This site is running on Wordpress using the Mimbo theme by Darren Hoyt. Both are offered free. Thus,  in a spirit of reciprocity, I am producing this page as a service to the community.

One of the key problems I encountered when setting up Mimbo was how to ensure a workflow for articles from writing through to publication. I publish this workflow in the hope that others may use it as a starting point.

My model works like this: I produce a Lead Story that takes prominence on the front page. This displaces the previous Lead which becomes a Feature in the left column. Eventually, this is displaced into the middle column on the page as one of the more specific stories there. In preparing for this migration, I adopt the following steps:

1. I write the article, of course, and identify a picture from a free source. I tend to use the creative commons Flickr photos found through the image search on Slidebay.com.
2. I use The GIMP to develop four versions of the main illustration and give them descriptive filenames baes on size. The main picture to appear in the article page itself will be 650 by 401 pixels in size (using the golden rectangle to decide the proportion) — and it is called, for example, picture_650×401.jpg. The thumbnail for the Lead Story block will be sized and named picture_269×178.jpg, picture_255×88.jpg will be used for the Feature, and picture_51×51.jpg will be used for the time the story spends on the middle column.
3. I upload the four pictures to the Mimbo theme images folder using ftp.
4. I then insert the 650-width picture into the main article and assign it a category as “Lead Story”. The first time I publish the story I do not assign it any other category as this can confuse Mimbo.
5. I also assign a custom field of type “Image” pointing to the 269-width image.
6. I write then the meta-data on the post: I write the excerpt (55 words max), I assign tags to the post, and using the All-in-one-SEO plugin, I paste in the excerpt as a description, tags as keywords, and put in a descriptive title to appear in window title-bars.
7. I paste in any pages that I want to trackback or ping.
8. I click Save, then Publish!
9. I edit the most recent Lead Story, reassign it to category Features, and update the image in the custom field to point to the 255-width image. I hit Publish here too.
10. I edit the oldest Features story, reassign it to another category on my site, and point the custom Image to the 51-width image, again simply by a name change. I hit Publish again.
11. In this way, I have created a new story, published it as Lead, and migrated two older stories down the hierarchy of the home page.

I hope this helps other Mimbo users.