Jekyll and Rake for Better Blogging

After a bit of manhandling, I now have Jekyll working as my blogging platform.

A few things that will make your life easier if you try this:

If you like ruby (and if you’re using jekyll, you probably do), do yourself a favour and setup a Rakefile and shell slug for new posts:

Rakefile

require 'time'

desc 'create a new draft post'
task :post, [:title]  do |t, args|
    title = args[:title]
    slug = "#{Date.today}-#{title.downcase.gsub(/[^\w]+/, '-')}"

    file = File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__),'_posts',slug + '.md')

    # Updated functionality 2015-02-19 - Do not automatically blat a file
        # if it already exists. Instead, exit gracefully.
    if File.exists?(file)  
       puts "File already exists as #{file}. Open it normally, silly."
       exit 1
    end

    File.open(file, "w") do |f|
	f << <<-EOS
---
layout: post
title: #{title}
---

	EOS
    end

    puts "Opening #{file}..."
    system ("#{ENV['EDITOR']} #{file}")
end

new_post.sh

EDITOR=vim rake post["$*"]

After setting the shell script as executable (chmod +x new_post.sh), just invoke ./new_post.sh Your title here and it will create the stub, and enter you into your prefered editor.

Protip: the $* part of the shell script gives you all your command line parameters delimited by your IFS variable. For me, this is spaces, so this allows me to run the script with a human title, and everything else is automated/formatted as is required (hyphen-delimited for the filename, etc).

Be sure to add these new files to your excludes in your _config.yml file.