Why I love Raccoon Blog

time to read 3 min | 436 words

Why did you write your own blogging software? I can hear a lot of people asking. The answer, to tell you the truth, is actually quite simple.

I needed it. My blogging habits puts me quite outside any curve that you care to name, and the usual blogging software just don’t take some stuff into account.

Probably the most important aspect of that is the notion of scheduling. When I got the muse, I got the muse, and I post a lot. Just to give you some idea, the entire Microsoft N Layer App Sample was posted during one morning at the office. This would be my 6th post of the day, etc. That means that the process of sending a new post out has to be as automated as possible, including when to schedule it.

Raccoon Blog does this for me, finding out the latest blog post and scheduling the new post on the next work day. But it gets better, because blogging is basically writing over time, it is important to actually see it that way. Here is the main admin screen for Raccoon Blog:

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As you can see, all of the posts are outlined nicely on a calendar, giving a real sense of when they are going to be posted. It is also showing a problem. When I do a series, I usually write all of them at once, and then dump it to the queue. But it is not necessarily the best case for reading. If you don’t care for the topic of the series, you might be bored for a long time. So it is good to mix up content a bit.

This is magic, but Raccoon Blog lets me drag & drop posts to new dates, meaning that in a few minutes, I can mix up the content so the blog wouldn’t be a one track topic for weeks on end. And the reason it is magic is that this is so much better than the alternatives that I have tried that it feels like heaven.

Here is how it looks like after the re-ordering:

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Now that is more like it, mixed topics, a lot of stuff that would interest you (I hope) and no pain at all during the entire process.