Blogging
One of the many reasons I don’t blog regularily is the fact that it is not easy for me to do some necesary preparation tasks:
- cd into content directory
- create a folder
- decide what laguage I want to use (en or pl)
- create a file and add frontmatter or
- use
hugo new <path> which is better as it prepopulates frontmatter
- update the frontmatter with description
- use my tool to check what are the tags I used to assign to my posts so that I can reuse them (check go-lista-tagow(pl))
These tasks are tiny but very effective in growing in my mind as “stuff” I need to do first. In order to make hard things easy and build better habits I decided I need to minimize this friction and created a bash script that does this for me, asking questions as I go. And this bash script should be fun to run and use.
Gum
I thought gum from charmbracelet would be a good choice.
Instllation
I just installed the latest version with go install:
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go install github.com/charmbracelet/gum@latest
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Usage
I used several features in my script:
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title=$(gum input --prompt.foreground "#04B575" --prompt "Title: ")
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gum choose for selecting the language and the tags (piped from my tag tool)
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lang=$(gum choose "en" "pl")
tags=$("$blogroot"/tools/tags -p $blogroot --only-names | gum choose --limit 4)
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I had some fun with converting a string with space-separated tags into a string of quoted coma-separated tags:
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tagssplit=$(for i in "$tags"; do echo $i; done | awk '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) printf "\"%s\"%s", $i, (i==NF?"":",")}')
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Effect
The effect is quite satisfactory :)
Here is my blog.sh script for the curious:
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# prepare filename
blogroot="$BLOGROOT"
postsdirectory="$blogroot/content/posts"
# ask for title
title=$(gum input --prompt.foreground "#04B575" --prompt "Title: ")
# choose language
lang=$(gum choose "en" "pl")
# generate directory name for blog entry
date=$(date -I)
titlenospace=$(echo "$title"|tr ' ' '_')
entrydirname="$postsdirectory"/"$date"_"$titlenospace"
# generate full name based on language
fname="index.md"
[ "$lang" == "en" ] && fname="index.en.md"
[ "$lang" == "pl" ] && fname="index.md"
fullname="$entrydirname"/"$fname"
# allow to edit filename
edited=$(gum input --prompt.foreground "#04B575" --prompt "Your blog filename: " --placeholder "$fullname" --value="$fullname")
# extract tags, allow to choose max 4
tags=$("$blogroot"/tools/tags -p $blogroot --only-names | gum choose --limit 4)
echo "tags: " $tags
# prepare textual tags comma separated
tagssplit=$(for i in "$tags"; do echo $i; done | awk '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) printf "\"%s\"%s", $i, (i==NF?"":",")}')
echo "tagssplit: " "$tagssplit"
# ask for description
description=$(gum input --prompt "Description: " --prompt.foreground "#04B575")
echo "description: " "$description"
# prepare content
# add support to series = ["Dart"] (tool/tag option extension is needed)
# full date for frontmatter
datetime=$(date "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M")
# write frontmatter to temp file
for i in "+++" "title = \"$title\"" "date = \"$datetime\"" "tags = [$tagssplit]" "featuredImagePreview=\"image.png\"" "featuredImage=\"image.png\"" "description=\"$description\"" "+++"; do echo $i; done > /tmp/foo
# confirm and go create it!
echo "Will create file: " $edited
gum confirm && mkdir -p $(dirname "$edited") && touch "$edited" && echo $edited && (cat /tmp/foo > $edited) || echo "No files created"
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VHS
One more idea: to show you how this script behaves, I’m using VHS program:
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go install github.com/charmbracelet/vhs@latest
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I just use the recording feature by running vhs record > cassette.tape and entering all commands.
Ehem, … well, it did not work.
Asciinema
So I installed asciinema from ubuntu package. I used asciinema to rpoduce .cast file:
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asciinema rec blog.cast
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I also compiled from sources a .cast to .gif encoder/generator called agg (installation instructions) using cargo:
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cargo install --git https://github.com/asciinema/agg
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and used it with
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agg --speed 3 blog.cast blog.gif
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which produced this beauty:
