18/5/2024

My Blogging Workflow

Let’s talk about blogs!

Mine is made with Jekyll and hosted on Fastmail — yes, on Fastmail’s virtual drive; more on that in a second. I mix medium-length articles with images, quotes, and short notes/asides (which we used to know as “tweets”), which makes my blog, in fact, a tumblelog.

Post ideas are registered in a list in Apple Reminders and developed on the computer. To write, I always use the standard macOS TextEditor, in plain text mode.

After putting the front matter in the file, I save it in the posts directory of my local copy of the blog and run an alias command in the terminal that serves as a shortcut for four commands:

• bundle update, to update Jekyll dependencies;
• jekyll clean, to delete the local copy of the static site;
• jekyll build, to generate a new copy of the static site; and
• rclone -v --progress --delete-excluded-checksum --exclude ".*{/**,}" sync ~/Sites/Notes/_site/ fastmail:rodrigo.ghed.in/files/notes/, to send the blog files to the Fastmail drive using rclone.

It sounds complex, but to be honest it’s not. (I’m not a developer or anything like that, just a random guy a little curious.)

I run the same workflow in my pt_BR blog, and both of them work like a charm!

This post was inspired by Robb Knight, Barry Hess, Robert Birming and others who shared their blog publishing workflows. See all of them on Robert’s blog.