Cleaning House

Part of the reason I haven’t been too productive recently in my writing has been that I’m working my way through my backlog of posts and importing them into WordPress. Previously they had all been saved as Markdown files for a Jekyll site I was using, and as part of the process, I’m also editing and reformatting them to fix plenty of spelling and grammar mistakes that slipped through the net the first time.

It’s actually been cathartic to read through nearly seven years’ worth of blogging and see how my writing style, and my life, have changed over the years. In about a month’s time, it will have been ten years since I left South Africa for Japan, and started my interesting journey of teaching and travelling. It’s sort of funny though that ten years later I am back in South Africa, and unable to travel back to my home in China because of the current COVID-19 epidemic.

The editing process itself has been rather painless. Seeing as my posts are all saved in plaintext format, I can simply copy and paste them into LanguageTool and fix any mistakes, before pasting the text straight into WordPress and just adding a featured image and a few other details before hitting the Publish button.

That’s a large part of the reason why I love writing out all of my work in plaintext files. It’s east to use no matter what system you run, what blogging platform you use, or which editor is your favourite. Markdown syntax also makes working with plaintext files extremely easy and helps me focus on my writing, rather than on my formatting.

Hopefully once I work my way through my blogging backlog, I can jump back into actual new content on a more regular basis!

I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting https://100daystooffload.com.

• Writing