Title Case

A good system should never make you remember its implementation details in order to use. That extends to blogging platforms. Since my blogging platform is a self-created, self-hosted website built on Astro, the onus of making myself not have to remember how it works just to use it rests solely on me.

Today I started writing a post about Mastodon and the Fediverse and why it’s not the solution to all your problems that you might think it is, and I realized I couldn’t remember if I write my blog post titles in Title Case or Just the first word capitalized or in camelCase.¹ It’s not the first time I’ve had to ask myself this question, and that means it’s a problem I don’t want to think about anymore. So here’s a very simple Title Case generator:

export function titleCase(str) {
  return str.replace(/\b[A-Za-z]/g, (x) => x.toUpperCase());
}

Running the first paragraph of this blog post through it results in this:

A Good System Should Never Make You Remember Its Implementation Details In Order To Use. That Extends To Blogging Platforms. Since My Blogging Platform Is A Self-Created, Self-Hosted Website Built On Astro, The Onus Of Making Myself Not Have To Remember How It Works Just To Use It Rests Solely On Me.

So now my blog post titles are generated like this:

<h1>
  <a
    href={new URL(
      path.join(config.get("posts.path"), content.frontmatter.slug),
      config.get("url"),
    )}
    >{titleCase(content.frontmatter.title)}
  </a>
</h1>

Speaking of camelCase, I also took the opportunity to add a camelCase function that outputs what we called camelCase when I was a juvenile programmer-wannabe.

export function camelize(str) {
  return str
    .toLowerCase()
    .replace(/[^a-zA-Z0-9]+(.)/g, (m, chr) => chr.toUpperCase());
}

I’ll be back next time with some reasons why Mastodon and the Fediverse aren’t suitable for most people in their current incarnations.²