;tldr I’ve created a shortcut that generates a template file in Bear notes for a new blog post. You can grab the Shortcut here if you’d like
If I’m going to write blog posts at all regularly, I need there to be as little friction as possible in creating them. Similarly, having some structure and consistency to the way that I write and publish posts will also help me remain focussed. To that end I created a Shortcut that generates a template file in Bear notes, that I can trigger right from my desktop whenever I’ve got an idea for a new post. Here’s how it works
When the Shortcut is run, it starts by grabbing the current date. This is then followed by a Text block that looks like this
`[Date]`
# Blog post title
---
shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=Generate%20frontmatter%20for%20blog%20post
---
---
#1-areas/alexmarshallio/blog/[date]
The first lines formats the current date into yyyy-MM-dd and styles it as code. I use this as a "published on" date so that my posts in Bear can be sorted alphabetically (or rather chronologically) based on that date. I could sort them using the 'creation date' in Bear, but sometimes I’ll start a blog post, leave it for a while and in the meantime start another. When I return to the first post and publish it, I can then update this date to reflect that.
Next is an H1 title placeholder, followed by a section that will eventually hold the frontmatter for this blog post. It’s possible to run a shortcut from a URL so I’ve included that URL here so I can quickly access it when I’m ready to publish. I wrote a separate blog post on generating frontmatter with Apple shortcuts
I leave a few empty lines to write my blog content, followed by a divider and a tag that’ll sort this post based on the year it was created in. I use the PARA method for managing all my files in Bear
Whether or not this shortcut is enough to keep my consistent, only time will tell, but I have at least written and published three separate blog posts today, so we’re off to a good start