I hate repetitve tasks. They make me bored and vulernable to human error. If I can find a solution to automate repetitive tasks, I will.

If you stop being boring and repetitive, that will be the end of it - I will not look for you, I will not pursue you… but if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you… and I will automate you. – Liam Neeson, probably

I noticed two reptitive tasks I did before publishing a blog post:

  1. Append “Let me know what you think on Twitter!” to the end
  2. Copy+Paste the front matter from prior blog posts

These were trivial tasks, but I wanted to focus on writing content. I needed them complete the moment I created a new blog post.

I created this site using Hugo. I got started by reading the Quick Start guide and skipped the rest of the documentation. I decided to take a learn-as-you-go approach. If I found something I didn’t understand, I searched the documentation or did a Google search.

That’s how I found archetypes. Archetypes are content template files in the archetypes directory of my project. Archetypes allow me to preconfigure front matter and define a common page structure. It was the perfect solution for my problem.

My project’s archetypes directory already contained a single file, default.md. It’s what preconfigured the front matter with title, date, and draft to all content files. But I didn’t want to edit this file because it would affect all new content on my site. I only cared for blog posts.

Hugo uses content-section to find the most suitable archetype template. The content-section is posts for my blog posts, so I needed a posts.md archetype.

If I didn’t have a posts.md archetype template, Hugo would use the first archetype file found of these:

  1. archetypes/default.md
  2. themes/my-theme/archetypes/posts.md
  3. themes/my-theme/archetypes/default.md

Here’s how my posts.md archetype looks like:

---
title: "{{ replace .Name "-" " " | title }}"
date: {{ .Date }}
draft: true
description: "Enter Description"
tags:
- daily writing
---



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Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think of this post on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/maupanelo).

Now my posts are populated with the front matter I prefer and my repeated elements are added by default.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think of this post on Twitter.