I tend to be pretty impatient and when I’m doing something, I want to just finish it off. Unfortunately, the world works better for me when I work to its schedule.

Every time I finish a video for shri codes , while I am still in the zone, I want to post to all the places (YouTube, BlueSky and Reddit). However, this is usually the worst time to share these if I want to get some decent traffic and raise awareness.

I’ve been remembering to post on the relevant days at reasonable times, but this process is annoying at best, interrupts flow and takes up cognitive load.

I wanted to automate it. I’ve got to say that automating these two seemingly simple tasks were rife with unexpected complexity.

My first challenge was trying to get rule_python to work, which, in the end, I did not succeed and gave up.

Getting pylyzer to work in neovim was also a challenge - another one that I gave up on.

I briefly gave up on python altogether and went with go, and I made stellar progress until I got to the bit about actually posting to BlueSky - ChatGPT had (once again) lied to me (shame on me not verifying their claims). The library it wanted me to use was a hallucination, and did not exist. I then realised that there was no real library for reddit integration either.

Back to python, and trusty poetry to see me through.

Scheduled Elements

There are four elements to getting scheduling to work

YouTube Scheduling

This part was the easiest. The platform is kind enough to provide an option to schedule release of videos, and we’ll use that!

Scheduled Publish for Blog

hugo supports this out of the box. The bigger challenge was how to get GitHub Actions to regenerate the site when relevant. In the end, I identified the window during the week when I want to be publishing.

10am - 4pm Mon - Fri seemed like a decent slot. GitHub Actions though does not support summer time. I opted for 10am - 3pm, which seemed the better option.

My GitHub action for publishing takes one minute to execute. If I run the action every 30 minutes, for three hours five days a week:

2 * 5 * 5 * 4 = 200

.github/workflows/hugo.yaml

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on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "*/30 12-15 * * 1-5"
  # Runs on pushes targeting the default branch
  push:
    branches:
      - main

I will need to run a second one for the despatches (below) as well, which would mean around 400 minutes each month - while there are no limits for public repos - it felt a little abusive to run it every minute.

Once this has been running safely for a while, I’ll consider bumping the cadence.

Cron is Unreliable on GitHub Actions

After I got this all ready with the two workflows set up to run on GitHub Actions, I waited, and waited, and nothing happened.

GA schedule doc states:

The schedule event can be delayed during periods of high loads of GitHub Actions workflow runs. High load times include the start of every hour. If the load is sufficiently high enough, some queued jobs may be dropped. To decrease the chance of delay, schedule your workflow to run at a different time of the hour.

The upptime post about GitHub Actions schedule not working includes some suggested workarounds, namely:

• IFTTT - seems to be limited to a maximum of hourly
• Google Cloud Scheduler - could be a good solution but a bit of a sledgehammer
• Cronhub - starts at $19/mo

I also discovered:

• cron-job.org - haven’t tried this yet, but looks viable

I was going to try out cron-job.org when ChatGPT suggested a simpler alternative - a simple workflow that only triggered the relevant workflows.

According to ChatGPT, the more complex a workflow, the more likely it is to be dropped. It makes sense, of course, and while I wasn’t fully convinced, I decided to give it a go .

It’s only been 10 minutes, but it has completed one run already - which is promising, but the original run also ran once.

I’ll have to keep an eye on the reliability of this.

Switched to cron-job.org

While the above strategy was OK, I wanted something more reliable, so I switched to cron-job.org

I created a new access token, restricted to the repo and with two additional permissions:

• actions: read & write
• contents: read (to read the workflow file, ChatGPT suggests)

I then set up a http call to:

https://api.github.com/repos/<gh-username>/<repo-name>/actions/workflows/<workflow-filename>/dispatches

• <gh-username>: use your github username from the url
• <repo-name>: name of your repo, again from the url
• <workflow-filename>: The filename of the workflow you want to trigger

To triger my hugo run, I used: https://api.github.com/repos/drone-ah/wordsonsand/actions/workflows/hugo.yaml/dispatches

Under advanced, I set the following Headers:

• Accept: application/vnd.github+json
• Authorization: token <personal-access-token>
• Content-Type: application/json
• User-Agent: cronjob

Set Request method to POST

Request body:

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{
  "ref": "main"
}

BlueSky

This one - posting to BlueSky was far more complicated than I anticipated. All the complexity was around its requirement to separate the post out into facets. I recognise and value the semantic content such a process would output. However, I could not find an algorithm or any details on how to extract the facets from some text - e.g. markdown.

I referenced some code from a couple of sources for a stopgap solution to address urls and hashtags.

And then, I found blueskysocial

Reddit

You first need to register an app on reddit, from a page I don’t seem to be able to get from anywhere except a direct link.

Once I registered a personal script, which will let any of the developers registered on that client to post, I got to try and login and was faced with:

prawcore.exceptions.OAuthException: invalid_grant error processing request

Red Herrings

I tried directly with curl:

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curl -u "$CLIENT_ID:$CLIENT_SECRET" \
  -d "grant_type=password&username=$USERNAME&password=$PASSWORD" \
  -A "$APP_NAME" \
  https://www.reddit.com/api/v1/access_token

and I got a similar error:

{"error": "invalid_grant"}

After stumbling around for a while, verifying and re-verifying the credentials, I also set up a brand new account using password auth (mine was originally oauth). It also returned the same error.

Some resources that I followed:

• redditdev
• OAuth2 Quick Start Example

While I was lookin around, I noticed in tiny little letters on the page to register an app , when you create a new app:

By creating an app, you agree to Reddit’s Developer Terms and Data Api Terms. You must also register to use the API .

(Emphasis mine)

I followed the instructions on that page, which felt more like red tape, but easy enough for an app that is only intended to post on a schedule.

Alas, this too did not help!

Final Solution

Perhaps not surprisingly, the final solution was to not use the password, but get a refresh token instead.

You can do this manually on the browser. Start by going to the following URL:

https://www.reddit.com/api/v1/authorize?client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID&response_type=code&state=xyz&redirect_uri=http://localhost&duration=permanent&scope=identity,submit,read

• YOUR_CLIENT_ID: Replace this with the client id from your reddit app
• redirect_uri: This value has (http://localhost in the example) has to match the redirect_uri setting in your app
• scope: Update to the scopes you are looking for. /api/vi/scopes will return the list of valid scopes and their descriptions.
• state: can be any value. It’s supposed to match in the next step

The browser will then ask your permission (of the scopes you defined). If you approve, the browser will redirect to localhost (or whatever url you define for the redirect above).

This redirect will likely fail, but that’s ok. There is one parameter in the URL that you are looking for - code

In my case, I got something like:

http://localhost:8080/?state=xyz&code=RilF7XDhRTr7o7B-iov2gpdDgum5pA#_

(don’t worry - that code isn’t the actual one)

You want to take the code, but without the #_ at the end and substitute it in the following:

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curl -X POST -A "despatcher" --user "$CLIENT_ID:$CLIENT_SECRET" \
  --data "grant_type=authorization_code&code=$CODE&redirect_uri=http://localhost:8080" \
  https://www.reddit.com/api/v1/access_token

• CLIENT_ID: The app id from your app settings page (again)
• CLIENT_SECRET: The secret from you app settings page
• CODE: The code that was in the URL above
• redirect_uri: exactly the same redirect_uri as above, and in the app settings

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{
  "access_token": "<access-token>",
  "token_type": "bearer",
  "expires_in": 86400,
  "refresh_token": "<refresh_token>",
  "scope": "read submit identity"
}

• access_token: You can use this to auth, but not so useful for long term use as it will expire
• refresh_token: more useful as it can be used to get a new access token. Pass to praw

tools/despatcher/despatch.py

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client_id = os.environ.get("APP_REDDIT_CLIENT_ID")
client_secret = os.environ.get("APP_REDDIT_CLIENT_SECRET")
refresh_token = os.environ.get("APP_REDDIT_REFRESH_TOKEN")

reddit = praw.Reddit(
    client_id=client_id,
    client_secret=client_secret,
    refresh_token=refresh_token,
    user_agent="despatcher",
)

print(reddit.user.me())

Posting & Tracking

Once a post has been submitted, it is important that we log it somehow. Otherwise, we’ll end up posting it again (and again (and again)).

The cleanest solution I could think of was to update the markdown file, then commit and push the change. This will also help to keep a log of it.

.github/workflows/despatcher.yaml

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- name: Commit and push if changed
  run: |
    git config user.name "drone-ah bot"
    git config user.email "github.actions@drone-ah.com"

    if ! git diff --quiet; then
      git add -u
      git commit -m "auto: log post submissions"
      git push
    else
      echo "No changes to commit"
    fi

Partial Successes

Now, I thought I’d covered the worst offenders for risk of repeated posting, but I’d missed one case.

What happens when something gets posted, then the script errors?

Well, the git commit won’t happen - and sadly this happened to my. My apologies to the nice folks at r/selfhosted who got a handful of my posts about automated posting - eek :(

Embarrassment aside, it identified at least one fix - probably two. Extra embarrassing because something like this has happened to me before - many years ago - but you live!

The first update is to get GitHub Actions to carry on even if there is an error:

.github/workflows/despatcher.yaml

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- name: Run despatcher script
  working-directory: tools/despatcher
  continue-on-error: true
  run: poetry run ./despatch.py ../../despatches/

The second fix it to catch any errors from the dispatchers.

tools/despatcher/despatch.py

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try:
    ptype = p.get("type")
    if ptype == "bluesky":
        url = post_bluesky(p)

    if ptype == "reddit":
        url = post_reddit(p)
except Exception as e:
    print(f"[ERROR] Failed to post to {ptype} for {path}: {e}")
    continue  # Skip to the next file

Wrap Up

In the end, what I thought was a two hour job took me two days, but such is the life of a software engineer (probably everyone).

I am looking forward to see how it works, and a little scared if it’ll go off and do random things in my name - but we’ll see

Links

• Code Repo

Updates

• 2025-07-08: Switch to cron-job.org
• 2025-07-02: Add note about GA cron unreliability
• 2025-07-02: Add details of handling partial success