This blog has been featured by GitHub!*

Well, sort of.

To publish posts to this blog, I’m abusing GitHub’s excellent Issue tracking capability. I have a GitHub Issue Form Template at .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/new-blog-post.yml which gives me a nice template to complete with fields like blog title, date, section etc.

The form template automatically labels the issue as a new-blog-post which triggers a GitHub Actions workflow to (very hackily) dump the contents of the Issue into a Markdown file and commit.

The commit triggers a Cloudflare Pages hook that builds my site with Hugo and deploys it to my abstractnonsense.xyz domain.

To parse the issue template, I’m using the excellent issue-ops/parser workflow maintained by Nick Alteen, a GitHub staffer! Nick’s very kindly featured my blog as an example of IssueOps, described as:

the process of interacting with GitHub Issues and Pull Requests to invoke commands. For example, approving requests to access important systems.

The key advantages of this workflow are:

• I can publish posts on mobile! In fact, this post was written all on mobile! This was probably the biggest requirement. I wanted to be able to make the writing experience as frictionless as possible and push content from anywhere without having to have my laptop on-hand.
• I get rich Markdown rendering support with GitHub Flavoured Markdown
• I can sort of abuse GitHub’s user-upload-file-to-Issue CDN for storing media. This is probably sub-optimal, and I should probably migrate to an idiomatic pattern like Cloudflare’s R2 or AWS S3¹ at some point. But for now, it just works 😉.

And yes, this is indeed an obligatory blog post about how I write blog posts. I spend far too much time thinking about blogging, tweaking my blog internals, or blogging about blogging instead of actually blogging. I’m trying to change that, I swear.