The last time I wrote something and posted it in a semi-permanent reverse-chronological database for public consumption (a.k.a a blog) was propbably, I don't know, years ago. It's time to get back. And in the spirit of starting over, I'm going to pretend this is my first blog post ever.

Hi, I'm Zaim Bakar. I'm a web developer and this is my blog. I'll be writing about almost anything, but I'll try to keep things within the confines of my general interests, namely:

1. Programming
2. technology
3. movies, and
4. maybe some music.

As my first post ever, please allow me some latitude to meander a little bit (but I promise there is a point in the end).

Let's start with Programming

def hello_world():
    print "yes, i'm still here"

But more specifically I want to talk about this blog in particular:

$ gem install jekyll
$ mkdir _posts
$ vim _posts/2013-02-26-starting-over.md

Yes, I'll grant you that installing Jekyll isn't much related to programming (but at least I'm using vim!), so let me lead you down the rabbit hole some more...

$ make post title="Starting over" open="vim +"

Yes, let's talk about Make! After reading this post about how awesome Make is (via reddit), I was inspired to look at things that are Makefile-worthy and lo and behold, what about blog writing?

So I hacked together something to help me quickly write blog posts in the spur of the moment.

You can see it in this blog's source. But it's not that long, so let me paste it here:

# Slugify title using tr
slugify = tr -d '[:punct:]' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr '[:space:]' '-'

# Post options
title  = New Post
name   = $(shell echo -n $(title) | $(slugify))
date   = $(shell date +%Y-%m-%d)
type   = md
file   = ./_posts/$(date)-$(name).$(type)
open   = vim +
layout = default

# Assets
styluses = ./_assets/stylus
css_out  = ./assets/css

# Stylus
# just set to 'stylus' to use a global install instead
stylus = ./_plugins/node_modules/.bin/stylus
stylus_opts = -I _plugins/node_modules/nib/lib \
              -I _plugins/node_modules/normalize/lib \
              -u nib/lib/nib \
              -u normalize/lib/normalize

site: css
    @jekyll

css:
    @$(stylus) $(stylus_opts) -o $(css_out) $(styluses)

post:
    @echo "---" > $(file)
    @echo "layout: $(layout)" >> $(file)
    @echo "title: $(title)" >> $(file)
    @echo "published: false" >> $(file)
    @echo "---" >> $(file)
    @echo >> $(file)
ifneq ($(open), 0)
    @$(open) $(file)
endif

server:
    @jekyll --server --auto

.PHONY: site css post server

Well, I know there are many other examples of Jekyll/blog Makefiles out there, but the point here is for me to excersize some Makefile-fu for myself. So here are some features of my blog Makefile that I think might be different from the others out there.

• I auto-convert long titles into slugs for cleaner filenames.
• I automatically open the file in vim. (set open=0 to not open the file)
• I use stylus to write my CSS.

I use Node instead of the many Stylus plugins for Jekyll so that I can use the awesome Stylus extensions nib and normalize (which requries Node).

Other things I'd like to implement:

• make push to push changes to GitHub.
• Customization of the YAML Front Matter directly from the command line.

And... that's it! Feel free to reuse this yourself. Or if you're feeling generous, fork my blog and send me a pull request of any changes you made.