So! As you may have noticed, I recently completely overhauled my blog. New design, new backend (GitHub Pages + Jekyll), and new comment system (Disqus). I'm working on migrating comments over from Posterous right now, so those should be back up soon.

Jekyll is a static page generator written in Ruby. It does a fantastic job at making blogging a breeze without the need for something like WordPress or Posterous, and with GitHub Pages, you don't have to drop a dime on hosting it anywhere. It is very simple, and that leads to what is my only real complaint about it: there is no good way to automagically generate posts. That is, there wasn't, until I wrote a neat little script to do it for me!

Here it is:

Just drop that file in the root of your Jekyll site, and use it like this: "./newpost.rb POST TITLE" (the title may contain any number of spaces and characters as you want - the script utilizes the String#parameterize function from Rails, which will replace spaces and special characters). For example, if you run:

./newpost.rb My Test Post

That will generate a file in your posts folder with a name like "2011-02-11-my-test-post.markdown." The post is generated based off of a markdown template, called "template.markdown," in the root of your Jekyll site. Mine looks like this:

If you want to use an HTML or Textile template, just rename "template.markdown" to "template.html_or_textile" and change the TEMPLATE constant in newpost.rb to "template.html_or_textile".

Happy Jekyll-ing!

ck