That Randy Brown

Automating Publishing Schedules

I recently decided that, rather than having notes publish as soon as I wrote them, I'd like to make it so that they publish semi-automatically on a cadence--updates every Monday sort of thing. My thinking is that if I can refine this, I can start to build a backlog of notes that will be shared and simultaneously perhaps create a model that can be monetized (even if the information cannot).

To do this, first, all notes were removed from my site repo to a private repo, following the approach I documented in Building and Deploying private repositories.

In my private repo, I create a list of unpublished notes, and pad the end of the list to 52 with empty spaces. Then I select a random number between 1 and 52, and if that number has a note assigned, it will publish that note by creating a new release with the note included.

I run this workflow once a week, which corresponds to the random number generator. When I have a full backlog of 52 posts, it will be guaranteed to publish a note every week. Every extra note I add a week increases the odds of publishing a note that week. To give myself less cushion and increase the likelihood of a published note, I could reduce the size of my runway.

The final step of this is that I have another cron that runs twice a week on my GitHub site repo which grabs the most recent release of the notes and publishes them, so that if a new note is added to the release, it's published the next time the cron runs.