a lot of my thoughts about family, culture, psychology, and unclassifiable ranting have gone under "Essays." If any one category gets to be too burdensome in the future, there's no reason I can't split them up.

But for now, I can keep things as simple as they need to be. I can also leave out all the re-steems. As much as I like to share stuff on occasion, I don't necessarily want it cluttering up my own catalog. (Come to think of it, I could build another catalog page with links to articles by other folks I've found interesting and useful. Hmm... wasn't this the whole point of the internet back in the day?)

For the time being I've listed the categories alphabetically, and the posts within them are in chronological order.

With this in place, it's easy for me to copy over a list of posts on a particular subject from the Wordpress edit screen - like the list of posts at the end of this story, which you could follow to more material on writing and blogging.

I'm not a huge fan of Wordpress' interface. It's clunky and complex, and often leaves me wondering if it wouldn't just be easier to hand-code a page in HTML. Cutting and pasting links from Steemit creates some formatting issues which are tedious to correct. On the other hand, the hosting and the domain for that site are all set up already, so I might as well use it for something - even if it's just to point folks back to Steemit from my own domain.

And it's nice to get traffic statistics when I want them. (As depressing as they are. It turns out hosting your own web-site is a really lousy way to find readers these days!)

If you don't have a domain or a Wordpress site, you're probably looking for a simpler way to do the same thing, I'd highly recommend setting up a table of contents page with TXTI. Txti provides a simple and free web-form where you can edit and share material in HTML or Markdown, and then it generates a link you can use to share this basic, static web-site with anyone you like - like your audience here on Steemit! And since you already know Markdown, it should be a breeze to use.

I love the simplicity of the TXTI service, which is epitomized in this profanity laden screed extolling the glories of the early web. Don't let the swearing turn you off. The guy has a m-f-ing point.

Wherever it's hosted, once a table of contents is set up, it really doesn't take much effort to update it after posting something over here. And now that I've got a list of everything I've written over the past two months together in one place, I feel a pretty great sense of accomplishment.

Maybe you can feel the same.

Do you try to maintain a catalog of your previous work? What tools do you use to do it?

Yours,
Winston