Hey fellow blogger, how do you organize your ideas, your photos, your post scheduling?  I need some help, but I also have some ideas.  Maybe we can help one another.  What do you say?  Let’s try.

Ideas

I get ideas.  Don’t we all?  But I’m talking about themes and topics for blog posts.  Sometimes an idea will come to me for a great post.  I’m kind of busy and don’t make a note of it.  Later, I remember that I had an idea, but can’t remember what it was.  Has this ever happened to you?

My messy computer desk.

I’ve had that spiral bound notebook (in the photo) with the aluminum cover and heavy duty rear cover around here for a few years.  It’s made for taking notes anywhere you are.  I’ve started writing down my ideas for posts in this.  When my “well is dry,” I come here to “prime the pump.”  It works.  That’s why I’m doing this post today.  I’ve been writing the core of the idea in the book.  What do you do?

For a couple of years, I used monthly calendars to record titles of blog posts in the date blocks.  In the margins I wrote down ideas for future posts.  I also kept a record of some of the interesting verification words that I found on various blogs.  Then Blogger went Captcha.  I’m sorry friend.  If you use that you are turning off people–big time.

Photos

My friend, Vanilla, mentioned to me recently that he has trouble finding photos.  I use lots of folders to organize mine.  Under My Pictures, I have a folder named Blog Stuff.  That is further divided into folders and sub-folders.  I have all my Wordless Wednesday photos in one folder.  I name the photos in the WW folder by a number/letter combination.  The number is serial, starting with 001 and incrementing by one for each week’s participation.  The photos for a given week are assigned a single letter to differentiate them and place them in order.  For example, the photos for my 96th week in WW (the car fire beside the expressway) are named 096a.jpg, 096b.jpg and 097.jpg.

The last few months, I’ve been dividing the general (non-theme or non-meme) photos into monthly folders.  I name the folders for the year and month (YYMM).  This month’s folder is “1209.”  I use naming protocols that sort into a convenient order.  To cut down on scrolling through lists, or thumb nails to find folders, I’ll rename the folder by adding “Z-” as a prefix to the name when the folder is ready to be archived.  That is working for now, but I may have to add an archive folder to separate the old stuff from the currently useful items.  Related to that, I put “0-” in front of WW for that folder so that it sorts toward the top.

A few years ago I adopted a file-name protocol for church photos.  I was receiving photos from multiple sources and had to keep them organized by when they were taken and who took them.  Further, some of the photos would be used on machines that were limited to 8 characters in the file name (not counting the extension, eg. jpg).  I used 6 numbers and two letters.  The numbers were when (YYMMDD) and the two letters indicated who and which.  “Who” being indicated by a single capital letter, while “which” indicated the photos from that day in lower case letters (a-z).  I still use a variation of that for my personal photos.  They sort conveniently into chronological order.  I like that.

What organizing techniques do you use?