Mr. Poole - Dr. Jekyll's Butler

Overview

Mr. Poole is an Alfred.app workflow for Jekyll sites. He is Dr. Jekyll's butler and tries to take the drudgery out of running a static site. Mr. Poole will assist you by...

• creating, opening and publishing drafts of regular as well as link and video posts
• opening existing posts for editing
• opening existing pages for editing
• starting a local server with the site including drafts
• opening the site folder in Sublime Text for development plus the above
• deploying the site to your server with rsync
• tweeting about (new) posts

The commands

Draft commands

New draft: Add the title as an argument. It creates a new draft file in the _drafts folder of your Jekyll site, then adds a front matter template with the title and default values defined in the script. The filename is the lowercase, hyphenated version of the title.

New link post draft: Reads the URL, title and selection from the active Safari tab and creates a new linked-list style draft with the page title, date, external URL and the selection (as Markdown quote) filled in. Requires modified Jekyll templates (cf. below).

New video post draft: Reads the video ID, title and selection from a Youtube or Vimeo video page in Safari and creates a new video post draft with the page title, date, video ID and the selection (as Markdown quote) filled in. Requires modified Jekyll templates (cf. below).

Open draft: Returns all of your existing drafts sorted by modification date (newest first). Selected post will be opened.

Publish draft: Lets you choose an existing draft, adds the current date to the beginning of the filename and moves it to the _posts folder. Builds the site and deploys it to your remote server. Opens your site in the standard browser.

Post commands

Open post: Returns a list of your existing posts in reverse chronological order and opens the selected post for editing.

Tweet post: Requires a page on your domain in the active window / tab of Safari. Reads the URL and the title and opens an editable tweet about the article. Requires Tweetbot for Mac.

Page commands

New page: Takes a page name as an argument. Creates a markdown page file. The filename is the lowercase, hyphenated version of the title.. Fills in a template front matter with the title and default values defined in the script. It creates subfolders if given. Example: The argument /resources/A list of my downloads/ will create the file path/to/jekyll/resources/a-list-of-my-downloads.md.

Open page: Returns a list of all .md files inside the Jekyll folder including subdirectories sorted by date of last modification, excluding only those in folders prefixed with an underscore such as _posts and _drafts. Opens selection for editing.

Site management commands

Deploy site: Builds the site and uses rsync to deploy it to the remote server. Opens the URL in the browser.

Serve site: Builds the site with drafts, starts the local server and opens the URL. Regenerates the site when files are changed.

Edit site: Same as Serve site, but additionally opens the site folder in Sublime Text.

Requirements

General

To use this workflow with only the modifications listed in the next section, you need to have...

• a local Jekyll installation
• a local Jekyll site folder
• a remote server with SSH access
• working public key authentication for SSH access
• templates that support Link and video posts (they are not supported by Jekyll out of the box - read the next section for more information)
• Tweetbot for Mac in case you need the Tweet post command

Link and video post support

Link and video posts do not work with a standard Jekyll setup. You have to modify your site to support these post formats. Two starting points might be my short blog posts on link posts and video posts with Jekyll (which lead back to GitHub for detailed instructions).

Getting started

To get started, go through each of the script filters and scripts and do the following:

• make sure there's a _drafts folder inside your site directory
• adjust the sitedir, extension and other variables
• adjust the url of your blog in all open commands pointing at the remote site (not in those pointing at localhost)
• adjust the remote server data in all rsync commands
• if you use a different editor, adjust all references to Sublime Text or just remove them to use your default app instead (for some editors this will probably break the "jy-develop-site" which opens a directory instead of a file)
• if you do not use Safari as your standard browser, you need to change that in the Apple Scripts too (check whether your browser supports Apple Script first)

Todo

• if a page with a subdirectory is created, the title in the YAML front matter will contain the directory name too - for the time being it must be removed manually

Disclaimer

I'm a noob and did this to learn a little bit about shell scripts. The workflow is functional on my Mac, but it can certainly be improved. If you encounter any problems or have suggestions, please use this repository's issue tracker.

Acknowledgements

• Script filters are based on Vítor's RecentDownloads workflow. Thanks, Vítor!
• Internet people, thank you for all the tutorials and resources that helped me get started with this workflow!

Changelog

v.6

• added: New link post draft command (only for modified Jekyll sites - please the Link and video posts section)
• added: New video post draft command (only for modified Jekyll sites - please the Link and video posts section)
• added: Tweet article command (requires Tweetbot for Mac)
• change: added a sed line to the Publish draft action that replaces the date: line in the post's YAML front matter with a line containing current date and time to ensure the correct order of multiple posts from the same date
• change: the current date is now added to the front matter of new drafts and pages
• change: added lowercase conversion for new filenames throughout the workflow

v.5

• renamed and shortened keywords
• changed action descriptions
• changed "blog" to "site" throughout the workflow
• corrected typos

v.4

• renamed keywords to better fit my workflow

v.3

• Mr. Poole now uses variables for user dependent values throughout all scripts and script filters to facilitate customization

Download

https://github.com/frederikvoigt/mrpoole