The New Utovsky Bolshevik Show

As some naysayers in #wuglug this (Sunday) evening suggested after three blog posts in a two hour span, I'm going to start posting to my blog once a day automatically, unless I really, really want to get around this. This should be posted Tuesday morning at 6am (famous last words).

I'm using PyBlosxom as my blogging engine, which is essentially based around dropping files into a directory. As such, it's almost trivial to write a script that will do the moving into place which can then be automated by cron. As it's only almost trivial, here's my script:

#!/bin/sh

set -e
set -u

FROMDIR=/home/daniel/pending-blogposts
TODIR=/home/daniel/test

next_post=`ls -t $FROMDIR | tail -n1`
if [ z != z$next_post ]; then
    echo $TODIR/$next_post
    if [ -e $TODIR/$next_post ]; then
        echo "Already a post with that name."
        exit 1
    else
        echo "Posting '$next_post'"
        mv $FROMDIR/$next_post $TODIR
        touch $TODIR/$next_post
    fi
fi

Just change FROMDIR and TODIR to match your needs, drop the resulting script somewhere on your server and add something like

  0 6    *   *   *   /home/daniel/bin/blog-post

to your crontab and you should be away.

Posted: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:21 | Comments: 2