Action Begets Action

I aspire to fully embrace the indieweb. But I’m definitely coming from the Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site (PESOS) end of the spectrum. As opposed to the more highly recommended Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE) workflow.

I’ve authored content all over the place. I’d like to get it all under one roof. I need a way to syndicate (aka “import”) all my old content. I’ve done this before.

Way back when I had a Jekyll powered site. Including a _scripts directory with Ruby code that did three things.

1. Fetch my my Pinboard bookmarks
2. Render a bookmark’s JSON attributes as Markdown using ERB
3. Wrote that rendered Markdown to disc with a deterministic filename that Jekyll understands

The idea was novel at the time. Automating that import never happened because I live on a laptop. I didn’t want to fuss with a server to setup the cron job.

GitHub Actions are enabling the workflow I wanted years ago. Using the schedule trigger allows me to import my Pinboard bookmarks every night.

name: Import
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 0 * * *"

jobs:
  import:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
      - run: rake import
      - run: |
          git config --local user.email "action@github.com"
          git config --local user.name "GitHub Action"
          git add .
          git commit -m "Ran rake import in a GitHub Action"
          git push

My import task looks something like this

task :import do
  PinboardPost.fetch.each(&:write!)
end

That’s pretty neat.

Published: 2022-10-13

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