Over the course of the last one week, I have realised a lot many things w.r.t to my writing habits and behaviours. Today, I noted these down and have converted these into a process. This process not only covers the writing, but also envelopes the environment, design, topics, tags(categories) and analytics & SEO as suggested here.

The Process:

Topic(s):

About 5 days in and I am writing on topics based on “10 days to a Better blog”. Prior to that and post that, my topics to write on were/will cover eight main subjects, divided up into 6 distinct blogs. These are:

• Code: I love my work, I learn a lot of new things while writing code, maintaining servers and creating new user experiences. This is what I wrote mostly on Designerfoo before shifting over Sojourner. And looking back at the trends of both Designerfoo and Sojourner, this is where I excelled. After shifting over most of the posts from Designerfoo to code.sojourner.co, I still get a lot of organic hits for some of the code based articles on code.sojourner.co. The posts that were shifted over need some attention and love and this weekend I am going to do just that. Code.sojourner.co will be home to code tutorials, gists, articles, resources, tips and tricks. 


• Design: I am the creative sorts. So I love colors, typefaces, learning flashy new tricks & stuff coming up at codepen.io every day, seeing bare bone user interfaces and day dreaming of designing something like them one day, working with wood & leather, sketching & drawing, etc. And thus design.sojourner.co will be home to my illustrations, inspirations, web designs, tattoos, resources and minimalism in design. 


• Photography: Being a very visual person, I discovered the camera and bought my first DSLR in 2010. Since then I have never stopped clicking. I have about 14 vintage cameras, all working and have been used. I love film and develop film at home. I love everything about photography. I took it up as a hobby and it’s become an obsession. I recently made the switch over to phone photography, I am still experimenting with it before I dive headlong here. So sojourner.photography is going to be home to everything I do with photography. 


• Poems & Haikus and it’s variations: I love writing poems. I have been writing these sine my school days. Only recently did I start sharing these with the world. My first act of sharing was publishing an ebook - Salt of the Earth - consisting 10 of my poems. First part a series of five ebooks. It was kind of a declaration of something for someone. The ebook is available on itunes for free, if you did like to read/download it. That being said this blog is all about my poems and more recently Haiku’s. 


• Travel: I want to travel the world, or most of it as I see fit before I pass. And I thought that starting a travel blog would motivate me even more so. So this ones all about my travel experiences. Here’s an example of a trip I wrote about.


• Personal/General Experiences: This and the next two topics will be published on blog.sojourner.co. Having segregated the my main interests in different blogs, blog.sojourner.co gives me enough freedom to write on anything I want, any topic. And this is just fantastic. So yes, Personal/General Experiences is one such topic that blog.sojourner.co is about. Essentially the topic doesn’t matter much, blog.sojourner.co is all about feelings.


• Resources: I recently released Minelienda tumblr theme, so resources such as these and their updates will be here. 


• Personal Zen: Self discoveries abound and ah ha! moments on blog.sojourner.co. Example of one such personal zen here.

Design:

I wanted all of the above blogs to be minimalistic, mind you minimalism to me doesn’t mean devoid of everything I would need, it means to evaluate if I really need a module/content holder/etc or just want one? 

Reaching a post via navigating the site is difficult for now, but that’s something I think I will work on in the future. For now I like it the way it is. If you visit any of the blogs, the home pages are just the recently published articles and the way to move forward through any of the blogs is via the Next and Previous buttons below each posts. Another way to reach an article is via the search or the open ended topics/categories. Most of the articles link to related articles from within the content, this provides context to the readers and aids navigation. My incoming traffic directly lands on the page they clicked on in the organic search results. A little later on, not so far off into the future, the sidebar will have an accordion with most popular posts on the blog roll. Each blog above is consistent in terms of look and feel. I love the way each of them look and behave. 

I would really like some help/critique from anyone reading this about their user experience with the blog(s).

Tags:

Almost all of the above blogs have categories/tags and these are used in a very general and open ended form. This is on purpose. You never know what you would like to read on blog(s) unless you explore a little eh!

Analytics and SEO:

Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools are both activated since day one. Along with that Minelienda also incorporates schema.org markup in compliance with Google’s structured data. In page SEO has been thought of since day one. I am keeping an eye on it overall and will know more soon, since this is too early to generate any kind of guesses or make decisions to alter any part of the process.

Writing and the Environment:

The writing process was covered up in a previous blog post here and the writing environment was written about here.

Popular Topics on my blog(s):

My most popular posts from all of the above blogs are on multiple articles on code.sojourner.co, lists of t-shirt websites I buy tees from, Calvin & Hobbes wallpapers, an article on design.sojourner.co, and so on. So I am going to be sticking to these, but at the same time not let these kind of topics defer me from writing about stuff I want to write and publish.