What I thought I'd get done in a week, actually took about four months. But I'm finally free of Blogger and have moved to Pelican for creating my blog. I'll be writing more about how I migrated soon.
As I approached the end of that lengthy migration, I found myself writing new draft articles that I wanted to ensure didn't actually make their way into my publication directory.
Writing blog posts
The way that I usually approach writing blog posts is that, as I reach the end of writing them, I'll start reading in the final display format, i.e. as a web page. This helps spot any mistakes that I might miss from my eyes glazing over at a text editor, and helps me spot formatting problems.
But, you might be working on multiple articles at once, so you want to
publish while you still have draft articles in your content directory.
Here's a few ways to prevent posts from being accidentally published,
without needing to do file juggling of your drafts in and out of the
content directory.
Marking as draft and .gitignore
Any articles we stick in the content directory will end up in our
output directory, right? Not if we do like
the documentation says
and add Status: draft to the metadata.
Building your site will then place draft articles in a drafts
directory, and the articles therein aren't linked from anywhere. This
might be useful if you want to share a link with someone to get feedback
on a post before you officially publish it.
Using a .gitignore file in your output directory is also an option
if you're using git to push new versions of your blog for publication.
Add drafts/ to your .gitignore and you'd have to make a deliberate
effort to add them for publication.
Stopping Pelican from seeing the draft posts
The other option is to just prevent Pelican from seeing draft posts completely.
This does mean that they won't appear in your local preview of your site, not even as an unlinked page.
Using Pelican's IGNORE_FILES
Putting "draft" in the filename of any drafts is another option. Then,
you can use the IGNORE_FILES setting in pelicanconf.py to
specifically ignore the drafts.
Note that if you specify a setting in your Pelican configuration files, the defaults get overridden. This means that you'll need to copy over the existing settings from the defaults too. Otherwise, you'll unintentionally change your configuration.
For instance, the default
IGNORE_FILES setting is IGNORE_FILES = ['.#*'] so we'll need to
add IGNORE_FILES = ['.#*', '*draft*'] to our Pelican settings.
Hiding the files completely (in Ubuntu, at least)
Under Linux, I thought that preceding the filename with a dot would hide posts from Pelican, but it doesn't seem to. However, sticking a tilde on the end of the filename does seem to prevent Pelican from seeing the post.
One side-effect is that if you use a text editor that creates backup
files with a tilde on the end, your backup files will actually have
another tilde on the end (e.g. my_draft_post.md~~).
(Maybe marking files as hidden in Windows would have the same effect? Haven't tried this.)