The goal of the Shortcut is simple: it looks for the posts you published last month in your blog and copies a list in your clipboard, with the publishing date, the title and the url in Markdown format. Ready to paste in your editor and publish.

The next screenshot shows the workflow. The texts are in Spanish (my system’s language) but once installed in your devices the Shortcut should show your own language. And I’ll try to explain the screenshot right away.

List of posts shortcut workflow
  1. The first thing you need to do is to enter your blog’s RSS feed in the Shorcut.
  2. The automation will obtain the first day of the current month.
  3. It will substract a month in order to obtain the first day of the previous month.
  4. It will search in the last 60 posts of your feed (you can set the amount you want), and see if there’s any posts published between those two dates. That is, published last month.
  5. If there is any, it will write (in the background) a line for each post with the publishing date, the title and the url in Markdown format.
  6. For the rest of the posts (published this month or before last month) it will do nothing.
  7. Finally, in a few seconds, you will have a list of all the posts from last month in your clipboard, ready to paste wherever you want.

You can download and install the Shortcut clicking on this link. It works on macOS, iOS and iPadOS.

Remember to paste you blog’s feed in the first step of the Shortcut.

You don’t need much more. I went one step forward and hooked the Shortcut to a Keyboard Maestro macro that launches Mars Edit, types the title of the post referencing last month, runs the Shotcut and pastes the result, asks if everything looks fine and, if it does, publishes the post swiftly. But I’ll tell you about KM another time.

Hope it is useful for somebody and it’s not too customized to my own needs. If you like it, retoot, repost, relink and print fliers to tell your whole neighborhood 😊.

Here’s a link to the Shortcut again, they’re free 😅.