title	additional_copy_path	tags	hide_date	category
NVTool	~/project/nvtool/README.md	nvtool	true	project

NVTool is a blog workflow tool I wrote to assist in publishing my text documents to Jekyll as well as to other projects. Originally, I used Notational Velocity on Mac, because I loved its instant note searching capability. However, since I was also on Linux, I began using Vim along with slew of plugins to imitate Notational Velocity as much as I could.

While I could just start writing text files inside the Jekyll's _posts directory, I don't like the file naming format for each blog posts, which need to start with date. It will create blog posts without having to name the files to the Jekyll's naming convention.

For example, it will name the blog post called My first day at work.txt to 2015-07-01-my-first-day-at-work.md

NVTool grabs all text files with !blog in its filename and ignore all others. For example, a file called About Me !blog.txt will be processed.

NVTool translates internal links used in the text, following the Notational Velocity. Internal links are created using square brackets such as [[Another Page]]. It is compatible with Notational Velocity, and looks somewhat similar to Wikipedia's Interwiki link format.

Once the text file is translated, it is copied to its target directory, usually in the Jekyll's _posts/ or _pages/ directory. The text can also be copied to another location, if desired.

Alternative

There are other tools that can handle certain parts of the workflow, and will be considered for future update.

• Jekyll Assett Pipeline
• Grunt/Gulp/Rakefile

Prerequisite

• Jekyll
• _pages/ directory in Jekyll. This directory needs to be created, since it is not in the original Jekyll's directory structure.

Usage

Run in command line. Only the newly updated files will be processed.

ruby nvtool.rb

-- force, -f processes all files, even if it is not necessary.

ruby nvtool.rb -f

Configuration

config.yml contains the system-wide setting.

notes_path: "~/_notes"
jekyll_path: "~/www/jekyll-site"

• notes_path: path where original text files are located. On Notational Velocity, this is usually in the ~/Library/Application Support/Notational Data. Make sure that Notational Velocity is using "Plain Text Files", not its binary database format. I usually assign the directory to _notes/.
• jekyll_path: jekyll's path, and should include _posts, and _pages directories.

Front Matter

Each document can have YAML front matter, as it is on Jekyll.

layout: page

• It is used by Jekyll to determine the layout file. With NVTool, by default, all entries are considered posts, unless the layout is set to page. NVTool will send all post to _posts/ directory and all page to _pages/

  additional_copy_path: ~/project/abc/README.md

• If specified, the output file will also be copied to another location. It is useful for generating additional copy to be used for another projects or blogs. I use this to generate README.md for several projects, including this one.