In the article My semi automated workflow for blogging, I have outlined what my blogging process is like and how I've started to automate it. Ofcourse, at the time of that article, the process was still in early stages and I hadn't automated everything I do. And, that's where this article comes in. This is the second attempt at automating my entire Blogging workflow.
Just to give you some context, here are the things that I do when I'm blogging.
- Open a markdown file in Vim with the title of the article as the name along with some template text
- Open a browser with the html of the newly created markdown file
- Convert markdown to html with pandoc several times during the writing process
- Once the article is done and html is produced, edit the html to make some changes specific based on whether I'm publishing on Medium or if I'm publishing on Blogger
- Read the tags/labels and other attributes from the file and Publish the code as draft on Medium or Blogger.
- Once it looks good, Schedule or Publish it (This is a manual process. There's no denying it.)
- Finally tweet about the post with the link to the article
I have the individual pieces of this process ready. I have already written about them in the following articles.
Semi Automated Blogging Workflow
Publish Articles To Blogger In One Second
Publish Articles To Medium In One Second
Now, since the individual pieces are ready, it might seem that everything is done. But, as it turns out (unsurprisingly), the integration is of-course a big deal and took a lot more effort than I was expecting. And I am documenting that in this article along with the complete flow.
It starts with the script blog-it which opens vim for me, opens chrome and also sets up a process for converting markdown to html, continuously.