commit 0c895d25be27693cd8ecf742305673984e07dfd1
parent 57f783cdfbdfbfd3dfa30da9adb7bba88da0ecd5
Author: Sebastiano Tronto <sebastiano@tronto.net>
Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2022 23:59:59 +0100
New blog post
Diffstat:
4 files changed, 60 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
diff --git a/src/blog/2022-12-30-blog-ready/blog-ready.md b/src/blog/2022-12-30-blog-ready/blog-ready.md
@@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
+# Getting my blog ready for 2023
+
+My first year of blogging is about to end, and I am happy with what
+I wrote. I wanted to write at least one post every month, and I did. I
+intend to keep this pace next year, but I want to make this easier by
+writing shorter posts from time to time. This is not a trivial task:
+I found out that writing good *short* content is harder than writing
+good *long* content!
+
+But if I keep writing, [my blogs's index page](../) is going to become
+messy at some point! It would be nice to divide these posts by year...
+
+## Adding year sections to my blog index
+
+Very easy: in my
+[build.sh](https://git.tronto.net/sebastiano.tronto.net/file/build.sh.html)
+script that I run to
+[build my website](../2022-08-14-website), there is a
+[`makeblog()`](https://git.tronto.net/sebastiano.tronto.net/file/build.sh.html#l52)
+function that takes care of building the index page and RSS feed for my blog.
+
+It is enough to add the following lines inside its main loop:
+
+```
+thisyear=$(echo $d | sed 's/-.*//')
+if [ "$thisyear" != "$lastyear" ]; then
+ printf "\n## $thisyear\n\n" >> $bf
+ lastyear=$thisyear
+fi
+```
+
+And that's it! These few lines introduce two new variables, `thisyear`
+and `lastyear`, that keep track of the years of the last and next blog
+post that the loop is scanning. If there was a year change, a new line
+with the current year is added, and the `lastyear` variable is updated.
+The first line refers to a variable `d` that holds the date of the
+current post in `yyyy-mm-dd` format.
+
+A last note on the variables: if you are familiar with other programming
+languages, you might wonder where the variable `lastyear` is initialized.
+After all, I am using it in the `if` statement's condition, so it must
+be initialized outside of its body, right?
+
+Actually, no. The shell's variable scoping does not work like in C or
+similar languages, and a variable initialized inside a block is also
+visibile outside of it. Moreover, un-initialized variables evaluate to
+the empty string, so the first time the condition is checked it correctly
+determines that the current year is different from the last.
+
+This was my last UNIX shell tip for this year. Stay tuned for more!
+
+
diff --git a/src/blog/2022-12-30-blog-ready/pc-planner.jpg b/src/blog/2022-12-30-blog-ready/pc-planner.jpg
Binary files differ.
diff --git a/src/blog/blog.md b/src/blog/blog.md
@@ -5,6 +5,7 @@
## 2022
+* 2022-12-30 [Getting my blog ready for 2023](2022-12-30-blog-ready)
* 2022-12-24 [The man page reading club: ed(1)](2022-12-24-ed)
* 2022-11-23 [Self-hosted git pages with stagit (featuring ed, the standard editor)](2022-11-23-git-host)
* 2022-10-19 [Keeping my email sorted (the hard way)](2022-10-19-email-setup)
diff --git a/src/blog/feed.xml b/src/blog/feed.xml
@@ -9,6 +9,13 @@ Thoughts about software, computers and whatever I feel like sharing
</description>
<item>
+<title>Getting my blog ready for 2023</title>
+<link>https://sebastiano.tronto.net/blog/2022-12-30-blog-ready</link>
+<description>Getting my blog ready for 2023</description>
+<pubDate>2022-12-30</pubDate>
+</item>
+
+<item>
<title>The man page reading club: ed(1)</title>
<link>https://sebastiano.tronto.net/blog/2022-12-24-ed</link>
<description>The man page reading club: ed(1)</description>
