Sharing my work flow

Howdy internet friend and welcome back!

Greetz to you, internet friend, and welcome back to my blog! Earlier this week I was thinking about a post I could write that would be something a little different from my weekly updates. So in this article I am going to share with you my work flow for creating new posts. I’ve previously written here about converting this blog from Jekyll to Hugo and some of the issues I experienced. In this post, however, I want to share with you how I go about writing new posts from a work flow perspective. I don’t know if this will actually be interesting to you, dear reader, or if this is just something I might need to refer to later if (when) I break my system(s). That being said, I either hope you either enjoy this, or it helps me out of a pickle later!

Before I start by describing what my work flow looks like, I need to first set the stage. As I’ve mentioned in other places, I’m a passionate Linux user - having been full time on various flavors of the operating systems for the last ten years. Most recently I switched from Arch Linux to Fedora, partially because it had been nearly a decade since I last ran Fedora and wanted to see what has changed. However, I also made the switch because it had been too long since I’d been responsible for maintaining a Red Hat system. Just to give you old school Linux folx an example of how long it had been, my first inclination around package management was to use Yum to update all my packages and install new software! Anyway, now that you know that I am on Fedora and that the blog was built using Hugo let me share a little bit more about how I write new posts. Before I do that though, I wanted to add that I created a custom Hugo theme which allowed me to customize the look and feel of this blog. This is also related to the reason I’ve been having trouble with CSS recently - because I wrote it! If you are considering making your own Hugo site, I would recommend using one of the pre-built themes rather than building your own. This custom theme was very time consuming to create and if you are just looking to get up quickly, find and use one of the pre-created open source themes. Now that I’ve got that second tangent out of the way, I will share how I create new posts.

One thing that is really cool about Hugo is how easy it is to create new posts. From the directory where your Hugo blog source is located in your file system, all you need to do is type the following command, “hugo new post/2020-XX-XX-title-of-post.md” where the first XX is the month and the second XX is the date, and your new post stub will be created in the post folder. From there, I go in and write the post using Markdown and ViM. Once I’ve completed the post, all I need to do is a quick edit, issue a few git commands (git add ., git commit -m “commit message”, git push) and the post is live!

If you are thinking to yourself, “wow, that sounds pretty straight forward” you would be right! Of all the things I like about Hugo and static sites, just how easy it is to create new content might be my favorite! When I first undertook the challenge of building a static site using Jekyll, I didn’t anticipate that the two things I would learn the most about would be Markdown and Git, but it turns out that those two things were instrumental in getting this new blog up and running! If you are unfamiliar with Markdown you should know that it was created with assistance from Aaron Swartz (RIP) and is a lightweight markup language. There are a number of cool things about Markdown, but the thing I like the most about it is that it quicky and easily it takes content you write and converts it to a language web browsers can understand.

I would like to end this blog by sharing a few thoughts. One thing that is very cool about taking on projects is that the stuff you learn isn’t always what you think it will be! In the example above, I planned on learning about how static sites are built, but I ended up learning more about Markdown and Git than anything else - which is awesome! Sometimes the things you think you need to learn don’t always end up being exactly what you needed to learn in the first place. One of the benefits of being a forever-student is that you are always learning new things! On that high note, I am going to end this post. Thank you for taking the time to read it, and I hope you have a very nice day!

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