Blog in Emacs - Use Jekyll's Draft Mode

Why?

I wasn’t aware of Jekyll’s draft mode. My workaround was manually changing the published field in the front matter to true when the post is ready to publish. It works fine. However, with naive support from Jekyll, there are more benefits to using the draft mode.

To start with, I like the drafts saved in the _drafts folder, not mixed with other published posts in the _posts folder. It is way more cleaner and easy to manage. With a glimpse of my eyes, I can see what are the posts that I am drafting.

It also gives a piece of mind: only posts under the _posts folder are exported and shown in my blog. It ensures I don’t accidentally publish a post in draft.

Once there are files in _drafts folder, adding ​-​-​drafts argument to the jekyll serve command is all I need to be able to see the drafts locally.

Of course, I also need to write a bit of Lisp code to integrate the draft mode into my blogging workflow. This is the remaining of this post is about.

Implementation

For a blog post, I have the source file in org-mode and its exported file in Markdown. Now there is a new location dimension: they can be either in the _drafts or _posts folder.

In terms of content, the published post and its final draft, and their exported counterparts are the same, only in different locations. Their content can be different to have some flexibility, e.g. published post has higher resolution of screenshots. This feature is possible to implement in the future. For now, I follow the simple “same but in different places” rule.

The new process looks like this: When I publish a post, it moves the org file from _draft to _posts folder, adds a date to the filename (which I have already), and then triggers the exporting process. To avoid duplication, it removes the original org file and its exported draft in Markdown.

To achieve that, the main missing piece from my current Emacs configuration is the yt/jekyll-find-export function (see below). For a post in _drafts or _posts, it finds the full path of the corresponding exported markdown file. I can then delete it or start the exporting process.

 
(defun yt/jekyll-is-draft-p ()
  "if the file is inside of the draft directory, it is a draft."
  (let ((draft-dir  (file-truename jekyll-source-drafts-dir))
        (filepath (file-truename (buffer-file-name))))
    (string-prefix-p draft-dir filepath)))


(defun yt/jekyll-find-export ()
  "find the full path to the exported file of the current post."
  (let* ((src-file (file-name-nondirectory (buffer-file-name)))
         (dest-file (file-name-with-extension src-file ".md")))
    (if (yt/jekyll-is-draft-p)
        (file-name-concat jekyll-site-draft-dir dest-file)
      (file-name-concat jekyll-site-post-dir dest-file))))