Minimizing friction to posting

Like most front-end developers, I’ve done the ol’ build a blog thing that ends with me spending way more time working on building the blog, only to post like once or twice before letting it sit idle for years.

This time around, I decided it would be different. Part of that was picking tech that is simple, like Astro. But that alone wasn’t all I needed. What really did it for me was realizing that I was making it too hard for myself.

I made a few changes, and surprise — I feel like posting way more often!

1. By default, the Astro blog example requires a hero image and description for each post. Removing these was way more liberating than I thought it would be!
2. I realized don’t need to make each post such a big deal. Doesn’t need to be a long, super well thought out essay. Saw something cool? Post something super short about it! I appreciate other people doing this. I should do it too.
3. Scripting the creation of a new blog post — this is the icing on the cake. At first I had created a script in my blog to create a new post file that would ask for the post title and create the file for me. But then I came across Script Kit and thought I could make a script to do this without even having my blog open in VS Code yet.

Here’s the script:

// Name: New Astro Blog Post

import "@johnlindquist/kit";

const title = await arg(
	"What's the title of the post?",
);
const description = await arg(
	"What's the description of the post?",
);
const slug = title
	.toLowerCase()
	.split(" ")
	.join("-");
const blogCollectionPath = await env(
	"ASTRO_BLOG_COLLECTION_PATH",
);
const content = `---
{
  "title": "${title}",${
		description
			? `\n  "description": "${description}",`
			: ""
	}
  "published": "${new Date().toISOString()}"
}
---

`;
const filePath = `${blogCollectionPath}/${slug}.md`;
const editedContent =
	await editor(content);
await writeFile(
	filePath,
	editedContent,
);
await exec(
	`/opt/homebrew/bin/code ${filePath}`,
);

This is delightful. Starting a blog post is a breeze.