If you find yourself writing posts here a lot, you might find yourself struggling to keep a consistent structure.
I mean, you may not want a consistent structure. Your output might be stream-of-consciousness good-time banter, and that's fine.
But if you're making posts as part of a series1 or if you have a couple of different streams going - maybe a personal blog post vs. a tutorial - then you could do with templating it.
DEV doesn't explicitly support templates, but since you can leave a post in draft status indefinitely, it's straightforward to emulate.
- Make a new post, give it an easy-to-locate title like
[TEMPLATE: blog posts]. - Find one of your posts that's in a style you like and copy the content to your new post.
- Rip all the good stuff out of it and replace it with obvious placeholder text.
- Save it.
When it comes time to make a new post, copy and paste your template and away you go!
Here's an example, including a few bits to remind me to use numbered bullets if I'm going to refer to something again later, and a common-ish signature2.
---
title: <TITLE>
published: false
description: <BRIEF DESCRIPTION>
tags: <TAGS: up to four comma-separated tags, without the hash>
cover_image: <URL: find something on unsplash>
---
## <SUB-TITLE>
<BRIEF DESCRIPTION>
## <SECTION HEADING>
1. <LIST ITEM>
1. <LIST ITEM>
1. <LIST ITEM...>
## Further reading
This was originally posted on [my personal blog](<ORIGINAL BLOG URL>).
If you're interested, I post about <THIS SUBJECT> a lot on [my Twitter](<TWITTER LINK>)
---
Cover image credit: <ADD ME: unsplash user> on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com).
It might seem that this isn't going to save you much time. Well, it might not, for you, but depending on how you post it might help a lot. Who am I to guess?
Cover photo by Francisco Arnela on Unsplash
-
Did you know you could do that? You add a series name to your front matter and it's done by magic. You can find out more in the editor guide ↩
-
I don't really recommend - or like - post signatures, but I wanted an example of something that would stay consistent across posts and it's what I came up with at the time. ↩
Top comments (1)
I love this! Really clever workaround... also, makes me think we should have a product feature for templates. We do have this somewhat internally and can turn it on for various tags... for instance, if you go to #shecoded and click on write a post in the lefthand sidebar it opens up a template we created... would be cool to extend this feature to DEV users for personal use.