A sign of good product or software is that is becomes forgotten. The product is so intutive that you don’t have to actively learn or remember how to use it but instead you internalize it. Making such software is extremely difficult, but there still are some like that. The first example that comes to mind is vim. Vim is by no means an easy software to learn and definitely not to master, yet once you learn the basics, most behaviour is very intutive.
Now, why am I blabbing about that here? Well, it’s because I know that the system I’ve setup to create these dev-log posts is by no means as elegant of well engineered to be intutive, but after a few rounds of trial and error it is at least efficient in terms of letting me create simple new logs. Hence, it is required to write a little bit about how to go about creating a log entry.
Yeah, it kinda works
At some point in the future I should write a small script that helps create new log entry auto-populating fields but, till then here’s the instructions.
The _config.yaml file has the general description of the dev-log collection that contains all the log entries. The folder _dev-log
acts as the source of all the items in the collection. Each file in _dev-log is one entry and the file name is in the following format:
%Y-%m-%d-{title}.md. Each dev-log comes with some amount of front-matter, ideally you want the provide atleast the following:
layout: dev-log
heading: "Heading of the Dev Log"
date: 2024-07-21 23:24:00 -0400 # $TZ=EST date +'%Y-%m-%d %T %z'
tags: ["some", "helpful", "tags"]
Alternatively you can copy over this file to a new file in _dev-log folder and edit it to jump-start.
read -p 'Title: '
TITLE="$(echo -n $REPLY | tr -Cs '[:alnum:]' '-')"
DATE="$(TZ=EST date +'%Y-%m-%d %T %z')"
DEST="_dev-log/$(echo $DATE | cut -d' ' -f1)-$TITLE.md"
cp '_dev-log/2024-07-22-dev-log-template.md' "$DEST"
sed -i "1s|date: .*|date: $DATE|g" "$DEST"
$EDITOR "$DEST"