Once upon a time, someone had an idea. A grand idea. A monumental idea. They were going to revamp the Ooligan website! Now, it wouldn’t be easy. There would be trials. Tribulations. HTML upsets. Images not uploading correctly. But they were determined. And, as in most PG-13 fairytales, it has a happy ending. The website looks great. The books are visible. Ooligan Press even has its own URL now. Unfortunately, all magic has a cost. This cost was that blogs were put on hold for about a year.
In most presses, this would not be that big of a deal. Yes, engagement might go down for a short period, but that’s nothing compared to increasing the useability of the website as a whole. However, since all of the managers in Ooligan Press are part of the book publishing master’s program at Portland State University, the life expectancy in any given position of the press is about a year. That is to say, I had never even written a blog post for Ooligan Press when I was put in charge of managing them. But that’s ok. As someone smart once said, “Confusion is a Learning State.” I learned how to manage blogs, and I can teach you as well.
The process begins with a lesson to all of Ooligan Press on how to write and submit their blogs. It is quite a long lesson, since the process is both confusing and has many steps. We will only be glancing at that lesson when it becomes relevant to what I’m discussing. Just know that in all my (two) times managing this assignment, I’ve never had 100 percent of the other students turn their work in correctly. Realistically, what those two times had in common was I was teaching the lesson, but I’m going to ignore that statistic.
My next step is setting up the Google Sheet where people can submit their topics ahead of writing the blog. Since we have a lot of people in the press, and about a decade of blogs on our website already, the topics need to be checked to see if they have been done recently. They also need to be checked to see if they’re appropriate for a blog and can be done in a certain word count.
Once I have that set up, I make a list on Trello (our business workspace) for this term’s blog posts and add a card onto it for every post being written that term. These cards allow the students to upload their posts and for me and our copy chief to check off our steps in an organized manner.
After the students have uploaded the blog posts, I wait for our copy chief to go over them, and then I schedule them to post on the blog. I typically schedule a month in advance, with Ooligan manager blogs on Mondays. I am responsible for checking and inputting the metadata into the Ooligan website when I schedule. Sometimes I’ll alter the data the students have given me to fit better for SEO, but mostly I’ll copy and paste it into the relevant sections on our website. Then I hit “Schedule Post.” Yay! Blog post uploaded! My work doesn’t stop there though.
I move the card to the “Scheduled Blogs” list on Trello so that we still have access to it before it goes live; then I make an Instagram and Facebook post to go out the day the blog post does. I just use the image chosen by the student, but sometimes I’ll have to crop it if it doesn’t fit Instagram’s guidelines, or Instagram is making it show up in a strange manner.
Finally, I grade everyone for their blogs. I won’t go into my grading secrets, but you should know that there have been tears. (My tears, but that still counts!) Grading the blogs is the very last step of this process, just in time for it to start all over again in a new term!
Written by AJ Adler.
Title created using Chat GPT