How long do you normally spend doing a breakdown? How much content do you want to do a breakdown for each day? What happens if you encounter a page where you know most of it?
For example, I did a breakdown of two pages from Flying Witch in which I was very familiar with most (if not all) of the content. It took me forever to write up, so I stopped after two pages. (I really wanted to get more like six done, but just didn’t have the time for it.)
If I didn’t know as much as I did on those two pages, I’d be looking up what things meant, or looking up what I kind of know to make certain I’m understanding and portraying it right, and that would take me half the day for those two pages. I’ve experienced that with the few pages of a reading guide up on one of my web sites, wherein I not only wrote up material, but went back and cleaned it up, and redid the formatting a few times.
Since you’ll want to keep going forward, and not keep cleaning up the earlier posts, my recommendations would be:
- Determine how detailed you want each day’s posting to be. Will you translate the whole page, and break down just a few lines? Or just provide a line or two with breakdowns and translations of those lines?
- Don’t repeat yourself. That is to say, when てる comes up, you can write a bit about 「VERBて + いる」, and about the dropped い. But the next time てる comes up, rather than rewriting it, you can link to what you wrote before, or quote what you wrote before, or just say, “This came up in post 12. Have fun scrolling up to it if you need a refresher.” Joking aside, if you spend too much time repeating the same grammar over and over again, you’re taking away from your time writing other things about the material.
- Feel free to repeat yourself. If there’s something you encounter that you don’t feel comfortable with your understanding of, and then you encounter it again later and start to understand it better (or someone helps by providing useful information), don’t hesitate to talk about the grammar point again. It’ll help you learn it better, and that should be your ultimate goal here. (Everyone else is just along for the ride. If they’re reading along, they’re free to post in a way that helps with their learning.)
Everyone has a different writing style (and you’ll use your own), but here are a few links to my personal blog from when I read through ごちうさ volume 1 last year, and occasionally posted about it. These posts were intended only for me, but posting them online gave me a reason to push to do a write-up, which gave me a push to learn grammar I might otherwise have been lazy and didn’t put effort into (or skipped):
- http://kurifuri.com/2018/01/05/is-the-order-a-rabbit-page-11-left-side
- http://kurifuri.com/2018/01/06/is-the-order-a-rabbit-page-12-right-side
- http://kurifuri.com/2018/01/08/is-the-order-a-rabbit-page-13-right-side (My early says of learning the explanatory の!)
- http://kurifuri.com/2018/01/17/is-the-order-a-rabbit-page-16-right-side
- http://kurifuri.com/2018/04/02/is-the-order-a-rabbit-page-27 (Example of one of my shorter ones.)
When I went through ごちうさ volume 1, while my goal was one four-strip comic per day and sometimes I would type it up that day, I typically tried to get comics typed in advance. Especially if I had time to get four or five pages (upwards of ten strips), I’d be assured that that’s just one less thing I’d have to do in a day. (And a year later, I still occasionally find a typo to correct in my transcript.)
Are you including furigana readings in your transcripts, or just the kanji? If you’re doing kanji only, I recommend keeping at it like that. If you’re including furigana, consider whether that’s adding too much time if you’re able to type it at a good pace. The only reason I did furigana on mine is because I wrote a tool to convert it to a web page afterwards, but doing a search text for a word written with kanji+furigana is difficult.
I don’t think it’s necessary to post all the text as if anyone else is reading along, they should have a copy of the book as well. You also want to ensure that the main portion of the post (breakdowns) are not competing for attention. One possible strategy is to post all the text, including (possibly spoiler-blurred) your translations alongside, and then include a breakdown of certain parts of the page’s content.
As for Google Translate, sometimes it’s nice to use it to get a gist of what’s being said, but I’ve seen it be very misleading or incorrect at times, and completely skip over some words at other times. You don’t want to “learn” something based off of a bad Google Translation, and continue misbelieving what a bit of grammar means.