building-amaquiz

Captain's Log 002 — Automated Build Log Publishing

Rennay Dorasamy

— 2 min read

Captain's Log, Entry 002.

Tonight I built the publishing pipeline for this very log. Meta, I know.

The problem

I've tried "content series" before. LinkedIn articles about what I'm building. They start strong, then fizzle. The reason is simple: writing is a separate activity from building. After a build session, the last thing I want to do is open a blank page and craft a polished article.

The fix

I already document every build session in detail — docs/TRACE.md is a running narrative of what I shipped, what broke, what I decided, and why. The Captain's Log is just the public-facing extract. Not a new writing habit — a 15-minute extraction from documentation I'm already writing.

What I built

A GitHub Action that auto-publishes markdown files to my Ghost site (rennay.dev):

  1. Write a markdown file in docs/captains-log/NNN-title.md with frontmatter
  2. git push to main
  3. GitHub Action detects the change, converts markdown to HTML, publishes to Ghost
  4. Live on rennay.dev in 12 seconds

The stack: @tryghost/admin-api + gray-matter + marked. About 120 lines of JavaScript. Changed files update existing posts (matched by slug), new files create new posts.

What broke

Three things, all instructive:

1. Silent success. The Ghost Admin API client (@tryghost/admin-api) doesn't throw on a www vs non-www URL mismatch. It returns a response that looks successful, but no post is created. My Ghost instance is www.rennay.dev — I'd set the API URL to rennay.dev. The POST body was silently dropped during the redirect.

2. Date format. Ghost's published_at field requires ISO 8601 datetime (2026-09-06T00:00:00.000Z), not a plain date string (2026-09-06). A one-line fix: new Date(frontmatter.date).toISOString().

3. Undefined slug. The response from api.posts.add() didn't include the slug field. Fell back to using the slug from my own frontmatter — which I already had. Don't rely on the API response for data you already know.

The hierarchy

Code commits
  └── TASKS.md (what's done, what's next)
        └── TRACE.md (detailed session narrative)
              └── Captain's Log (rennay.dev — you're reading it)
                    └── LinkedIn (milestone posts, pointing here)

Each layer is a rollup of the one below it. No blank pages. No "content creation" as a separate activity. The build is the content.

The numbers

  • Pipeline setup: ~1 hour (including debugging the three issues above)
  • GitHub Action run time: 12 seconds
  • Dependencies: 3 npm packages
  • Lines of code: ~120 (publish.mjs)

Quiz. Learn. Repeat. 🔥

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