I’m guessing most of my regular blog readers don’t have “years of blog content” to organize and will, therefore, not find this post practically useful.  I’m hoping, though, that maybe it will be helpful to the five people out there in cyberspace who need the information 😉 — and that the regular, non-blogging, readers will find it a fun “peek behind the curtain.”

The Beginning…a Very Good Place to Start

The first blog post here at Titus 2 Homemaker went up in August of 2005.  Although the consistency of my posting has waxed and waned over the years, the net result was 2500 published blog posts by the time I started this re-organization project.

Moreover, much of the earlier content was weak or scattered or otherwise…just less than impressive.  “Back in the old days” of blogging, the whole purpose and tone was different (as hinted at by the term “web log,” from which “blog” was derived), so a lot of the earlier content was text only (no pictures) and more along the lines of what one would post on a personal Facebook profile today.

Overwhelming!

Twenty-five hundred posts is a lot of content.  It was more than a little overwhelming.  I’m not very good at looking at the details and building a “big picture,” so a spreadsheet wasn’t working for me.  (It works okay for maintaining, but it wasn’t working for getting the posts organized.)  I’d see that I had a post about topic A, remember I’d seen something else about topic A, and have no idea where to go back to in order to find it.

And in the meantime, virtually no one is writing about getting your act together after you’ve been blogging for a decade or more, because they assume that by this time, you’ve already gotten it all figured out!  All the information I could find about organizing a blog was designed for new bloggers just getting started.  Gretchen Louise’s post about organizing your blog archives is the only one I saw, and although it’s good, it’s still a little too high-level for what I was looking for.  (In other words, this post is about the process I went through/am going through to accomplish the three “big-chunk” steps she talks about in her post.)

Sooo…I decided I needed to make this more visual and tactile.  And this project was a real pain in the behind, but it was totally worth it.  Here’s what I did:

Export a List of Post Titles

First, I used the WP All Export plugin to export a list of all of my post titles.  I exported the titles, the dates (largely because some of my titles were really stupidly non-descript and I thought I might need the dates to identify them), and the post status (so I could easily separate the drafts from the published posts).

Then I copied-and-pasted each title into a small card in a Word document, with 21 cards to a page (3 columns by 7 rows).  This was tedious.  I expected I should be able to essentially “import” the entire list of titles into a table in Word in a single click and have it put each cell from Excel into a separate cell in Word, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it do that.  There may be a way that I just missed, but I couldn’t figure it out so I had to copy/paste each title separately, which was not very fun.

Make Physical Cards

I had these printed out on lightweight cardstock (at BestValueCopy  — I was not printing all those pages on my home printer!).

(The titles are blurred because the top page is current drafts and I don’t want any spoilers!)

Then I trimmed the edges off and cut the pages apart using my guillotine-style paper trimmer.  I was left with a huge stack of small cards, like this:

Sort the Posts

Now I had something physical in front of me that I could see, handle, and sort.  So I sorted the cards into categories, including one for “no longer useful” posts that need to be deleted.

Unlike a spreadsheet, I could spread these out, move them around, change my mind and rearrange, etc.  When I was done, I had topical groups of posts, like this:

These individual groups of posts are now a lot easier to work with, one at a time, when deleting, updating, etc.

This also gave me a much better idea of what areas my blog really focuses on, something I wasn’t getting a feel for by scrolling through a spreadsheet.

Create a New Spreadsheet

Being able to spread the cards out and manipulate them made it easier to separate the “junk” posts that needed deleting (I deleted over 200 posts), but also to get a better idea of what I have and how they do and do not relate to each other.

This next bit is optional, but I think it’s a lot more manageable moving forward than maintaining a set of cards.  (Although if you prefer to keep the cards long-term, I’d recommend using business card sleeves and putting them in a binder.)

At this point, I created a new spreadsheet.  I exported my posts a second time, after deleting all the delete-able posts.  (That isn’t strictly necessary, but I found that easier than locating all those deleted posts in the spreadsheet and removing them.)  Then I added a bunch of columns for additional information.  The idea is to enter whatever information I need to keep myself organized.

For every post, I enter the title, link, date, and (where relevant) most-recently-updated date.  Oh, and category/ies  Pretty much everything else is optional.  But I can keep notes like the Pinterest description, what holiday or season a post is related to, if it’s part of a series, and so on — all in the spreadsheet.  Now that I know which information to put in there and what I have.