One of the things I like to do with more general blog posts is source feedback for them before hitting the publish button. This is often known as “private posts” in normal blogging engines. With these posts, the pure privacy is less of an issue than just not showing things off before they are ready. (Put another way: If someone sees the post before it’s published, who cares.)

This blog is maintained using Jekyll. The Jekyll drafts feature won’t do the trick here, because I want the posts to actually get published, just not linked anywhere. Here’s how I accomplish this.

First, I hack posts with a bit of front-matter:

And then slightly modify my posts loop on both index.html and feed.xml:

And now in feed.xml:

Boom. Now I can share direct links with trusted parties to give posts a once-over before publishing them.