2024–09–17

RegEx and a stroll down memory lane

I posted recently about my iPad-based workflow in the rebuilding of the blog portion of my website. Sunday morning it occurred to me that I might be able to streamline it further by eliminating one of the repetitive tasks: After exporting the Markdown to html using a shortcut I’m prompted to save the file with a name. My format is a simple year-month-day yyyy-00–00.html and I’ve got that date at the top of each processed markdown file it occurred to me that the RegEx step in Shortcuts could do this.

I’ll admit, though I’m aware of RegEx I’ve never made the effort to learn it. With a bit of searching I found the string I needed to do it and added it to Shortcuts. Now when I send the markdown to the Shortcut it is autosaved in the posts folder with the date-based name without any work on my part. Yay, one less step!

No doubt, this is a manual process! But I’ve really enojoyed skimming through old posts and it’s been fun tinkering with the workflow. It will take me a few months to work my way through 20ish years of blog posts but thus far I am really enjoying revisiting my life a bit. If you keep a blog or journal and have not reviewed it recently I’d suggest it. I’m 55 and reading how and what I was writing about when I was 35 years old has been interesting.