My writing practice usually leaves me with at least some content I’d like on my website. As it’s a digital garden, more gets published than is finished or indeed interesting. The aim is to tend to it over time, and eventually/hopefully it will get some shape.

As this directory will contain a mix of private and potentially public writing, each markdown file I write has a YAML header. This provides some metadata on the content of the file, and is (partially) used by the static site generator I use, Hugo. For instance, the header of this page is:

---
title: Publishing my thoughts
publish: yes
keywords: publishing digitalgarden thinking
---

I have written a Python tool, MupPub*, to publish my markdown notes. This uses the publish value in the YAML header to determine what pages to publish and which pages to ignore. All public content gets converted to the format expected by Hugo, and links to private pages are removed.

At present I manually copy the published output to my Hugo content folder, commit and push to GitHub, which automatically publishes to picton.uk via (Netlify). Further automation is planned, but I have plenty more to be getting on with with my site and elsewhere.