Start New Blogofile Post With a Single Command

Posted on Fri 22 February 2013 in misc

I wrote a bash script which should allow starting blogofile blog posts more conveniently. This will set up everything needed with a single command.

This script will perform:

  1. Create a file in the _posts directory. The file name will be prefixed with the next number in the sequence (personal choice to enumerate the markdown files for better organization)

  2. The file will contain a starting template for a markdown blog post (a header with placeholders for title, date etc.)

  3. Add the file to source control.

  4. Open the file in emacs.

The script is:

#!/bin/bash


POSTS_DIR=_posts
FILE_EXT=markdown
TEXT_EDITOR=emacs
SOURCE_CONTROL_CMD="git add"

read -d '' TEMPLATE <<"EOF"
Tags: 
date: 
title: 
draft: True

EOF


if [ $# -le 0 ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 postfix-name"
    exit
fi
if [ $# -ge 2 ]; then 
    echo "Warning: whitespaces in the name will be ignored" 
fi


cd $POSTS_DIR
last=`ls *.$FILE_EXT | sed 's/^\([0-9]*\).*/\1/g' | sort -n | tail -1`
next=`expr $last + 1`
next_name=${next}-$1.$FILE_EXT
echo "Creating new file ($next_name)..."
echo "$TEMPLATE" > $next_name
echo "Adding file to source control"
( $SOURCE_CONTROL_CMD $next_name )
echo "Opening file in $TEXT_EDITOR..."
( $TEXT_EDITOR $next_name & )

The way it is currently written, it supposed to work from the main directory (one above "_posts"), but feel free to tweak it for your needs.

Do not forget to add a "_" prefix, otherwise when you build, blogofile will copy it into "_site".

Blogofile