Rethinking How I Write Blog Posts

07/16/15

I have a methodology to publishing posts that really is in sore need of updating. It goes like this.

Log onto computer
Open crosh shell
shell
sudo enter-chroot
Input password
cd Projects/doing/nodeSite/
pushd public/blog/inprogress
cp templates/post.html <post_title>.html
vim <post_title>.html
Write title of post in empty title tag
Write title of post in empty h1 class="title" tag
Fill in date
Write post
Fill in links
Remove any superfluous '""' strings.
pushd
node scripts/publish.js blog public/blog/inprogress/<post_title>.html
vim public/basic.rss
Copy last RSS item, edit to discuss new blog post
git add .
git commit -m 'Publishing blog post "<Post Title>"'
./site_push.bash

And after all of that a new post is pushed to the server that everyone can see.

There's a lot of manual stuff in there that doesn't need to be manual. Some of it is unavoidable, like logging onto my computer. However, copying the template post, entering the title in manually twice and the date in once, and writing a lot of the RSS stuff are all things that could be more automated.

I think of particular interest is fixing the RSS setup. It's something that I can forget to do, and it's just tedious and error-prone in various ways.

How I want to fix it involves fixing some other blog post problems, too. I want to have the RSS blurb be written in the same file I write the blog post. When I finally publish it, I want that blurb to not be apart of the blog post itself.

I now have a small amount of experience with ejs. Not enough to know what ejs is or what it stands for, but enough to serve it and have some parts of it be served dynamically.

Part of me thinks that I may also just want to start over. Move all of this site into some sort of "old" area, have the last blog post point to the new area.

It's definitely something for me to consider.

Though, for now, I'll do bitwise changes until I know I want to start over.