From 0c895d25be27693cd8ecf742305673984e07dfd1 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Sebastiano Tronto <sebastiano@tronto.net>
Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2022 23:59:59 +0100
Subject: New blog post

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+# 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!
+
+![My netbook and planner for 2023](pc-planner.jpg)
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