Introduction

It is 1000 days ago that I started my daily posts on discovermyeurope.eu. Since then I publish one post every single day at 16.00. Many are saying it is a lot of commitments. For me it is a lot of fun and pleasure. Let’s mark this special day with a special post in which I share with you my experience and give you some insight about my editorial workflow so that you can understand why it doesn’t feel so painful.

First why I am doing this?

I am an avid reader and I have been always a very curious person. I have been always looking for some means to combine this voracity of information with my intrinsic need of sharing it. Since over 25 years I have been designing websites. Quite often, it was my support to good causes. That’s how I helped associations, initiatives create their websites. It has been a long way. First HTML, then PHP, then Joomla, Drupal and in the last decade WordPress.

Having a blog has been always an intriguing idea for me. This is a way to express myself. But that’s not all. Having such a project on a daily basis provides me some nice rhythm in the life and also a nice disconnect after a busy working day. That was at least the plan. And it turned to be mostly true.

How I select the topics? Basically the pictures first from my archive

One of the consequences of my curiosity is that I love taking pictures everywhere I am. Be it in the forest, sitting on a bench or visiting some European countries for holidays. I am lucky to travel a lot. Once a picture is there, I have a good starting point to dig out some details about the place and then slowly the topic is decided and the draft of the article is designed. Afterwards, it is still a long way, but more straightforward. Before explaining my editorial workflow, it is also important to explain what topics I cover and what I don’t.

What do I cover and what I don’t

I cover topics that are in line with my ethics. I am convinced European with a positive, but critical attitude. My studies in international relations and languages are one hint of orientation, my love of architecture, cars, nature, technology… are another. All this around my interest in learning and communicating in various languages.

How do I work? How does my workflow look like?

Most of you are asking if I am really writing and publishing a post every single day. Well, the short answer is yes and no.

The longer one is the following. I have a 5-step workflow that has the following stages.

1. Selection of the photo: This is the starting point for all my articles. I choose in my favourites one photo I took recently (or not so recently) for which I have a story or there is something I want to research.
2. Writing the article and noting down what should be still improved: As I am not native English speaker, I mark those parts that I find suspicious from stylistic point of view and where I query the AI for an improvement and review. This draft is often longer than the final article as it contains targeted prompts for the AI.
3. Cleaning and finalisation with the help of the AI: I submit my entire post with my prompts to Copilot and I take over the improvements I find useful.
4. Waiting for scheduling: The ready made article is waiting for publication. I have always a stock so that I am never under pressure even if I have no time to produce a new one for a week or two. The schedule is usually ahead for at least two weeks. Every day, there is one article released at 4PM CET.
5. Publication and sharing: The website is automatically publishing the post, but I am manually sharing it on the various social media platforms. It happens every day any time before midnight.

So basically, yes I publish every day, but I work with conserves as one would say in the newspaper business. Therefore the absolute minimum time per day required is to share the freshly published post on social media which reduces my constraint to couple of minutes.

Technical background

Well, I am a self-taught website editor and IT guy, but I am definitely not an advanced programmer. I have always had some shared hosting space and I know how to install and manage WordPress sites. That’s what I do also for this blog. WordPress is rather flexible and with some tweaking, it becomes a really powerful platform.

As I mentioned above, I use AI as a support in drafting my articles. To be more precise, I usually use Copilot of Microsoft, more rarely Le Chat Mistral. My experience is rather good with both. However it is also worth noting that in the last years I managed to fine-tune a lot my prompting and today it is not rare that my prompt is much longer than the actual post.

How I share it?

Beside my website, I am active on multiple platforms with multiple accounts. I have a Facebook account, I have several thematic accounts on Instagram. I have an account on Mastodon, on Thread and on Bluesky. When I draft my posts, I prepare the social media announcement as well and hence it is rather quick and easy to proceed with the daily sharing. I have not too much time to further curate my social media accounts and it is not primary focus either.

What sort of feedback I get and what is my audience?

You would say that the most crucial is to have a big outreach and audience. Well, I will be honest. Of course it is sometimes impressing to see that I have over 11k followers combined on my Instagram accounts and a daily average of 750 visits to my website. But it is not my primary objective. I am much more interested in the chats that some of my posts trigger. Be it online or in person with friends and colleagues. And what is also equally interesting is the daily learning when I am discovering new things in Europe. Hence the name of the blog.

What did I learn with all this?

Actually fair to ask what are the biggest take-aways and learnings. Well I learned a lot about plenty of topics (history, architecture, technology etc.) while researching for individual posts. But I also learned a lot about the programming of WordPress, managing the various social media platforms and prompting AI in particular and curating online content in general.

My plans?

I have still thousands of pictures and stories that I want to share. For the moment my motivation is still high to keep the rhythm and things rolling.

So see you tomorrow at 16.00 with a normal post.