Why?

Vanity might be a reason. Fooling yourself into thinking: “every posting should add something”. It should be original. It should be witty and well-written.

Because, after all, it is yours, and people will judge you on it. So you really still need to work on it before letting it out! And so you procrastinate. You don’t publish anymore. You postpone till next weekend. And then the weekend after that. And when a draft gets stale or obsolete because everybody has read and written on the same subject, you don’t even delete. Because you still might rework it, later. When there’s more time and new inpiration.

If you don’t recognize the state of self-deception described above, count yourself lucky. For the rest of us silly perfectionists and procrastinators, what follows is a guide to manage your draft postings. Oh BTW, you’re asking yourself how I finally managed to post this one? Really easy: following the advice of this essay on structured procrastination, I in fact should have been finishing on this other big posting the world was waiting for. But, well, finishing things is so hard… So in order to have an excuse not to work on it, I finished this one :-)

< !—– end of tongue-in-cheek-mode —–>

How?

What are the ways to manage your draft postings? Let’s start with the most obvious way: saved as draft in your blogging system

• This works fine for just a couple of posts. As soon as you have a considerable number, you need to be able to search through your drafts – WordPress doesn’t allow to do this, and I do not know of any other blogging engine who does.
• With longer posts, the typical edit textbox is a pain to use. Here some WordPress-specific workarounds, none of them perfect:
  • in the admin panel, make the edit box bigger to get a better overview: options… writing… Size of the post box (in lines)
  • since WordPress 2.0, there’s a post preview pane in the editing window, but it still takes a lot of scrolling down (and within the preview pane)
  • publish your post with a timestamp set in the future. You can have a look at the posting as it will be published, but it doesn’t show (yet) on the front page or in the navigation. Or you could publish as page (without including them in the navigation) to achieve the same effect. Neither trick solves the search problem however.

There should be better ways to keep an overview of, and search through your drafts, and more comfortable editing environments. Let’s have a look at some other tools I tried *:

• Collect snippets of text in your Gmail drafts folder
  • the in:drafts <searchword> search phrase solves the searching problem
  • the editing environment still is not ideal for long texts
  • you probably also have draft mails cluttering up the folder (logically, that’s what it’s meant for)
  • could be useful if you post to your blog via email anyway, but that seems more of a quick-posting style which is contradictory to the idea of keeping and working on draft posts :-)
• Mind mapping tools
  • a mind mapping tool helps you to organize thoughts and concepts (see earlier posting for an example).
  • so it can help you while preparing a text (which is why Mindjet promotes its MindManager tool to bloggers). But it doesn’t help you to get an overview on a collection of individual draft postings. And it is more suitable for the phase of brainstorming and collecting ideas, not so much for editing and finishing your postings.
• Online text editors
  • Jotspot, Writely, Writeboard, Zohowriter, Thinkfree, SynchroEdit, Goffice… a bunch of “collaborative online text editors” has sprung up and try to be the MS Office for the web (I tried them for a friend who wanted to circumvent corporate IT to work on texts with colleagues – I have a draft post with a comparison somewhere :-)
  • after a while, I gave up on using them: these tools have put a lot of effort in trying to imitate the Office and Windows interfaces (working with menus, pop-up windows…), which is just clumsy and uncomfortable on the web.
  • I found Writely to be the most promising and feature-rich at first sight, but the Writely code is not xhtml-compliant (e.g. tags instead of ) and postings from Writely to the blog lost their title ) I’m wondering whether pro blogger Steve Rubel (see his 10 blogging hacks) really uses it.
• Write and maintain your draft texts in a wiki
  • not a bad idea: wikis have search built-in, and by the nature of a wiki, editing should be quick and easy
  • you might have trouble copy-pasting from your wiki to your blog, because of differences in how they handle/produce html
  • if you want to get away from a web-based editing interface, a wiki is not a solution of course
  • like mindmapping tools, some would argue that a wiki is more suitable for the brainstorming phase before defining the scope of your blog posting.
  • an example: Dutch KM blogger Ton Zylstra has a WikkaWiki running on his laptop for “working out ideas, filing, keeping notes” (see his overview of information-processing tools).
• Desktop blogging tools
  • Instead of a web interface, you can use a desktop application that posts to your blog, here’s a quick list (from yet another draft posting :-) ):
    • W.Bloggar and Zempt are freeware oldies with which you edit the html code: only for masochists
    • the more recent Qumana and Zoundry Blog Writer are more sophisticated and very nice freeware aiming to create an advertising network through its userbase
    • you can get Ecto (Mac and Windows) and Blogjet (Windows only) for a moderate fee. They probably are very well worth their money if you spend a lot of time writing and want an intuitive and comfortable interface.
  • Apart from the first two, I find them more comfortable to work with than a web interface – and you can save your drafts on your hard disk and work on them off-line
  • but again, there’s no way to search trough your drafts, unless you use the text search functionality in Windows (or Mac, or…)
• Blog posting as an extension to your browser
  • the “social browser” Flock was hyped too early and failed the expectations, but the Performancing plugin in Firefox is a lightweight and very practical alternative – have a look at the features.
  • search your “notes”, switch between WYSIWYG, code and preview pane, maximize the editing window… really great! (the plugin saves your non-published notes on your harddisk in \Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\{some profile identifier}\extensions\performancing-notes.xml)
  • what it still lacks in comparison with desktop blogging tools is support for image upload and for extended entries (separating the intro and the “More…” part of the text )

What

Finally, here’s the recipe I settled for (for now :-) ):

• publish snippets of text to a separate blog set up on a different subdomain or subdirectory (such as test.vanhecke.info, but with another name :-).)
• searching is the same as searching on any blog, and you see the text as it will be published
• the described desktop blogging clients and the Performancing plugin make it easy to manage multiple blogging accounts – when the text is finished, swith the target blog and publish to the actual blog
• configure the image upload for the test blog to be the same location as the actual blog
• if you want to keep your testblog private, don’t forget:
  • to put <meta content="noindex, nofollow" name="robots"> in your html or disallow search engines with your robots.txt.
  • switch off trackback and pingback

So, will it make me more productive? Dunno, but at least it made me write on technical solutions for a psychological issue. How more geeky can it get?

* (not necessarily alone in the context of blogging but for keeping notes and editing texts in general)

Seedwiki:

• like all other services, free version has contextual ads running
• paid versions have password protection, user management
• the free version does not have its own subdomain like many other services offer
• has a WYSIWYG editor – no has several WYSIWYG editors at the same time, which makes it kind of confusing!

Conclusion: has some nice features, but for my purposes, this was far too complex and not (end)user friendly enough.

PBWiki:

• Spartan interface
• the ads or support links are a bit in-your-face
• no possibility to edit without registration – you need “the” wiki password (that only the issuer can change)
• no help on wiki syntax found (you can have at the wiki source of example pages, and it follows the usual Wiki Markup)
• no possibility to delete your wiki

Not satisfying at all, unless for a closed group of geek-minded users

WikiCities:

• based on MediaWiki (the software Wikipedia is running)
• so no WYSIWYG, and Mediawiki was probably too feature-rich and too complex

Conclusion: probably a good solution for people already into wiki’s, not for my purpose

Schtuff:

• document-centered, not page-centered
• homepage shows last documents instead of being editable
• “creating a document” requires a pop-up window?!
• not WYSIWYG
• registration is required to edit
• the only service I saw with the possibility to delete (your own) spaces (which is a plus)

Far too complex and far from user-friendly, I can’t see why it got such good reviews.

Wikispaces :

• no possibility to delete or to rename self-created wikis (*)
• I found the pop-up to create links a bit confusing
• sober, but effective WYSIWYG, multilevel bullet lists being the only feature I really missed
• Feeds: global feed for page changes, comments feeds, per-page feed
• really big plus: editable left menu, so end users can navigate through the wiki easily without getting lost in the wiki functionality!
• there’s a comments feature, but it’s not really well integrated into the wiki pages, and it’s impossible to delete comments

Conclusion: the people behind Wikispaces have really thought about how create a finished wiki product out of the myriads of existing wiki practices: simple, nice interface, but still feature-rich enough if you dig deeper.

Xwiki.com

• has more portal features than being a pure wiki
• too complex, so I gave up on registration

Riters.com

• hosts MoinMoin wiki’s
• so again too geeky for my audience

Overall conclusion:

Wikispaces definitely has some drawbacks, but for my purpose at this time there was no competition. (Going through my list again, I noticed I mainly wrote down negative points, but I can imagine each one of these services can be a satisfactory solution for a particular purpose or a particular type of users!)
I did not consider paid solutions like Jotspot, Confluence or Socialtext, but they really might be worth the money (as well as the paid upgrades of the free hosts I described) if you’re searching for a more complex solution or one that has to be more lasting than the throw-away wiki I needed for this one event.

More resources:

• Wiki Farms: Chaotic, but up to date and helpful listing of wikifarms (at Ward Cunningham’s Mother of All Wikis)
• List of wiki farms: from Wikipedia
• Wiki based websites: at a wiki on wikis by Wouter Van daele, who’s also a speaker on the topic of wiki’s
• (added Oct 31) Peter Forret’s June 2005 wiki farm evaluation: I had totally forgotten about this posting, although I commented on it… Memebot, which is in his list, doesn’t accept any new signups anymore

* Update January 9, 2006

Also note that it wasn’t possible to delete or rename individual pages.  (You could delete a page by simply emptying the content, and “rename” it by moving the content to a newly created one as a workaround).  Wikispaces has added this feature now, but still internal references to pages aren’t updated automatically.  I know cool URL’s don’t change, so one should not encourage renaming pages, but still it feels strange that there is a feature called “renaming” without at least the option to have all references updated automatically (like the open source wiki TikiWiki does, for example).  I assume it’s only a matter of time before it’ll be added to the impressive list of other improvements…

Here’s an idea:

• When setting meeting dates across organisations (or even within, when there’s no shared calendar available), people still have to rely on sending mails around over and over again until everyone settles on a common day/time.
• Instead, use a wiki page available to and editable by everybody: the organizer sends out an invitation, all attendees note their available dates on the page, the organizer sends the result to the group again.
• Users will love it, and it’ll be a small step to post meeting notes, collect ideas, co-editing texts etc…

Access and permissions

When it comes to information that is not supposed to publicly accessible and/or editable by anyone, you might have to find a wiki system with some user and permissions management. TikiWiki is pretty fine-grained in that respect: here an illustration of permissions for a page that is editable and viewable by anyone, whereas the rest of the wiki is only editable by a designated group of people.

I do use and like the Tikiwiki wiki functionality however, mainly because of two features:

• structures: an example at the tikiwi docs pages. It allows you to arrange wiki pages in an outline (or hierarchy if you want), resulting in an automatic navigation, and the ability to create printable pages and pdf’s for the whole structure. Ideal for maintaining technical documentation in the wiki – and being able to extract a printable version of it at any moment.
• database access: if you already have information in a database, pull it into the wiki with the SQL plugin. An example of this is the wiki we use at work (screenshot): using data on upcoming seminars and some string concatenation in sql, links are constructed, pointing to:
  • the db editing interface for that seminar
  • the wiki page with preparation notes for the seminar (if there’s a question mark, it means there aren’t any notes yet)
  • the link to the seminar description on the public site

Both of these features provide your wiki with a “structured backbone”. Wiki’s are fantastic because of the freedom users have to link and create pages at will. But large, “pure”, “organically grown” wiki’s tend to get cluttered and impossible to maintain for exactly the same reason. (Wikipedia is not a counterexample here – in fact Wikipedia has a very rigid structure because of the lemma – article schema).

BTW: I’m preparing a seminar on light-weight knowledgemanagement, featuring wikis, blogs and syndication. If you know examples of corporate usage, let me know (pascal at itworks dot be). I’m searching for companies using it internally, not for marketing purposes. Nor does the seminar deal with blogging and wikis as a phenomenon in society at large. I’ve already spoken to these people: Steven Noels, Wouter Van Daele, Maarten Schenk, Ton Zijlstra and Tom Mertens.