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My blog workflow Link to heading

So, I’m writing this post as much for my own benefit as anyone else’s. The last time I tried to build a blog I left it alone for a while and when I came back to it I’d forgotten the steps to build it… If this is of benefit to anyone else though, great!

I’ve put this blog together using Hugo, a static site generator. What does that mean? Simply, I can write pages in simple markdown, then run Hugo and it takes all the pages and assets and outputs a fully formed website which can then be uploaded to the web.

I then use git to version control it and push changes to a remote github repository (like this), and make use of github pages to host the site (with my domain pointed to github per these instructions ).

So, that’s the background, but how do I go about generating and uploading a post. Well, I do 90% of that via Terminal because it’s cool.

I assume this would be virtually identical on a Windows machine via Command Prompt, I’ll give it a go at some point.

Creating the post Link to heading

  • Open Terminal

  • Create a new post
    Hugo new posts/post_name.md

  • Open the generated file in Atom (the program I use to write and edit markdown, amongst other things)
    open -a "Atom" stifblog_mk2/content/posts/post_name.md

    Note: The “a “Atom”” part of this is only required as my Macbook seems determined to only let me edit markdown posts in Xcode, despite Atom being set as the default…

  • Edit the front matter of the post to add any categories or tags that I want to associate with the post (I often actually do this last).

  • Write the post (the hardest part for someone as un-creative as me!)

  • Preview the post by running a local server
    Hugo server -D

This command runs a local server that hosts the site at localhost:1313
The ’-D’ suffix tells Hugo that I want to see posts that are still marked as drafts (until the draft flag is set to false Hugo won’t include them in the site build).

  • Finally, once the post is ready (and saved! CMD + S ), set the draft flag to false and generate the ‘Prod ready’ site
    Hugo

Getting it live Link to heading

The last thing to do is to create a git commit and then push the changes to the remote repository, from there github works it’s magic.

  • First, I like to check that the only deviations from what’s on github are those I just made
    git status
    I do this at the start if I am, or have been, working on a different machine.

  • Stage all of the changed files
    git add .

  • Now turn the staged changes into a commit (including a suitable message)
    git commit -m"Description of the change"

  • Finally, push the changes to the remote master branch
    git push

Since writing a post is simple text (and the odd image), rather than any structure or code changes, I’m comfortable commiting straight to the master branch - if I was making any code changes (which I might try to do later…) then I’d create a develop or specific feature branch to do this on first.

So there we go - how long will it be before I need to pull this post up to remind me how it all works?