Most of the time, when writing for a client, I have occasion in future posts to link back to older posts. To facilitate that, it’s a good idea to record post titles and URLs for every blog post or webpage that you write, whether for yourself or a client.
Use a simple Excel spreadsheet on your computer. In addition to a column each for post “title” and “URL”, keep a column containing either a short description of the post or keywords, for reference. It’ll help you quickly decide whether or not you want to link to it.
I don’t recommend a web-based spreadsheet such as ZohoSheet, in case you temporarily don’t have Internet access but need link info for an blog post you’re working on.
6 thoughts on “Back That Thing Up: Keep A Simple Log of All Your Posts”
As I am writing and publishing my articles flat file that is no problem at all. The problem which comes up from time to time are changes in the article which are not automatically backupped.
I would love to have a classical CMS setup where I produce locally and publish and update articles from a local environment which also automatically keeps old versions.
What I will do next is a local reproduction of the input form for Textpattern in OpenOffice plus some additional administration fields (date, version counter, word counter, ads included or not, paid or not, final URL, checkboxes for a lot of things like del.icio.us, …). Lately I have fallen in love with OpenOffice for these kinds of writing and administration tasks. I start to develop some kind of blogging office environment in OpenOffice.
Next step is a very simple to create Yellow Pages database as nobody answered my question for that 🙂 I hope that that thingy will throw out complete pages as I want them.
Yeah, i’m finding it handy, Ahmed. Although I would think, Markus, that flat files would be a pain, because you wouldn’t get it to “see” each post the same way it is on your cilent’s site. Of course, it’s not strictly necessary, but I like to duplicate the client’s environment – just without advertising, and with password-protected posts so that the engines don’t spider it. (See my other post about the article bank. Looks as if the comments are kind of cross over
nice tip Raj – makes sense to do this for your own projects as well (although I tend to just search on my blog).
Just single text files, for each blog in a local sub-folder, with title, section, categories, keywords, specific URL, excerpt and full body for every single article. File name is article title. Quite the same backup method for all template files and CSS.
Pictures are stored on Flickr and the original is kept local.
And I also have the full MySQL backup which would/will allow me to do a full SQL select in a local MySQL database. Just forgot to mention that because I never had to use it (knock on wood).
For me it is important to have the raw text data (variables …) and not the formatted output.
Markus, what format do you keep your backups in? Do you post articles you’ve written for clients somewhere on your own site? (I.e., like the article bank I mentioned elsewhere?)
What I do on my site is that sometimes I only link to tags like …/tag/keyword which makes the link future safe as the most recent article will show up on top. Of course with additional rel=”tag” markup.
For your example of finding an article locally I simply use Google Desktop to search my local files (the backups).
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