Placeholder — A Note Being Written in Public
Placeholder copy. This shows the shape of a work-in-progress note: live at its own URL, listed in the drawer on /posts/, and deliberately out of the feed and the sitemap.
Placeholder note. This one exists to hold the works-in-progress tier open — replace it or delete it once there is a real note in the drawer.
A note in _wip/ is a published page that is not asking for readers. It has a
URL, it renders with the same layout every other entry uses, and anyone with the
link can read it. What it does not have is a place in /feed.xml, a row in
/sitemap.xml, or an invitation to a crawler — the wip defaults scope in
_config.yml handles all three, so nothing here needs to set them.
Why the tier exists
The gap it fills is between _drafts/, which nobody can see, and _posts/,
which goes out on the feed the moment it lands. Some things want to be readable
before they are finished: a research thread, a half-argued position, a data pull
that hasn’t decided what it means yet. Publishing those to the feed is a promise
the writing can’t keep, and leaving them in _drafts/ means they’re invisible
from anywhere but a laptop.
What is different about the page
Two things, both in _layouts/post.html. A note carries the standing banner
above the prose saying what it is, and it does not get the newer/older pair at
the foot — chaining unrelated half-formed notes to each other is noise rather
than navigation.
Front matter is a post’s, with one difference: the date lives in the front
matter rather than the filename, because these files aren’t named
YYYY-MM-DD-. Give every note one. Without it the drawer falls back to sorting
by filename, which is not the order anybody wants.
Getting out of the drawer
Finishing a note is a rename: move it to _posts/YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.md and drop
the date line, since the filename carries it from then on. The URL changes
from /posts/wip/<slug>/ to /posts/<slug>/, and it joins the log and the feed
like anything else.