When I want to publish a blog post using jekyll I need to manually rename the file to the correct date. This is a pain. I was about to write a plugin or script to do exactly this, but as usual, I searched Google to see if anyone has already solved this. I came across an interesting discussion.

A interesting solution is to use Git itself for the drafts. I don’t need to use the draft feature at all. For each draft, I simply checkout a branch and put the post into the normal posts folder. When I want to publish it, I simply merge with the master branch.

This is a perfect example of how existing tools combine to be more powerful. Git is perfect for drafting work, whether it is text, or code. It was designed for this and we don’t need to duplicate this in other software.

This however is more typing for me than I would like. There are indeed already various solutions to the problem such as mr_poole. I will simply use a command-line tool to generate a draft template with the preamble already there. When I want to publish, it moves it to the posts directory. That is how this article got published.