Written by Matt Bilyeu
on April 02, 2018

Creating a new blog post in Emacs

Now that my blog is based on markdown text files, some new tooling options have opened!

entire blog is under source control (done)
make targets for common actions (e.g. create new post, deploy, serve dev version) (done)
git hooks for publishing (need to think about this more)
blogging via emacs! (done!)

I just wrote this function to create a new posts file and open a buffer for editing it. In fact, it’s how I’m editing this post right now!

(defun new-blog-post ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((post-title (read-string "Enter new post title: ")))
    (let* ((posts-dir "/ssh:vps:~/projects/blog/_posts/")
           (clean-title (replace-regexp-in-string
                         "[^[:alpha:][:digit:]_-]"
                         ""
                         (s-replace " " "-" (downcase post-title))))
           (new-post-filename (concat
                               (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d")
                               "-"
                               clean-title
                               ".md"))
           (frontmatter-template "---\nlayout: post\ntitle: {title}\ndate: {date}\n---\n\n")
           (frontmatter (s-replace "{date}"
                                   (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d %H:%m %z")
                                   (s-replace "{title}"
                                              post-title
                                              frontmatter-template)))
           (new-post-file (expand-file-name new-post-filename posts-dir)))
      (if (file-exists-p new-post-file)
          (message "A post with that name already exists.")
        (write-region frontmatter nil new-post-file)
        (find-file new-post-file)))))

This was also the first elisp function I wrote :)

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