If everything works as expected this blog post should appear in in my
blog without I ever touching the
capivaras.dev website. I rewrote my previous Python
script to Go
(permalink)
since my attempt to generate proper description to the RSS feed resulted in
slow startup times (not because of Python, but because of my usage of
nix-shell since I didn't want to deal with
venv or anything to manage my
Python dependencies).
My previous workflow of this blog already involved me writing the texts in neovim, copying and pasting the result in the capivaras.dev website and publishing. This was not that bad, except that it seems I have a heavy tendency of editing my posts multiple times. Copying and pasting data between neovim and the website became tedious, so I decided to give up and automate the whole process.
Mataroa (the blog platform
capivaras.dev run) has a reasonable good
API, and it only took a few hours to get a
version of publishing working (it would take less if
Django, the framework Mataroa is written, did
not have a weird behavior with URLs missing a trailing /). An additional few
lines of
YAML
to make GitHub Actions trigger a pipeline and now I should never have to
manually update my blog again.
I could have not done this. I mean, I probably wasted more time writing an automation than I actually wasted publishing manually. But the manual process is easy to miss, and I already did multiple mistakes publishing in the manual method. For example, when writing the Markdown files, each post is written in a particular format, where the first header is considered the title, so I need to remove it from the contents during publication. But of course, this is easy to miss, and I had to fix this multiple times already.
So yes, I think this is a good lesson on why you should automate everything. It is more than just about time savings, it is about reducing mistakes and even documenting (even if poorly) a process. I mean, the code I wrote is not that great, but I can definitely rely on it in the future to remember what I need to do. It will be much faster than trying to learn from scratch again.