Testing Github Actions
What's cool about Github is that it has built-in Continuous Integration & Deployment (CI/CD) with this feature called Github Actions. On an event like a commit to your Github repo, it'll run the CI/CD jobs that you write out on a...runner. These runners convert your job into a container that executes the code you've set up on there. Practical benefits galore — run scans on your code, deploy a project to Github pages, the possibilities are endless.
What I wanted to try was to see whether I could create a Github Action that would publish to my blog. This blog post is a that. I am using this repo to do it — a Python script that takes the content of a Markdown file and updates a Write.as post that gets published to my blog via a scheduled publishing program. When I make a commit to the Markdown file, the code in the Python script will execute on the runner, updating the post. You get the added granularity of version control for a piece of writing with the automated publishing via CI/CD. Plus you don't have to open a web browser to publish on the web this way — just edit a Markdown file, perform some git incantations, and you're off to the races!
This is merely a test though, a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine, but isn't that part of the fun? To tinker around because you can? Take hobbyist software kludging with a sense of pride. At least I try to (on a good day).