I blog a fair amount and do you want to know what the most annoying part of the process is? It’s not coming up with ideas, it’s not even writing the posts. It’s when you have names that you need to add. Any time I put in someone’s name into a blog post I want to make sure I include a link to their blog and twitter accounts, not to mention getting their name right. Right Andy (blog|twitter)?. On top of that I write my posts in HTML so it would look like this:
Kenneth Fisher (<a href=”https://sqlstudies.com ” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>blog</a>|<a href=”https://twitter.com/sqlstudent144 ” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>twitter</a>)
Which ends up looking like this:
You can see how typing that out a few times could be a headache. Not to mention finding the links for a blog and twitter. Now try doing a #tsql2sday rollup. (Like I just did.) More than 20 people. Most of whom have been mentioned in past blogs or rollups. I ran into this problem a while back and started keeping a text document with all of the names & code of people that had been in my blog. From there it was an easy copy and paste whenever I needed them.
I was talking to Andy Mallon (blog|twitter) one day and we were discussing the problem. I offered him the text file figuring he could keep up his own copy. Andy being Andy he went several steps farther and cleaned up the list and set up a Github repository. He then shared it with everyone. Now when I need a name I go to the repository and grab the line of code and paste it into my blog. On top of that when he adds someone new, or I do, or heck anyone else it’s available to me and everyone else.
On top of that if someone’s blog moves, or they change twitter handles, or heck, they’d like their Linked in handle referenced as well, or instead, they can go in and change it.
I will point out that you are expected to behave yourself when adding new information but we are all (mostly) adults here so I’m not too worried.
Here’s the repository:
https://github.com/amtwo/Data-Blogger-Resource-Kit
You’ll notice a wiki in there as well with a lot of other useful blogging tools.
Oh, and in case you were keeping count. Simple blog post, 3 people referenced, three lines copied and pasted. Total time spent <30 seconds. (It helped I already had BlogMentions already open.)