Indexing your work

I will suggest that you index your own work. Due to Steemit's nature, your readers may lose a chapter or two in your story line, if you write fiction, or maybe miss a chapter in your documentary work. Even worse, you can lose track of what you are doing, especially if you write a lot, or write on a lot of different subjects . In order to make it easier on your readers, you might want to consider indexes or link-chains. Cheetah may yell ;>, but these devices can help you readers move from post to another easily. Indexes can also find your older posts that you may wish to repost or to reference. I wouldn't suggest an index of everything that you write if you cover a lot of subjects all in one post, but a post indexing your fiction in one blog, and then another covering your criminal justice thoughts in another, may just be the ticket. It might also help YOU keep track of what your doing.

A Sample Index

This sample screenshot shows indexing and writing new stories in combination. As I wrote the series, I would go back and update previous posts, sometimes due to outstanding commenter contribution, and other times to reinforce what I was doing in a later post. Another benfit to me is to be able to go back and search for an earlier post I wanted to reference.

Making an index for this work made it easier for my readers to get the whole idea of what I was getting at AND made it easier for me to keep writing towards the end goal!


Interested in these titles? click here to read the stories

You can see another sample index, for fiction, organized in a different manner.

How to Build Your Own Indexes

Have a general outline of the way you want to share your information; obviously, fiction series would be from chapter to chapter, but real life research can be presented in many ways, and is usually so complex, that you may need to make some introductory posts so your readers can follow your more in-depth work with better understanding.

Then you start to gather your posts: There are several methods for doing so -

  • Bookmarking: You can bookmark your posts as you write them, and then do searches for those posts.
  • Hard Drive archiving - This is the most complicated, but IMO, the best way to keep your writing organized. I use Zotero, see last post, to do this...sometimes ;>
  • AskSteem is a great Steemit search engine. If you were to do a search author:stevescoins, you would see all my blogs returned for the result; if you just wanted my informationwar work, you could use author:stevescoins AND tags:informationwar.
  • Unique Tagging: Steemit gives 5 slots for tags; use one of these slots to create a tag that will be unique to that category you wish to come back and look for later...for example, I could use stevescoinsfiction or stevescoins3 to make searching for these posts easier, as long as I kept track of which tags I was using.
  • Spreadsheets: Although I am a big advocate for spreadsheets for organization, I use Zotero (when I remember to) for Steemit writing organization. But for those folks that don't want to bother with Zotero, put together a spreadsheet!
    sssample.jpg

InformationWar Application

I'm going to be asking those who write in informationwar to index their own posts, maybe one index for their best work, and another index (or more) for any series they have compiled. Keeping data where it can be cross referenced is going to help people make up their own minds better than having folks chase across the internet post by post.



My Books

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