Create Jekyll post file title lazily

Jekyll is an awesome static site generator which helps us to create a website easily. A feature which I evaluate highly is that setting up a blog by Jekyll is done in just few steps. It also supports pagination, so fantastic.

At first, I felt so weird in one point when setting my own blog by Jekyll. When creating a new blog post, we always need to put date on its file title following this pattern yyyy-mm-dd-post-title.md. i.e: 2017-09-17-jekyll-blog-post.md. It is a must although the date can be re-defined in front-matter as below.

layout: page
title:  Jekyll Blog Post
date:   2017-09-17 12:34:20

On a discussion on Github, @Parker pointed out that.

The idea for putting it in the title is to enforce the idea that posts are date-centric. It’s part of jekyll’s “blog-aware” features.

So, there is no any other choice, but I actually do not want to put a boring looong date on file title every time I create a new post. As you know, laziness has been nourished in our nature.

A quick solution I came up with is using a simple bash script. I created a script file named newpost.sh in my site root directory and put simple commands inside to get work done.

now="$(date +'%Y-%m-%d')"
file="./_posts/$now-$1.md"
touch $file
/bin/cat <<EOM >$file
---
layout: post
title: Post Title
---
EOM

It might need to set it as an executable file.

$ chmod +x newpost.sh

From now on, when creating a new post, running a simple command is enough.

$ ./newpost post-title-sample

It will automatically generate a blog post file yyyy-mm-dd-post-title-sample.md under _post folder, and put a default front-matter content inside too.

That is a shortcut for a lazy man like me in the world.