I’ve been happily using the Trello service for several years to help me organize my blog posts. I’ve come a long way from my original setup. Instead of an unnamed workspace with a single board, I now use a workspace called “My Blog” with three boards that cover different aspects of the blog:
1) Potential Posts
2) Posts in Progress
3) Published Posts
Since I’m always tweaking my setup for maximum efficiency, I like to periodically update this post to share what I’ve learned. Here’s how I’m using my boards in 2024.
Potential Posts
Potential Posts is where I stick cards for topics I might want to write about in the future. While I arrange the lists on my other boards by month or year, I arrange this board’s lists by subject. For instance, the name of a movie that I’d like to review one day would go on my “Potential Movie Reviews” list.
I’m thinking about phasing out this board because I rarely use it anymore. When I come up with a new post idea, I tend to immediately schedule it on my Posts in Progress board.
Posts in Progress
Posts in Progress functions as my publishing calendar of sorts. It has a list named for every month of the year. I create a card for each new blog post and put it under the month in which I plan to publish it.
I also assign the cards colored labels that correspond with their category (or categories) on my blog. For example, posts about my music streaming stats have a purple “TV, Music, Movies” label, while phone reviews carry both a light green label for “Reviews” and a red label for “Tech & Hardware.” These labels are consistent across all three boards.
At the end of the month, I move the empty list to the end, behind the other lists. If the month ends before I finish all of my planned posts, however, I move the remaining cards to the following month’s list first.
Published Posts
The final stop for most cards is Published Posts. After I publish a post, I move its corresponding card to this board. I also add the post’s original pub date to the card’s comment section. If I retire a card or modify it in some way later, I add that date and a brief note about what I did.
Published Posts is more rigidly organized than the other boards. The lists here all use the naming scheme “Published 20XX” where the X’s represent the year (ex. “Published 2019”). The lists are arranged in reverse chronological order, which puts the current year’s list up front when I open the board. If a list gets too long to see all of the cards without zooming out, I create a new one, transfer over some of the cards, and add “Part #” to the title.
This is the only board where I use a Power-Up, the Google Drive Power-Up. After I publish a blog post, I put the folder with all of its associated files (images, drafts, etc.) into Google Drive. Thanks to this Power-Up, I can reach into that folder from Trello and attach the final version of the post’s text file and a PDF of the finished post to the card.
Recently, I started assigning covers to the cards as well. I use the blog post’s featured image as its card’s cover, which appears as an image attachment along with the other attached files. If the card represents a link post, a simple miscellaneous post, or an announcement, which use the same featured image on my site, I make the cover a solid green (for no reason other than green reminds me of my favorite K-Pop group NCT). If the card represents an old version of an updated post, I make the cover gray to indicate that it has been retired.
And that’s how I use Trello to manage my blog.
*Updated from a post originally published in 2019 and 2021.*