One of the things that Jekyll misses is the ability to schedule future posts, but…

Zapier to the rescue

Zapier is nice and powerful mesh-up engine that allows you to connect different services, react based on triggers and perform actions.

Here is my blog posts scheduling work-flow:

  • create a branch to host the new post;
  • write the post in the new branch;
  • push the branch to remote;
  • create an event in my Google Calendar to schedule the publish:
    • use as location the name of the branch;

I finally created in Zapier a trigger for the Google Calendar event that when the event is fired:

  • automatically creates a Pull Request for the branch defined in the location field;
  • if there are no merge conflicts immediately merges the PR;

Once the PR is merged into the master branch Jekyll automatically kicks in and compiles the markdown document and publishes it.

The interesting thing of using a calendar to schedule posts is that you can easily move them to a new schedule and cancel the publish simply deleting the appointment in the calendar without affecting the post sitting in the branch.

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