GitHub Actions + Ghost

Today, I reached another big milestone!

I now have GitHub and Ghost working together!

I spent some time yesterday understanding and learning more about how git works and then how things like pull requests on GitHub work. After watching the video below, I started up a few dummy repositories and began playing with add , commit, push, pull, branch, checkout  and status.

I always source a lot of  different things to learn something new but this video with Brian Yu was just enough help to foster learning. Thank you, Brian!

Now, when I make modifications to my local files (local repository) I can push them to the GitHub and the GitHub Actions integration from Ghost will build my theme and load it to my site. I can see my changes to the master branch show up within a minute on my live Ghost blog!

I was able to make the title for this live site hideously large within a matter of seconds!

None of this rapid progress would have been possible without the time I spent playing in the HTML/CSS/JS/NPM ecosystem and trying to understand how things work.

Friction

But, why spend all of this time setting up build tools and version control instead of making more progress on the site or learning or something else?

Because of friction.

I have very limited time to work on this site so I am trying to setup a sustainable system (a habit) for making incremental progress each day.

Imagine you're building a new house but you only have three hours each morning to work on it before you go to your day job.

Every morning you start at your old house, load up your truck with all of your tools and most of your materials and drive to your new 'project' house. Once you arrive, you get all of your tools plugged in and set up, and then unload your materials and get started. You can now do some actual work, for a little over and hour before you have to pack everything up to go to your full-time job.

It is doubtful that house will ever be built.

You're spending a significant portion of your project time each day on setup.

All of this setup wastes a massive amount of time when you multiply it out over months and years, but it also erodes your motivation and resets your inertia back to zero each day.

I have set things up so that I can do this over and over and tighten the feedback loop. While removing the friction of getting started each day.

What's next

I have a lot of ideas for the site but I want to start with understanding the layout and structure of the pages. I am using the Ghost Starter theme right now and I want to break it down and understand why it's setup the way it is before I start to make major changes.

I can foresee a challenge ahead in implementing responsive design correctly while changing the layout options.

It will be fun.