Your next hundred articles are already on your site

There is a version of the content-planning problem everybody talks about, and a version that actually stops people.

The one everybody talks about is ideas. What should we write about next. There are a hundred tools for it, all generating topic lists, and I have never met somebody running a real content site who was short of ideas.

The one that stops people is duller than that. You published a few hundred posts over several years. Some meaningful share of them are now wrong, thin, or about a version of something that no longer exists. You already know this. What you do not have is the list. And without the list, "refresh the archive" is not a task. It is a mood.

The list already exists

Your site publishes a sitemap. Almost every site does - it is how search engines are told what is there. It is a complete, current, machine-readable inventory of everything you have ever published, and in my experience the person who runs the site has never once opened it.

So point Mastheads at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. It reads it and lists what you publish.

Then the part that is actually the feature. Three filters:

• Path contains - /blog/, if you want the blog and not the product pages.
• Last changed - pages nobody has touched in three, six or twelve months.
• Take at most - the first twenty-five, which is one full run.

And it counts out loud while you narrow. The dialog carries three numbers side by side: IN THE SITEMAP, AFTER FILTERS, TAKING. You watch the last one come down as you tighten the first two. Nothing is decided behind your back, and nothing is spent until you say so.

That is the whole import. It is not clever. It is the thing that was missing.

What it does not do, and why I am telling you

It sorts by age, not by worth.

A twelve-month-old page is not automatically a page that deserves a rewrite. Some old posts are old because they were finished. Some are quietly your best-performing pages and the last thing you should touch. A last-changed filter cannot tell those apart, and I would rather say so here than let you find out after a run.

What it gives you is a short, honest shortlist out of an archive too big to hold in your head. That was the impossible step, not the judgement. The judgement is still yours and it takes about two minutes once the list is in front of you.

One other thing worth knowing. A sitemap will hand you pages that are not articles at all - section indexes, tag pages, a paywall, the occasional link that no longer resolves. Every page that comes back is fetched and shown to you before anything is generated, and one we could not read is named and left out rather than written about blind. That check exists because of imports exactly like this one.

The habit this is for

Once a quarter: open your own sitemap through the product, filter to /blog/ and twelve months, take twenty-five, read the list. Strike the ones that are fine. Run the rest.

That is a maintenance pass on your archive that used to mean an afternoon with a spreadsheet, and most sites never did it once. Not because it was hard - because nobody had the list.

New accounts get ten articles over seven days, free, with no card. Ten is enough to try it on the ten pages you already suspect.