Web Publishing Workflow
2023-11-11Last updated: 2023-11-19
Overview
- Web files are served from my Vultr VM.
- New files and changes are published by mirroring a directory on my Mac to a directory on the VM.
- Web files are edited directly (html, css) using VSCode & iA Writer.
- Posts are added to RSS feeds manually by adding an "entry" to the /blog.xml file.
- Presently, the process is quite manual. There are likely scripts and automation I can use to streamline once the process stabilizes. Manual is OK to start.
Publishing Process
- Copy template file
- Rename file and headers
- Write the post in iA Writer in Markdown
- Copy the HTML (Shift-CMD-C)
- Paste the HTML into the template in VSCode
- Tidy formatting
- Save the file
- Add links to the file on /index and /blog (or elsewhere if relevant)
- Add an "entry" to /blog.xml to push to the RSS feed (if relevant)
- Publish changes in terminal via rsync command
Details on updating the /blog.xml file for RSS
- Create new "entry" by copy-pasting an existing entry
- Populate "id", "link", "title", "published" and "updated" fields by copy-pasting from the original post.
- Add the "content" of the post by copy-pasting the body of the html from the original post, wrapped in a CDATA field to render the HTML properly.
- Update any links from internal (e.g. /webpub) to external links (full url), using find & replace in VSCode
Questions, comments or ideas on how to improve this workflow? Let me know in the comments. I'll update this post as my process evolves/improves.