Blogging as an Open Source Project

Sometimes you have to go with what you know. For the past few years, I’ve been working on establishing a daily writing habit. Many thanks to 750words, I’ve had some success, but that hasn’t always translated to blog posts or any public writing.

However, I got a tweet reply from Boris that triggered an idea. While his suggestion was to write a post with the titles of my “Unpublished Drafts”, I’m going to take it one step further:

I’m going to run this blog like an open source project.

Now, since the switch to jekyll over 3 years ago, the source code for my blog has been open source on github. However, I’m going to open up things a bit further:

• Instead of a post with untitled drafts, I have started to create issues with an “idea label” for blog post ideas.
• Beginning with this post, I’m trying github flow for all new posts. This will result in a new PR.
• And, of course, all posts will be tested on travis-ci.

This might be overkill. It’s an experiment. But, this is (more or less), the way I build software. That’s something I do every day, so maybe it will better integrate blogging with the rest of my flow.

Of course, it also encourages collaboration. I am not expecting a lot of participation on my blog, but I anticipate that giddy feeling the first time someone does! See you on github.