I created a little hack on my Jekyll-driven websites to allow me to publish a week’s worth of posts (or more) ahead of time. I’ve been scheduling these publishing using my homebrew CMS, but I recently ditched it for Siteleaf, and one of the things that were not possible with the CMS was scheduling–so I needed a hack.
I wanted to be able to just publish at least a weeks worth of blog posts, but then just trickle them out somehow using Jekyll, and avoid using the CMS layer. I got to work publishing a couple of “future” posts and tightening up any holes where the future might leak out into the present–specifically the blog and RSS/Atom listings.
First I set a variable to tell me what the date and time were for any given moment:
Then I translated the publish date for each post into the same format as my definition for now (seconds):
Then you just check to make sure each blog post that is being displayed using Liquid is truly from the past:
Voila, a filter for the future on my blog listing page, and the RSS or Atom feeds. After this, I published a schedule.xml feed which showed all my blog posts, even for the future. I use this to schedule Tweets, and other social media posts for my blogs throughout the week–allowing my social media management tooling to see into the future when it comes to my blogs.
It is a hack for achieving a blog schedule, but it works. It allows me to schedule my world days or weeks ahead, and stay focused on project work. One of the reasons I abandoned my homegrown CMS is I wanted to be forced to find solutions within the cracks of a variety of SaaS tooling, using feeds and APIs. I feel like these approaches are going to be more valuable to my readers, as I can’t expect everyone to deploy a custom solution like I was doing.
