Jekyll Blog CLI

19 Nov 2019   software

Sometimes it’s tough to find the energy to write a blog post. I have a long list topics that I want to write about, but it’s hard to find the willpower to fire up a text editor and start riffing. To make things worse, Jekyll blog post file names have the following format: yyyy-mm-dd-title.md. As such, it can be annoying to:

1. Open up a post - I’m not good at typing numbers
2. Update the date - sometimes it takes multiple days to finish a post

So I built a tool that reduces the friction involved in managing Jekyll blog posts: mackorone/jekyll-blog-cli

(Yes, I was procrastinating…)

Key features include:

• Open up posts and update dates by title, rather than path
• Tab completion on title using the argcomplete library

In short, I never have to manually type date strings - nice.

Demo

List blog posts by date:

$ blog list
2019-07-14-hello-world.md
2019-07-17-running-upright-relieves-cramps.md
...

Open a post by title (with tab-completion):

$ blog open <TAB>
hello-world.md
honda-maintenance-codes.md
...
$ blog open hello-world.md

Update the date by title:

$ blog touch hello-world.md

Before: 2019-07-14-hello-world.md
After: 2019-11-19-hello-world.md

Run Jekyll server locally:

$ blog serve