I haven’t talked more about regular expressions like I promised I would, but I’ll partially rectify that today by writing about a regular expression I created last night for my Blog Post Publish shortcut. This one applies specifically to how I name my blog post files for WTF Weekly.
Since WTF Weekly post titles are just dated blurbs like WTF Weekly for Oct 12th, 2020, I decided to name the post markdown files as consecutive numbers, starting at 1. I also make the post slug match this number so that the URLs are very simple, such as https://wtfweekly.me/41/ in the case of the one for Oct 12th, 2020.
Originally when I wrote my Blog Post Publish shortcut, I was entering slugs and file names manually as user input. This was partly because I do this already for this site, because instead of numbering posts, I give the files and slugs names related to the topic. The …