As the title said, I have been playing with some bash scripting since I was kinda bored. I was thinking about a blog made by Kev, where he expressed how he moved away from Jekyll and back to WordPress. Now, I have never used WP, so I don’t really know how many advantages, besides the mentioned in his blog, it has.
But that blog helped me to see, and recognize some of problems and annoyances I have with my current workflow.
Recently, I started to use Neovim to make my blogs, like the one you are reading right now. And since I am already trying to be as minimal as possible, I decided to make a script that helped me do the following things
- Create a post file
- Name it and add its date
- Add the metadata to it
- Open it to start editing
Doing scripting stuff (Not a tutorial tbh)
So, doing a script on linux is kinda easy, because of the way UNIX like systems work, I can make use of small utilities that can do small things and wrap everything together to make new useful scripts to automate the little things. In my case, I made something like this.
#! /bin/bash
echo "Type filename"
read name
filename=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d"-$name)
touch /path/to/_posts/$filename.md
printf '%b\n' "$(cat /path/to/_template.md)" >> /path/to/_posts/$filename.md
alacritty -e nvim /path/to/_posts/$filename.md
A quick explanation
-
In this case,
echoallows me to print text, just likeprintf, to keep the format of mytemplate.mdfile, containing the metadata of the blog, sp I only have to fill it out (I could probably automate this too, honestly). -
I used
dateto create the and format the filename of the post, as well as add the given title usingread(I cannot use spaces, but I always use dashes-anyways). -
I used
touchto create the markdown file and place it in the right locations. -
Finally, I open the file on Neovim in a new terminal window (my choice is alacritty).
Wrapping up
And that was it! I actually managed to do it. I am not sure if I could make it even simpler, but I am happy with the result. I can now start my blogs in a better way than before, where I copied and pasted everything from a previous file, that I had to open and close and I also had to be type the path of the file and make it and all of the usual stuff. But hey, now it’s everything automated for me!
Also! I also made some changes to the font sizes of this blog, and other CSS things, just because I felt that everything was a little too big, and I didn’t feel like scrolling that much just to get past the title. I think I still have to tweak it a little bit, but it is a good start.
This was day 23 of #100DaystoOffload, let me know if you found this kinda useful for you too. Or if you have a better script or anything that you use to make your blog workflow better!
