Classic Logic

Introducing JekPost

As much as I love jekyll, one thing I found really annoying about it was the post creation ritual itself. You had to name the file a certain way and type in a bunch of metadata at its top for the whole thing to work. Cumbersome and repetitive.

That’s when I decided to write a script to simplify the post creation process.

It’s actually been a year since I wrote JekPost. It was something I wrote for myself, and had not really thought about sharing it with anybody. There were some minor nuances, but they were things I could live with. After a while I decided that I might as well upload the package to pypi, which in itself was a learning experience.

Recently, I fixed the aforementioned nuances. At the time of writing, JekPost is at version 2.1.0, and is very polished for what it does:

  • Create a new jekyll post file with appropriately formatted filename.
  • Add a basic YAML front matter block to the top of the post file.

JekPost is written in python. You need python 3 to run it.

To install jekpost run pip install jekpost. Restart your terminal after installation.

To create a new post, run:

$ jekpost 'My Awesome Post' dir
  • My Awesome Post is the post title.
  • dir is where you want the post file to be; this is typically the _posts directory.
  • 2017-08-14-my-awesome-post.md* would be created inside dir with the necessary YAML front matter.

There! That takes care of all the heavy lifting associated with creating a new jekyll post.

Let me run though a full example:

$ jekpost 'My Awesome Post' _posts
Post Title: My Awesome Post
New post created: 2017-08-14-my-awesome-post.md
$ cat _posts/2017-08-14-my-awesome-post.md
---
layout: post
title: My Awesome Post
date: 2017-08-14
excerpt: Your excerpt goes here
tags: tag1, tag2
---
Your post content goes here

You should replace the excerpt, tags, and post content with values specific to your post.

If you use jekyll, try out JekPost. I could use some feedback!