Vim (or vi in the anceint past) has been my partner in getting things done. Like an rich tool it has lots of features that go untapped or undiscovered. A few days ago I decided I wanted a script within a tempate to help build the “front matter” to my markdown (.md) files.
The front matter looks like this:
+++
author = ""
comments = true
date = "2018-07-15 14:45:19"
draft = false
image = ""
share = true
# slug =
# tags = [ "tag1", "tag2" ]
title = "vim_scriptable_templates"
+++
The challenge was to have vim write in the date for me in the needed format. And if you use hugo as your static web site generator as I do you may have found that it will silently ignore a new markdown file if the date is not formated correctly. It some testing to discover that but the bottom line is that I needed a way to script it for to avoid mistakes.
Research to me to this tip source: vim embedded scripts
First credit goes to Silke V at codepen.io name “silkine” [http://www.silkevoigts.de/]. Original source code can be found here: https://codepen.io/silkine/pen/jldif
I had a coworker who had a non-profit business blog that wanted to offer a newsletter to her clients. So I got interested in finding an HTML format that gave an old traditional newspaper style and Silke offered a solution that provided a strong simple css base. Currently (2017) I find the hugo cms system to be the easiest most portable static web building application freely available. The challenge was to create a full newsletter style theme as a subtheme within an existing theme structure. So I mocked up a ported version of Silke’s newspaper css into a hugo “section”.
An example of this subtheme can be seen here: [newspaper-hugo-subtheme]
This project is a drop in offering to any existing hugo themed structure which will produce a newsletter format in an “article(s)” hugo section. A user only needs to change the title, city, and state varbiable that are stored as front matter in the ./content/articles/_index.md file. Hugo uses this file natively to discover section (in this case “articles”) specific data. All posts to the newsletter subtheme should be created in this ./content/articles/ directory as markdown files. Running hugo new articles/mynewarticle.md will create a new file with the default front matter pulled from ./archtypes/articles.md.
This project becomes a drop in addition to any hugo theme to add a newspaper type subtheme section.
