After reading this Scott Hanselman post on keystrokes I’ve realized that while I’ve tweeted quite a bit in the past couple of years I’ve hardly ever blogged, when that would be much more useful (not to mention sustainable.)

So, here’s a little script wrapper for posting quickly to a Jekyll blog hosted on your filesystem.

Aliases are helpful to use this - I have this particular blog aliased as:

alias blog="post ~/code/sideprojects/brianhicks.github.com/_posts -c -p 'git push'"

Then I can just blog "Post Script" to generate some boilerplate for this post, for instance. When I save and quit vim, it’ll get pushed to GitHub pages automatically.

Hopefully I can remember to “post more in the future” although that’s an empty promise of many a personal tech blog.

Without further ado, the wrapper (the irony of this being written in Python is not lost on me, for the record):

#!/usr/bin/env python
"Wrapper for posting to a Jekyll blog from the command line"
import argparse
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
import operator
import os
import re
from subprocess import call

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(__doc__)

parser.add_argument(
    'where',
    help='Which directory to post to'
)
parser.add_argument('title', help='Title of the post')
parser.add_argument(
    '-d', '--date',
    default=datetime.now().strftime('%Y-%m-%d'),
    help='Date the post should be published (ex: 2013-06-19)',
)
parser.add_argument(
    '-o', '--offset',
    help='Days to offset post by, based on latest post (ex: +2 or -5)',
)
parser.add_argument(
    '-n', '--offset-now',
    action='store_true',
    help='If present, offset from current date instead of last post'
)
parser.add_argument(
    '-c', '--commit-after',
    action='store_true',
    help='If present, add and commit to git afterward'
)
parser.add_argument(
    '-p', '--post',
    help='Extra command to run after hook, if committed'
)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    args = parser.parse_args()

    # transform the parsed arguments
    slug = re.sub('[^\w-]', '', re.sub('\s+', '-', args.title).lower())

    date = args.date

    # do relative posting dates, from the latest post. Override date if provided.
    if args.offset:
        if args.offset_now:
            base = datetime.now()
        else:
            latest = sorted([x.split('-') for x in os.listdir(args.where)], reverse=True)[0]
            base = datetime(int(latest[0]), int(latest[1]), int(latest[2]))

        op = operator.sub if args.offset.startswith('-') else operator.add

        date = datetime.strftime(op(base, timedelta(int(args.offset[1:]))), '%Y-%m-%d')

    title = '%s-%s.md' % (date, slug)
    filename = os.path.expanduser(os.path.join(args.where, title))

    text = "---\ntitle: %s\ndate: %s\nlayout: default\n---" % (args.title, date)

    if not os.path.exists(filename):
        with open(filename, 'w') as post:
            post.write(text)

    call([os.environ.get('EDITOR', '/usr/local/bin/vim'), filename])
    if args.commit_after:
        os.chdir(args.where)
        call(['git', 'add', title])
        call(['git', 'commit', '-m', 'Add %s' % title])

        if args.post:
            os.chdir(os.path.abspath(
                os.path.join(args.where, '..') if '_posts' in args.where else args.where
            ))
            call(args.post.split())

Brian Hicks
Be Good.
brian@brianthicks.com

github.com/brianhicks
twitter.com/brianhicks