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Blog post outline template
Angle, audience, structure and SEO for a post
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Filled example
The template filled in for a made-up company, so you can see what good looks like.
Why your runbooks rot (and how to stop it)
Author: Tomas Lindqvist · Date: 2026-09-22
Working title options
- 5 tips for better runbooks
- Runbooks are documentation debt
- Why your runbooks rot (and how to stop it)
Audience & takeaway
- Audience: SRE and platform leads at 50 to 500 person companies who own an on-call rotation and a wiki full of stale pages.
- Takeaway: A runbook stays accurate only if it is edited in the same place, and at the same moment, as the incident it describes.
Angle
Most runbook advice is about format (checklists, templates). Our data says format barely matters. Across 1,400 Bramble Labs runbooks, the ones edited during an incident were 3x more likely to be correct six months later than the ones written in a quiet week. The post argues that freshness is a workflow problem, not a writing problem.
Outline
H2: The runbook you need is always the stale one
- Opens with a real (anonymized) 2 a.m. incident where step 4 pointed at a decommissioned host.
H2: What we found in 1,400 runbooks
- Edit-during-incident runbooks: 71% accurate at six months. Written-in-isolation: 23%.
- One simple chart, no methodology wall.
H2: Three habits that keep runbooks honest
- Link the runbook from the alert itself.
- Make the postmortem's first action item "fix the runbook".
- Give every runbook a named owner and a review date.
H2: What to do this week
- A 30-minute exercise: pick your five most-paged alerts and check their runbooks.
Keywords & SEO
- Primary keyword: runbook best practices (informational intent; searchers want a checklist they can apply)
- Secondary keywords: incident runbook template, on-call documentation, SRE runbook
CTA
Try the free incident runbook template in Bramble Labs, prefilled with the three habits.
Distribution
- SRE Weekly submission and our own newsletter (14,000 subscribers)
- Tomas posts the chart on LinkedIn with a two-line hook
- Share in the two Slack communities where we already answer on-call questions
Review checklist
The template
Show the blank template
Blog post outline
Author: [your name] · Date: [date]
Working title options
Draft 3. The real title is often the third one, once you've argued past the obvious one.
Audience & takeaway
Who this is for and the one thing they should remember after reading. Everything else is in service of this.
Angle
What makes this worth writing now, and different from the ten other posts on the topic.
Outline
H2s with a bullet of what each section proves. A heading with no point under it gets cut in edit.
H2: [section heading]
H2: [section heading]
H2: [section heading]
Keywords & SEO
Primary keyword and the intent behind the search. Write for the person, optimize for the engine second.
- Primary keyword:
- Secondary keywords:
CTA
One clear next step, not three competing ones.
Distribution
Where this gets pushed after publish. A post with no distribution plan is a post no one reads.
Review checklist
The last-mile checks that catch what drafting misses.
Questions
- How detailed should the outline be?
- Each H2 with one bullet of what it proves; that is enough for a writer to draft from
- When do I pick the final title?
- After the draft, since the best title usually comes from what the post actually says
- Who reviews it?
- An editor for structure, plus a subject expert for any technical claim
Fill it with your agent
Connect Claude to reph over MCP, then paste this. The draft arrives as suggestions you accept or reject section by section. How to connect Claude.
Find my reph doc "Blog post outline" with search_docs, then read it with read_doc. Propose three working titles, an angle and an H2 outline from the topic notes in the doc, our past posts on the subject and the customer questions or call notes it links, plus a primary keyword and its search intent. File it with suggest_edit, one replace_section op per section (heading line kept) so each can be accepted alone. Ask each open question (unverified claims, a missing proof point) with add_comment quoting that section's heading line, then call request_review with a one-line summary.
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