Hands On: Creating a Useful Shell Script

I use the static site generator Jekyll to write my blog. I store the site at Github, who then translates and hosts it all for me for free. Jekyll is simple to use and I like it a lot. There's only one problem: it's a bit manual.

Every post that you create has to have a very specific filename in the form of year-month-day-post-slug.md. Not that big of a problem, just a mere annoyance. In addition, every post you have must have a blob of text at the top called the front matter. Again: not a huge problem, just kind of time consuming. The perfect candidate for a little help from a shell script.

<span class="hljs-meta">#!/bin/bash</span>
<span class="hljs-comment"># a Jekyll post creator, which creates a new file, adds frontmatter,</span>
<span class="hljs-comment"># and opens the editor and starts Jekyll</span>
<span class="hljs-function"><span class="hljs-title">new_post</span></span>() {
  JEKYLL_ROOT=~/Documents/Sites/conery-io-jekyll
  JEKYLL_POSTS=<span class="hljs-variable">$JEKYLL_ROOT</span>/_posts
  TITLE=<span class="hljs-variable">$1</span>
  SLUGIFIED=<span class="hljs-string">&quot;<span class="hljs-subst">$(echo -n <span class="hljs-string">&quot;<span class="hljs-variable">$TITLE</span>&quot;</span> | sed -e &#x27;s/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g&#x27; | tr -s &#x27;-&#x27; | tr A-Z a-z)</span>&quot;</span>
  NEW_POST_FILE=<span class="hljs-variable">$JEKYLL_POSTS</span>/$(<span class="hljs-built_in">date</span> +%Y-%m-%d-<span class="hljs-variable">$SLUGIFIED</span>.md)

  <span class="hljs-built_in">cat</span> &lt;&lt;<span class="hljs-string">frontmatter &gt; $NEW_POST_FILE
---
-minimal
title: &quot;$TITLE&quot;
image: &#x27;&#x27;
comments: false
categories:
summary: &quot;&quot;
---
frontmatter</span>

  <span class="hljs-built_in">echo</span> <span class="hljs-string">&quot;New post created, opening in Atom, starting Jekyll&quot;</span>
  atom <span class="hljs-variable">$NEW_POST_FILE</span>
  jekyll serve -s <span class="hljs-variable">$JEKYLL_ROOT</span>
}