Balaji's Weblog

Creating a new Jekyll blog post in Emacs

  | #software  #emacs  

I use Jekyll static site generator for this blog and it is served through GitHub Pages. One needs to create a new file under _posts folder to write a new blog. It should be of the format yyyy-mm-dd-title.md.

It gets tedious to create the file manually. We can do better. I automated the following on GNU Emacs:

  1. Creating the file
  2. snippet for adding the the front matter

Creating the file through a command on GNU Emacs:

This function would wait for a file name (name) and then create the file in the path: ~/path/{yyyy-mm-dd}-name.md, where {yyyy-mm-dd} would be the current date.

(defun new-post(blog-name)
  "Creates a new microblog entry for my blog in balaji.dev"
  (interactive "sBlog-name:")
  (let ((prefix (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d-" (current-time))))
    (with-temp-buffer (write-file (concat "~/path/" prefix blog-name ".md")))))

I invoke this function as M-x new-post. I did not bind this to a key, I don’t think I need it and I won’t remember it anyway.

Front matter snippets

package setup

I use yasnippet for code snippets. This is my package config:

(use-package yasnippet
  :ensure t
  :init
  (yas-global-mode 1)
  :hook
  ((markdown-mode) . (lambda () (set (make-local-variable 'yas-indent-line) 'fixed)))
  :config
  (setq yas-snippet-dirs
        (append yas-snippet-dirs '("~/projects/dotfiles/emacs/custom-snippets")))
  (yas-reload-all))
  • The :init section ensures that the package is loaded globally.
  • The :config section is there to add our custom-snippets folder to the path and reload it.
  • The :hook section is to ensure that we get the indentation style “as is” from the snippet file. By default yasnippets tries to auto-indent based on the major mode and it doesn’t work for the snippet I use in markdown-mode. It might probably be a good idea to set the variable yas-indent-line globally to fixed. I might try that later if the snippet is an issue for another major mode.

snippets

Here’s a snippet for the front matter of a blog post:

# -*- mode: snippet -*-
# name: blogpost
# key: blogpost
# --
---
layout: post
date: `(format-time-string "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%:z")`
title: ${1:title}
categories:
  - ${2:category}
tags:
  - blog
gist: >-
  New blog: <a href="/${4:href}">${3:gist}</a> 
img:
  src: 
  width: 
---
$0

This text should be stored as a file under the markdown-mode sub-directory. There are two snippets here, one for a blog post and another for a microblog post.

~/projects/dotfiles/emacs/custom-snippets$ tree
.
└── markdown-mode
    ├── blogpost
    └── microblog

…and that is it. My new workflow is M-x new-post and use a snippet to load the front matter. Emacs makes it easy.