Another gemlog script

Published: 2026-05-12

Sava.Rocks has just published a transmission on how they create new gemlog posts and the shell script they wrote for this purpose.

gemini://sava.rocks/blog/how-i-create-new-blog-posts/

This reminded me that I'm still a little bit annoyed every time I write something, I have to choose a filename, put the link, datestamp and title into the index.gmi, check that it works, correct my typo in the link, correct it again, etc. So I should write a script for this since my gemlog structure is slightly different. And writing it myself was a 10 minute job, having no error handling because that's just how I roll. If anything breaks I can just fix it by hand.

My gemlogs are structured the same way:

A gemlog per topic (3 in my case)
one folder per gemlog, containing an index.gmi and the transmissions in the same folder

The script is called from the directory I wanna post in and it requires an index.gmi already existing with at least valid post in it (This is needed in order to find the right line in the file). I simply keep it in the root folder of my gemsite.

A simple call to

../newpost.sh

Does the following things:

create a tempfile
get the date
fill the tempfile with a bit of text to have a template
open the editor to edit the tempfile, now looking like

# Title

Published: 2026-05-12

Write text here....

=> mailto:Rania%20al-Harisa<sojuz@v-tr.org>?subject=RE:%20RE:%20sava.rocks%20-%20Another%20gemlog%20script Reply

=> ./index.gmi Back to Gemlog

After leaving the editor (don't forget to save), a filename is created from the title line, the publishing date is inserted as well as the subject field in the reply link.
Last but not least, the script looks for the first line that matches a date stamp and inserts a new line there like this

=> filename.gmi date title

You can also download the full script here:

../newpost.sh

Back to Gemlog