Automating the file creation
In my last post Auto Generating the Commit Message I indicated that this post I would "throw it all together and to get a spot where I can run one make command that will do all of this for me".
I decided to take a brief detour though as I realized I didn't have a good way to create a new post, i.e. the starting point wasn't automated!
In this post I'm going to go over how I create the start to a new post using Makefile and the command make newpost
My initial idea was to create a new bash script (similar to the tweet.sh file), but as a first iteration I went in a different direction based on this post How to Slugify Strings in Bash.
The command that the is finally arrived at in the post above was
newpost:
vim +':r templates/post.md' $(BASEDIR)/content/blog/$$(date +%Y-%m-%d)-$$(echo -n $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
which was really close to what I needed. My static site is set up a bit differently and I'm not using vim (I'm using VS Code) to write my words.
The first change I needed to make was to remove the use of vim from the command and instead use touch to create the file
newpost:
touch $(BASEDIR)/content/blog/$$(date +%Y-%m-%d)-$$(echo -n $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
The second was to change the file path for where to create the file. As I've indicated previously, the structure of my content looks like this:
content
├── musings
├── pages
├── productivity
├── professional\ development
└── technology
giving me an updated version of the command that looks like this:
touch content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
When I run the command make newpost title='Automating the file creation' category='productivity' I get a empty new files created.
Now I just need to populate it with the data.
There are seven bits of meta data that need to be added, but four of them are the same for each post
Author: ryan
Tags:
Series: Remove if Not Needed
Status: draft
That allows me to have the newpost command look like this:
newpost:
touch content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
echo "Author: ryan" >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
echo "Tags: " >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
echo "Series: Remove if Not Needed" >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
echo "Status: draft" >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
The remaining metadata to be added are:
- Title:
- Date
- Slug
Of these, Date and Title are the most straightforward.
bash has a command called date that can be formatted in the way I want with %F. Using this I can get the date like this
echo "Date: $$(date +%F)" >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
For Title I can take the input parameter title like this:
echo "Title: $${title}" > content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
Slug is just Title but slugified. Trying to figure out how to do this is how I found the article above.
Using a slightly modified version of the code that generates the file, we get this:
printf "Slug: " >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
echo "$${title}" | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
One thing to notice here is that printf. I needed/wanted to echo -n but make didn't seem to like that. This StackOverflow answer helped me to get a fix (using printf) though I'm sure there's a way I can get it to work with echo -n.
Essentially, since this was a first pass, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up re-writing this as a shell script I didn't want to spend too much time getting a perfect answer here.
OK, with all of that, here's the entire newpost recipe I'm using now:
newpost:
touch content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
echo "Title: $${title}" > content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
echo "Date: $$(date +%F)" >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
echo "Author: ryan" >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
echo "Tags: " >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
printf "Slug: " >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
echo "$${title}" | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
echo "Series: Remove if Not Needed" >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
echo "Status: draft" >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
This allows me to type make newpost and generate a new file for me to start my new post in!1