Jekyll Post Creator is a bookmarklet service that generates Jekyll posts for you.

All you need to do is create a bookmarklet in your browser and start clipping pages and creating posts. It works in a similar fashion to the Press This Wordpress bookmarklet (I lifted their Javascript, so thanks to the Wordpress team).

Jekyll Post Creator ← Drag this to your bookmarks bar

Using the Jekyll Post Creator

When you have found an interesting page you think is worth blogging about, you can highlight the relevant text and click on the Jekyll Post Creator bookmarklet. A small popup window will appear, allowing you to tweak the title, slug, body and categories:

Jekyll Post Creator

When happy with your post, click on the Generate Post button and a Jekyll friendly Markdown document will download (or display, depending on your browser) which you can drop in to your Jekyll site.

Please note that the Post Slug field will form part of the filename for the Markdown document. In the example above, the resulting file would be called:

2012-04-24-jekyll-post-creator.markdown

Assuming it’s the 24th April 2012…which it won’t be for long!

Markdown Output

The post creator populates a textarea with any selected text and also a handy link to allow your readers to click through to the web page you are blogging from.

You can, of course, delete these very easily from the textarea.

Supported YAML Front Matter

The post creator will output the following YAML entries:

  • layout
  • title
  • published
  • categories

The published entry defaults to true and the layout entry defaults to post.

This bookmarklet does not attempt to create a permalink entry.

Categories in the posting interface are comma separated and are turned into a YAML array.

Room for improvement?

Have suggestions for this bookmarklet? Would it be better to have posts emailed to you, or perhaps ZIP up all your created posts in one day and then email them to you, or merge all your clippings in to one file at the end of the day and download that?

Let me know if you have any bright ideas below.

If you find this useful, then feel free to link back.