Added Support for Arbitrary Jekyll YAML Fields
Clean up your drafts folder and start using `_drafts` for actual drafts! Learn how to set the publish field to false in Jekyll Front Matter, adjust list comprehension to filter out unpublished posts, and preserve fields during the YAML-chopping step. Improve the core yamlchop function with a before and after example and see the result with the first release under the new code.
I Improved my Code and Gained More Control Over My Blog Posts
By Michael Levin
Thursday, May 4, 2023
My drafts folder is really cleaned up since I “rebased” my public site repo.
And so I can start using _drafts for actual drafts. Let’s go look at the
publishing status field in Jekyll… yup. Jekyll Front
Matter
I can set publish to false, and that’s just a super quick fix to keep the YAML where it is and still turn off the publishing of that one particular post. I may have to adjust the list comprehension to filter out unpublished posts, but that’s easy.
More important is making those fields get preserved during the YAML-chopping step. I very deliberately write the fields in a certain order and do some processing, because those fields don’t actually exist source-side. That would be keywords, description, and headline. OpenAI writes those, so I don’t just dump the data-structure from source. There’s also other fields not written by OpenAI, but which I calculate and layer in. That’s mostly just the categories field right now.
Ah! A chance to improve the core yamlchop function! Wow, that really just amounted to cleaning up yaml_chop(). Here’s the new code:
def yaml_chop():
# __ __ _ __ __ _ | ____ _ _ _ _
# \ \ / // \ | \/ | | | / ___| |__ ___ _ __ | || || |
# \ V // _ \ | |\/| | | || | | '_ \ / _ \| '_ \ | || || |
# | |/ ___ \| | | | |___ || |___| | | | (_) | |_) ||_||_||_|
# |_/_/ \_\_| |_|_____|| \____|_| |_|\___/| .__/ (_)(_)(_)
fig("Chop the YAML!") # | |_|
"""Chop a YAMLesque text-file into the individual text-files (posts) it implies."""
for i, (fm, body, combined) in enumerate(yaml_generator(YAMLESQUE)):
if fm and isinstance(fm, dict) and len(fm) > 2:
# Print a progress indicator:
if (i + 1) % 10 == 0:
print(f"{i+1} ", end="", flush=True)
# Build the categories:
keyword_list = fm["keywords"].split(", ")
top_cats = get_top_cats()
categories = set()
for keyword in keyword_list:
keyword = keyword.lower()
nkey = normalize_key(keyword)
if keyword in top_cats or nkey in top_cats:
categories.add(keyword)
categories = ", ".join(categories)
fm["categories"] = categories
# Format the date:
adate = fm["date"]
date_object = datetime.strptime(adate, "%a %b %d, %Y")
adate = date_object.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
fm["date"] = adate
# Build the permalink:
stem = slugify(fm["title"])
fm["permalink"] = f"{BLOG}{stem}/"
filename = f"{OUTPUT_PATH}/{adate}-{stem}.md"
with open(filename, "w", encoding="utf-8") as fh:
fh.write("---")
for afield in fm:
fh.write(f"{afield}: {sq(fm[afield])}\n")
fh.write("layout: post\n")
fh.write("---\n")
fh.write(body)
fh.write("\n## Categories\n")
fh.write("\n<ul>")
for asubcat in categories.split(", "):
asubcat = asubcat.strip().lower()
if asubcat in top_cats:
fh.write(f"\n<li><h4><a href='/{slugify(asubcat)}/'>{cdict[asubcat]['title']}</a></h4></li>")
fh.write("</ul>")
print("chopped!")
There we go! How much cleaner is that? And now with that light touch, it becomes more powerful. This is always the best case scenario. Through actually cleaning up and making less code (but for comments), your code becomes more under your control and more powerful. Now any discretionary fields I feel like dropping into the longfile-source, I can do so, and they will be handled automatically. This goes for Jekyll-supported fields like published, or ones that I make up for special template-handling purposes and other customizations. Very powerful.
Okay, I’m doing my first release under this new code. Let’s see if that blog post becomes unpublished and what it does to the arrows.