When I built this site in late 2020 I was happy with how it turned out, which was gratifying given most of the experience was crafted around tools and techniques that were completely new to me -- the Eleventy static site generator, Nunjucks templating language, managing site content via a GitHub repository, and deploying a site via Netlify. Having spent so much time inside the iterative process of building the site itself I failed to realize that I would be relying on that same heavily manual, multi-step process to create new posts and articles. That didn't work out so well, as you can tell by looking at the date on the post prior to this one.

Unhappy about and a little bit embarrassed by that gap and inspired by some friends, I decided the time had more than come to improve my new post and new article creation workflow. My theory going in is that I need an easier, more integrated workflow to create, test, commit, and publish posts but had no idea where to start.

In researching options and talking to people I stumbled on examples of web site development and content management using Visual Studio Code. In addition to extensive visual editing capabilities, VS Code handles GitHub integration directly, supports a wide range of language aware and functional extensions, and incorporates an extensible task framework that enables services (like starting and stopping Eleventy for testing, for example). Many of the VS Code introductory videos answered my basic questions and inspired me to give it a try.

This is my first attempt at creating, testing, committing, and publishing a new post all from within VS Code. Let's see how it goes, but more importantly if it encourages me to post more often and write more about what I'm up to.