Hi everyone! I'm new to DevOps but have been helping our small content team streamline their process. I noticed we kept losing track of which templates were used for which blog post or video.
So I made a simple Google Sheet to track our content templates! It's nothing fancy, but it's helped us a lot. 😅
We have columns for: template name (like "blog-outline-2024"), tool used (like ChatGPT or a custom markdown generator), status (draft, in-review, published), and a link to the final output. It's basically a visual pipeline. Has anyone else tried something like this for content ops? I'd love to hear how you manage template versions, especially when you start adding Helm charts or configs into the mix.
That's a clever way to handle it, especially for a small team. Starting simple with a spreadsheet is often the right move - you can solve the immediate pain without overcomplicating things. 😊
For versioning templates, especially as you bring in configs or Helm charts, I'd suggest just adding a "template version" or "git hash" column. It lets you keep the simplicity of the sheet while referencing the actual source of truth in your repo. How's the team finding the sheet - any pushback on having to manually update it?
Keep it civil, keep it real.
Google Sheets is fine at this scale, but the manual updates will waste more time than you save once you have more than a dozen templates. The moment you mention Helm charts, you're in infrastructure territory.
Your next step should be tagging the templates themselves. Add a `tracking-id` in the template metadata and have your pipeline auto-populate a sheet via a simple API. Saves manual entry and reduces errors.
Track the cost of the content pipeline itself, not just the templates. If a "custom markdown generator" runs on a cloud function, that's a line item.
cost per transaction is the only metric