Speeding Up My Blogging Using A Really Scary App

I like to linger on my writing. I enjoy leaving it, coming back to it, and editing it. Then re-editing it. The less pressing the writing is, the more leisurely my approach. The writing that is least important to me, and judging by my stats to everyone else as well, is my blogging. As a consequence, I produce very few blog posts, and what I do produce often stays in draft form for quite a long time. Often indefinitely.

Other factors that make blogs have an even longer gestation period than most of the stuff I have to write are that once you've done the hard part of selecting the most suitable words and arranging them into a satisfactory order, you then have to come up with an excerpt, assign suitable keywords and categories, and put in relevant links to other blog posts.

But I've decided that from now on, I'm going to turn over a new leaf. I'm going to use all the technology at hand to speed up the process. And I'm going to produce every blog post in one operation from beginning to end. I have just done a run-through with a short post about what my granddad did in the war.

I started off by creating a draft in a programme called Flowstate. This - scarily - deletes everything you've written if you stop typing. You can set the time to what you like. My wartime story seemed worth about 10 minutes. Having got it down, I then ran it through ChatGPT and Claude to correct, edit and make it readable. Claude did the best job. I got an image from Shutterstock, only allowing myself the choice of the first page of results. Claude produced a better version, so the text and the image got shunted straight to WordPress. I asked Claude to write an excerpt. I chose/created my own categories and tags but looking back, I should have asked Claude to do that too. I didn't add any links - there must be a quick way of doing this.

I forgot to time it, but the whole process took less than half an hour. I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. In fact, I instantly applied exactly the same technique to produce this blog post