I have a confession to make. About writing a blog. It's based on some advice I always share with new clients as a blog writer.

But here's the confession: maintaining an editorial calendar sucks.

It sometimes feels like more work than it's worth. It's difficult to maintain. So, it gets neglected and disorganised. It falls into disarray and, as a result, your blog becomes neglected and disorganised.

Sound familiar?

Working as a blog writer (and the freelance writer who gets tech) I've tried various online tools to help me master the art of the editorial calendar. Until now, other solutions haven't quite worked. They've helped, but never taken away all of the issues around writing a blog.

Then, I started working with Trello, and things have got a lot less...sucky. I know what posts I need to write and when. It prompts me when a deadline is looming, and it's a great repository to write ideas down.

In case you're not familiar with Trello, its a fabulous collaboration tool. It organises your blog (or whatever project you're working on) into a board. This board is divided into columns (called lists) and tasks (called cards) pass along the columns from left to right.

​Here's a quick tutorial on Trello:

Let's assume you just want to manage your personal blog with an editorial calendar. Let's look into the three basic components (boards, lists and cards) to set up your blog:

Trello organises projects into boards. Your blog’s editorial calendar will be run from one board, so create this board. It’s incredibly simple to do for a personal blog — just hit the “boards” tab at the top left-hand corner of Trello, and click to “create a board”. Call it “editorial calendar” and off you go — told you it was simple! 

I'd recommend a really simple set-up where you just have three lists for your blog: ideas, writing and published. It should look something a little like this:

Here's what each list is for:

Ideas - this is where (surprise, surprise) you dump all of your ideas for your blog. 

Writing - once you start working on a post, pop it in the writing column. This really helps me to push through posts to publishing, instead of letting them stagnate in some half-finished form.

Published - pop any articles you've published here. It's good to keep a couple of month's of posts here so you can make sure you don't repeat yourself or, more importantly, build a story of posts.

Now we have a board and lists in place, let's drill down to creating cards for each blog post. 

For a personal blog, you don't need to come up with a full outline - just a title is enough. Brainstorm and jot down ideas, no matter how daft they may seem, as cards. When you get to the writing stage, you can delete cards and choose which ones you want to write.

You can also add a quick description and outline, and remember to put in a due date. Which brings me to my next point.

It's vital to schedule your posts. Trello will alert you when a card is due, reminding you to post (or write!) that article.

I'd recommend installing the "calendar" power-up using the top right-hand menu. You can see when your posts are scheduled on a calendar - it makes it easy to identify any gaps when you should be posting, or maintain a consistent schedule. Here's what it looks like:

This post has covered the basics of maintaining a personal blog on Trello. If you want to extend these principles to a larger blog, with multiple writers, I'll cover that in the next post.

​Happy blogging!

Last week, we dealt with General Relativity (which is all about gravity). This week, we're looking at another theory from Einstein: Special Relativity (which does not include gravity).

This clip from Channel 4's wonderful comedy Father Ted actually explains the basics of Special Relativity quite nicely:

It's all about frames of reference. In the clip, Father Ted explains to Dougal that the toy cows in his hands are "small, but the ones out there are far away".

Special Relativity takes things one step further to include motion. It states that everything is moving relative to everything else.

Confused? Time to break out the Lego figures to help us explain.

Here's Ironman whizzing past Batman at a constant velocity of 750mph.

Ironman has no way to prove he's moving. It could be that Batman (and the Earth and everything on it) is moving backwards at 750 mph.

And under Special Relativity BOTH frames of reference are correct. It could be Ironman, it could be Batman moving at 750mph.

BUT this rule only applies under certain SPECIAL circumstances (hence, the name Special Relativity).

Ironman must be travelling at a constant velocity. In other words, he has to be travelling at the same speed and in a straight line.

If Ironman accelerates or changes direction, then Special Relativity no longer applies. But General Relativity does.

Special Relativity has many consequences for Ironman, Batman and our entire understanding of the universe:

1. Time changes,
2. Moving objects appear shorter to one another,
3. The world's most famous equation E=mc2 results.

We'll delve more into those three big scientific concepts soon. 

Rewind five years and picture your Facebook stream. What did it look like?

​Chances are it was filled with words, not images. Your Tweets were photo-free 140-character musings. Text was King in the social media space of yesteryear.

Things have changed.

Smartphones fitted with high-quality cameras and improved network speeds mean social media outlets have transformed into an online picture gallery where you could share your thoughts and experiences through images and videos. The emphasis changed as text was sidelined by images and video snippets.

What’s next?

The online world is shifting its focus again thanks to technologies such as the 4G network, which gives you download speeds peaking at 50 Mbps, and the 4K Ultra High Resolution, which runs at resolutions of 3,840 pixels x 2,160 lines. Suddenly the low-quality, slow-loading images that once filled your news feed  are being replaced with high-quality GIFs that appear instantaneously.

The effect is infectious. The humble GIF, once the pixelated Court Jester of the online kingdom, has got its eyes focused on the social media crowd.

The GIF Revolution

The GIF has a chequered history. In the 1990s, dancing babies, hamsters and bananas amused and annoyed us. The GIF’s popularity waned until the mid-2000s when MySpace led a GIF resurgence, using the format to personalise user pages.​

MySpace was soon shunted out of the social media landscape as it became too cluttered. Users wanted a clean and simple interface. They didn’t want GIFs. They craved the simplicity of the Facebook feed.

​But, in the early 2010s, GIFs started to reappear in the comments sections of Tumblr and Reddit. These clunky moving images started to amuse people again and, before long, the Giphy GIF sharing site was born.

It was suddenly incredibly simple to find and use GIFs. Giphy is widely regarded as the Google of the GIF world, with their API recently reaching one billion visits per day. Google gets around 3.5 billion searches and Bing gets roughly 120 million searches per day. GIFs are all the rage again.

Such easy access and high distribution figures meant the likes of Facebook and Twitter began to take note. In 2015, Twitter users shared more than 100 million GIFs and earlier last year it introduced a GIF search. Facebook also officially supported GIFs and let users search for and post GIFs directly in Messenger.

Apple launched its Live Photos feature in 2015, where devices capture three seconds of video when you take a photo. It’s a bit like a GIF, but audio is also captured to effectively create tiny videos.

Marketers quickly jumped on the GIF bandwagon too as posts featuring those funny little animations suddenly boosted conversion rates by 103 per cent and total revenues by 109 percent.

Big brands including Calvin Klein and Disney partnered with Giphy to host their existing GIFs on their own branded channel.

General Relativity is the pillar of modern physics. Let's try and explain it in a few paragraphs and with the help of Lego Batman.

First, we need to understand Newton's first law of motion. Here it is: an object will stay sat still or keep moving forever at a constant speed, unless a force acts on it.

Batman likes to jump off buildings. When he jumps off buildings he's accelerating to the ground.

But Batman doesn't feel a force when this happens. And he should under Newton's first law of motion. It doesn't make sense.

Einstein (why does no one make a Lego Einstein?!) came up with the solution: gravity is a product of warped space and time.

What is space and time? It's like a blanket on which every astronomical object sits.

And the heavier you are the more you warp space and time.

The Earth does not keep the Moon in orbit by exerting a physical force on it, but because its mass distorts the surrounding space and forces the Moon to move that way. 

​This means that being at rest in a gravitational field and accelerating are physically identical.

​This is General Relativity.

This week, scientists reportedly brought "nonsensical" quantum physics into the real world for the first time. Is quantum physics really nonsensical? Or do we just need an Ironman Lego figure to help us truly understand it?

Quantum mechanics is the science of the incredibly small. When you are trying to describe how a tiny particle will act (compared to an object you can see unaided in the real world) weird stuff starts to happen.

Time to look at a superhero example. Here's Ironman standing on my desk:

Because I live in a world governed by the rules of the classic physics, I'm pretty confident that Ironman will stay stood there until my son reclaims him.

In the quantum world, if you conduct a measurement you can’t get a single, definite answer about its outcome. 

​When I'm not looking at Ironman in the quantum world, he could be doing an infinite number of things. By observing him, I am forcing him to do the most likely of these things.

The minute I look at him, I dictate the state he's in. It's most likely that he'll still be there, in the same position on my desk. So, that's the state he returns to when I look at him.

As Einstein once put it: “Do you really think the moon isn’t there if you aren’t looking at it?”

It's confusing stuff, and here's some extra reading to help you out:

• Are the Quantum World and the Real World the Same Thing?
• What can the Quantum World teach us about reality?
• Physicists can't agree what the Quantum World looks like

If quantum mechanics exists on a scale so small that we can't see it - why do we need to understand it?

Well, the principles of quantum mechanics have guided some of our most important discoveries. For example, the transistor and diode (two of the most fundamental parts on a computer chip) are based on the laws of quantum mechanics. Without quantum mechanics, I wouldn't have a computer to write this on.

Here's an excellent article highlighting 10 of the practical applications of quantum mechanics.

​There is also a range of practical uses for one of the spookiest quantum mechanical phenomenon - entanglement. Quantum entanglement states that particles on opposite sides of the universe separated by billions of light-years are intrinsically linked, and this link lets them share information instantly.

​Einstein scoffed at the premise - but it was later proven by John Stewart Bell. 

And that's the real problem with quantum mechanics - its principles and ideas are so alien to our human brains that we can struggle to visualise and understand them.

With this week's first glimpses of quantum effects happening on a scale just big enough to be seen by the human eye, a new era of understanding and discoveries in the quantum world can, hopefully, begin.

I am excited to announce the launch of a new blog series, "Sunday Science".

​Over the coming months, I'll be highlighting some core scientific concepts that you've probably heard of, but may not know the ins and outs of.

Throughout the blog series, I will explain what each concept is, why it's important and who the big players are. 

Oh, and I'll be explaining it with the help of my son's superhero Lego characters.

Want to see how (or if) this will work? The posts will appear here every Sunday. Or if you want to sign up to the Sunday Science newsletter,  please fill in the form below.

Amen.

Are you dreading your return to work after the festive break? Do you long to set up your own business and to escape from the 9-5 drudgery?

​Newsflash. If you want to run a business, there's a 50-50 chance you'll fail in the first five years. I'm living proof of that stat - my first venture closed after just three years, but my second business is going from strength to strength.

So, what went so wrong first time round? And so right this time? I'd argue luck played a small part - but so did the mistakes I made with that first business.

Those mistakes helped me to cultivate my second incarnation as "the freelance writer who gets tech". Here's a (very honest) discussion on the five lessons I learnt with that first business.

​I hope they help you get things right (first time) for your business in 2017:

A few years ago, I started a jewellery company after attending a local silversmithing course. It had moderate success. I received orders, built up a client base and things ticked along nicely.

It did not, however, give me the financial clout to quit my day job. Why? The competition has too high and my ideas, quite frankly, were not original enough. The market is saturated with moderately talented jewellery makers. I needed to stand out. And I didn't.

This is where my writing business got things write.

See what I did there?

I found a niche in the market - I don't just write about science and technology, I've worked in these sectors as a research scientist and software developer. I've lived, breathed and worked on the topics I write about. I'd also worked as a journalist for a number of years.

My scatter-gun CV of jobs in the media, scientific and technical sectors gave me an unusual combination of skills. I can do and write about science and technology.

I am very, very different from other freelance writers. And this difference meant I finally stood out from the crowd.

I love maths but completely failed to do some basic calculations with that original jewellery business. Once I factored in the cost of materials, other overheads and how long it took me to make an item of jewellery - I was probably only making a few pounds an hour. And, given the infrequency of my orders, I could not rely on that tiny income.

You will need a basic income to survive. Once you know that figure, extrapolate to include your expenses and anything else that could impact your financial health. Or you could just make it up - which is the (surprisingly) excellent advice given in this blog post.

Setting up a business is a mystery in itself - the variables between your business and a competitor's offering will vary wildly. Just don't throw money at any problems - work out what works for you. Here's a great post covering the basics of setting up a business model.

You can have the best business in the world, but if no one knows about it, who's going to invest in it?

You must put time aside to research your target audience and market your business appropriately. This seemed like a dark art when I ran the jewellery business. I wasted a lot of money on magazine advertising and chasing Facebook followers when I should have been approaching local shops and building clients organically.

You need to understand your target audience and how to reach out to those individuals. Here's an excellent article crammed with marketing resources and ideas that could work for you.

If your business doesn't succeed, what are you going to do? Make sure you have a Plan B.

For the jewellery business, I didn't quit my day job - I kept it as my safety net because I could commit to both my "proper" job and fledgling business. I did not overly invest in expensive materials and equipment that would now be gathering dust. I kept detailed accounts to continually check the business's financial health.

If I hadn't been so careful, I could have ended up in an awful lot of debt. Yes, you need to invest in your new business - but throwing good money after bad will never save the day. 

Be cautious and make sure you can cover yourself should the proverbial s**t ever hit the fan.

Here's one thing I failed to do with my writing business: I did not prepare for its success.

I assumed that it would take years to cultivate a client base. I assumed that I would be twiddling my thumbs and chasing work. Thankfully, I was completely wrong.

There is a flip side to this success. How are you going to cope if orders come flying in? How can you meet this demand? As a writer, it's involved a few all-nighters when I've inadvertently taken too much on.

It's a learning curve but it's the most important lesson of all - you must prepare for success. You must be prepared to turn down work to maintain the quality of your work or expand to meet demand.

I hope you've found this post useful, but it's just a tiny snapshot of my experiences. I'd love to hear your experiences and advice to fellow aspiring freelancers and business owners.

Please share your tips in the comments below!