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Nick  Cotton

My 11ty Blogging Workflow (or Lack Thereof)

Since deciding to go with 11ty, I've struggled to come up with a simple, frictionless workflow for getting text out of my head, into a markdown document and then quickly published.

Here's the current process:

  • Usually start writing a draft in Obsidian, I've got a folder for posts and this seems to be working. There's a bunch of drafts in there.
  • Create an empty markdown file for the post in VSCode with some basic front matter (usually copied from another post)
  • Try and get the dates right [1].
  • Copy the draft from Obsidian into VSCode which has my entire site repo open at all times.
  • Create a new git branch for the post.
  • Try and work out how how to fit a blog post into the Conventional Commits framework (feat? chore?).
  • git add . to stage the file, which I always forget to do before committing.
  • Commit.
  • Create a PR (what) to the main branch of my own site (lol).
  • Review the PR (am I ok?).
  • Update the dates at the last minute.
  • Merge.
  • Netlify takes care of the rest.

Safe to say, there's a little bit of friction there. Event writing out the process feels exhausting. I've tried a few template generators and even came close to installing one of those git powered CMS plugins (opened a PR) but nothing's really stuck.

How do you all do it? Do you just live in your code editors? Push straight to the main branch? I wanna know.

  1. For some reason I'm getting super hung up on the date in the file name and the front matter. If I get that wrong or it's not specific enough, is it going to do weird things in RSS readers. Does anyone even subscribe to this blog in an RSS reader? ↩︎