Writing a #perl #script to avoid needing to type #hugo's #FrontMatter for every post.
https://blog.k3can.us/posts/2026/jan/newpostscript/
#selfhosted #blog
Writing a #perl #script to avoid needing to type #hugo's #FrontMatter for every post.
https://blog.k3can.us/posts/2026/jan/newpostscript/
#selfhosted #blog
Broken FrontMatter Extension
Reading Time: 2 minutes
For two days now FrontMatter has been slightly broken. When I want to create new posts via the interface it refuses, so I have to copy and paste the front matter info from the previous day, and add it to a new markdown document. The operation is quick and easy but it's a shame not to have the tool working as well as it could.
Every Hugo post has a title, a description, the date, preview, draft status, tags, and categories. With the FrontMatter extension all of this is generated automatically. For two or three days when I try to create a new page this isn't generated, hence doing it manually.
In practice this is an opportunity to move towards a lighter tool. I could revert to using VIM and work towards being faster with this solution, or I could experiment with using emacs.
With both of these solutions I could use a Pi for blogging, rather than a laptop or desktop. I could live in terminal, rather than use Ubuntu and MacOS. I tried it before, and eventually decided to revert to having a simplified workflow.
Debugging
I tried deactivating the plugin. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it. I tried updating the system and packages. I also tried turning it off and on again, without success. The last thing to try is to clean install VS code and see if that helps.
This could also be the opportunity to get a metaphorical leaf blower and move previous posts towards the blog archive, but I don't want to do that yet. I want to keep the history as it is.
The Side Track
A few months agoo I was trying to export my blog from WordPress to Ghost but it always timed out so that I only had a partial import of my current blog. I was thinking of playing with vibe coding to create a tool to convert the XML file to something ghost friendly. I haven't got around to it.
Of course, because of age I know that with a google search I can find tools prepared by others that might achive what I want. A tool like MD2Ghost might work well.
And Finally
When a workflow breaks we can spend time fixing it, but we can also think laterally and learn about tools that are new to us. I enjoy having the Hugo static blog and the WordPress dynamic blog but I am curious about experimenting with ghost, to learn about a new blogging solution.
Are people even using something else than YAML front matter in their Markdown (or whatever) files?
Apparently there are SSGs that support HTML <meta> tag front matter, and if you're using ReStructured Text it probably does its own thing. And I bet there's at least one person on the planet building their website from ASN.1 files.
What are _you_ using?
#WebDev #SSG #YAML #Markdown #FrontMatter #PlainText #StaticSite #StaticWebsite
Aaaand there you go: My first very own Python package on PyPI.
https://pypi.org/project/felloff/
felloff is a CLI tool to extract, edit (non-interactively, i.e. via command line switches), or remove YAML front matter in text files.
Now also supports editing existing files in place (instead of just printing the changed version to stdout).
Also, if you installed the 0.1.0 version please upgrade to 0.1.1, there's been a silly bug that broke reading from stdin … 🤦♂️
If you'd like to test drive my YAML front matter CLI tool, you can now install it from Git using uv or pip(x). There's also a readme now that shows you what it can do and teaches you how to use it.
https://codeberg.org/scy/felloff
Let me know what you think and if you encounter any bugs!
me: manually editing YAML front matter sucks
also me: *spends a day writing a CLI tool for common tasks*
(Not released yet, I have a few small features I'd like to implement first.)
Edit: It's now available for testing via Git:
Have you validated your
#RSS feed? https://www.rssboard.org/rss-validator/
I just did and realised there were lots of intraoperability suggestions on one of my blogs running #Hugo and it was actually not even valid because I had a missing trailing slash on my baseURL!
But I managed to sqash the errors (e.g. using absolute permalinks instead of relPermalinks and ensuring the date in the #frontmatter was in the right format).
PS. Thanks @joel for inadvertently making me aware of the situation!
Y’ALL!
i need #YAML #Obisidan #Frontmatter help
y’all know how you can add filters to frontmatter variables?
https://help.obsidian.md/web-clipper/filters
how do i do this?
1. TAKE A TITLE
"Ohai This Is A Title: Made a long ass mess with all this text"
2. USE THE COLON AS DELIMITER
title: "Ohai This Is A Title"
subtitle: "Made a long ass mess with all this text"
3. SO I CAN TEMPLATE IT AS
title: {{title|replace: ? : " " }}
subtitle: {{title|replace: ? : " " }}
alias: {{title}}
#Markdown の序文にメタ情報みたいなの書くやつ、#FrontMatter っていうのか。