Stockpiling blog posts

TL;DR

Sometimes I can write a few posts ahead of time… but stockpile them for publishing when I run out of time. Git helps.

Writing posts ahead of time in this blog allows me to keep up with a self-promise of publishing one post per day. Which is a reasonable proxy for writing one post per day, at least on average.

This leads me to a little issue though. If I have a few canned posts - let’s say three - it means that if I discover something cool I’ll publish about it only later than three days.

Now, admittedly some posts here have a sort of… filler taste, if you will, so it’s better to have two different speeds and leave the filler stuff for when I’m short with time.

The solution I though about is the following:

  • Write these fillers and set to a time very ahead in the future - like 200 years from now. This guarantees me that it appears on top of the list;
  • Save each of these posts in a branch of itself, like stockpile/item-d-x where the d is a date and x is a progressive integer (it will usually be 0);
  • When I need it, get an element from this stockpile, change the date and publish it.

To help me with this process, script stockpile.sh helps a lot:

  • The add sub-command works much like publish.sh, only saving the new post(s) inside its(/theirs) own branch;
  • The get sub-command takes an item and puts it into the current branch (usually devel)
  • For good measure, the list sub-command does what you think.

I somehow feel that this blog is growing and growing, but until it’s still capable of letting me do stuff from the web should I need it… it’s fine.


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