I’m writing a little tool to help with the workflow of writing a Jekyll ‘blog.

I call it blog because I didn’t want to strain my memory. It has several subcommands, a la git or jekyll itself. Here’s the help text.

$ blog help
usage: blog [-h] {help,describe,start,publish,push,serve} ...

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

commands:
  {help,describe,start,publish,push,serve}
    help                describe a command
    describe            describe a post
    start               start a new draft post.
    publish             publish a draft.
    push                push 'blog to GitHub.
    serve               start the Jekyll server.

The original problem that made me write a tool is that every jekyll post has two date stamps. One is in the filename: _posts/2016-01-01-some-title.md. And then, inside the post’s front matter, there’s a full ISO date stamp:

date: 2016-01-01 12:34:56 -0800

Now, instead of typing two date stamps, I type zero. When I publish a draft, the tool autogenerates both stamps. And of course, it does so atomically, so it’s safe to publish on the cusp of midnight like an embargoed tech journalist.

The publish subcommand also prohibits me from publishing in the default category of uncategorized. If I forget to set the category, publish fails.

The start command automatically converts the title, “‘Blog Automation”, to the slug, blog-automation, which appears in this page’s URL.

The other commands are just bells and whistles. Some of them aren’t even implemented yet. I’m sure I’ll think of more things for blog to do as I keep working on this ‘blog.