Creating a tool for a blog like this
Recently I was thinking about creating a blog for my site on Github I’ve already had 2 blogs, one is hosted on Medium and the other on Wordpress, the thing is that I want to collect everything in a single place, so I find out this site where they explain how to create a blog with Jekyll (BTW it is a nice and helpful post)
Anyway, so I read the article and everything was very simple I’ve already had my profile site with Github Pages, so I thought it will be nice to have something in another repository and then just add it to my dot IO profile.
Laziness
I’m a lazy person, so if have opportunity to create a tool for something to simplify my life, I will do it.
The programming language
My favorite language since 2010 and till today it’s Groovy, so I have created a script that help me to configure (I know, configuration is a one time thing) and create new blog posts in this repo in a simple way.
Groovy is a language for the JVM, it compiles to Java bytecode, to me, it’s like Java with asteroids yep I code with Java, so far I like the JVM but not so much the verbosity of Java itself and when I knew Groovy it was like having the best of 2 worlds, a Static and Compiled language at the same time.
I had created a series of videos about Groovy on my YouTube channel everything is on Spanish because I consider that there is not so much info regarding this in that language.
The tool
To create a script with Groovy is very simple you just need to start a file (in my case is called blog.groovy)
with this line at first:
#!/usr/bin/env groovy
This line tells to your computer that it is a file that runs with Groovy, you need to give execution privileges and for that you just need to execute the following command:
chmod +x blog.groovy
Now write your code there, you can either use Groovy or Java that’s why I liked so much, anyway
the reason why I wrote that tool is because the file format for the archives with Jekyll is like
yyyy-MM-dd-title-of-your-post.md and don’t want to write things like that everytime I want to create
a new entry to me is easily to do something like this.
blog -n "Creating a tool for a blog like this"
That’s how I automatically create a new entry with date and the title from anywhere on my terminal, see, I’m lazy but now when I want to create a new blogpost I will just need to execute that command and that’s it, if you are interested on this tool you can see the source code in this project called blog-jekyll-tool, I’m open to receive feedback and pull requests, thanks for reading me.