I’ve had this blog for a couple of years and so far, when I wanted to make a new post, I had to:
- Sit down at my home PC, get into my text editor.
- Create a Markdown file, preview that a bunch, tweak it until it’s just right.
- Then use git to commit and push that into my cloud-based git repo.
- From there, the post is magically posts to my web site and it shows up here for the world to read.
That’s been fine but I wanted to know if there is a way for me to post from this web site itself, from anywhere - and it turns out there is.
Big, complicated web sites have what is called a “CMS” - a Content Management System. Since this web site was created by and for me alone, I don’t need all the functionality that comes with a CMS, but I did still want this one function - online post creation and editing. The tool I found - Decap CMS - is just what I need and nothing else.
With Decap, I can publish to my blog via this process now:
- Visit my web site, log in there.
- Click Create Post
- Start typing… add images and links and whatever else I need (music, video, etc…)
- Click Publish.
- Wait a few minutes and boom. My words are online.
Adding Decap to my static hugo web site was really simple:
- Create a folder at /static/(secret administration folder name)
- Create an “index.html” file in there and give that the contents as shown on this page.
- Create a “config.yml” file in there and give it the contents from the same page.
- That same instruction page tells you to create a index.html file in the /layouts/ folder but for my Hugo site’s theme, that didn’t work since it doesn’t have a file there by design.
- So I found and edited the file at /themes/introduction/layouts/index.html and inserted this line into that file:
<script src="https://identity.netlify.com/v1/netlify-identity-widget.js"></script> - Save all those files.
- Commit and push those updates to my cloud git repo.
- Let my web host pick those up and publish them to the public site.
Getting it running on the web site was simple too:
- Visit my web site, access the administrative login page.
- Sign up for a new user account.
- Confirm my email address is legit via their confirmation email in my client software.
- Log in to the site and start working.
This is all working now and I like writing in the Decap editor just fine so I think I will use this from now on.