newsbuddy

newsbuddy is utility to help generate the bulk of my Friday newsletters which I distribute at work.

The goal is to

1. generate an mjml template given a plain-text file containing metadata, welcome message, and links to articles
2. invoke the mjml command-line tool to generate the HTML file
3. copy the contents of the HTML file to the clipboard

Most of the tooling will be written in Go. Orchestration will be performed using a Makefile.

Usage

From a .toml source file, newsbuddy will generate an .mjml file according to a defined template. The structure of the newsletter is fairly simple, comprising of a header containing the issue number and date, and a body with the welcome message and articles. Source data is expressed in a TOML file which is parsed and transformed into the output MJML file.

Source .toml

The source file should be in the following format:

[metadata]
title = ""
no = <>
date = ""
welcome = """

"""   # Multiline welcome message

[[articles]]
url = ""
type = "<TEXT | VIDEO>"
cat = "<GENERAL | DEV | RECIPE>"

[[articles]]
url = ""
type = "<TEXT | VIDEO>"
cat = "<GENERAL | DEV | RECIPE>"

# Add as many articles as you wish!

mjml template

template.mjml contains the empty template used for the newsletter. We use Go's text/template package to populate the template.

todo

• Decide on a config file structure - this is used to define the metadata, welcome message, and links for a specific issue
• Implement text parser for the above
• Add Makefile to orchestrate template generation and invoking mjml