Outlining a Blog

In one of the more surprising events of the new year for me, my good friend and role model Rebecca Blood has started using Movable Type for her seminal, influential blog “What’s in Rebecca’s Pocket”.

The thing is, the application works sufficiently differently from the workflow she’s established over the past half-decade-plus that she’s been blogging that I’m trying to figure out the best toolset for her to use. Most modern blogging tools are pretty similar to Movable Type in their general blogging style, and many were influenced by it, so I don’t think the solution is hacking the app, but rather posting into it with another tool.

Since she doesn’t use titles on her posts, for the most part, and likes to rearrange posts on the page against each other for reasons of aesthetics and flow, I figured the best choice of an editor would probably be something like Dave Winer’s OPML Editor, which is outline-based and supports the Metaweblog API that Movable Type uses. But a good bit of poking around didn’t reveal to me how to use that editor (or any other one that lets you drag-and-drop the posts on your page relative to one another) as a post-arranger with Movable Type.

So, though I could have asked Rebecca or probably Dave directly, I go to you, my ever-helpful blogging audience: What’s the best way to organize posts if you’re primarily using date-based posting, but want to manually arrange posts within a day?