According to Octopress’s official documentation, the command for generating a new post is like this.¹

$ rake new_post["title"]

How about including some symbols inside title?

Single quotation marks

As you can see from the documentation, simply enclosing it with a pair of double quotes will do.

Double quotation marks

The following shell command works.

$ rake new_post['testing "double" quotes']
# Creates source/_posts/2014-05-31-testing-double-quotes.markdown

However, as I ran rake generate, I encountered an error.

$ rake generate
(in /home/owner/octopress)
## Generating Site with Jekyll
unchanged sass/print.scss
identical source/stylesheets/screen.css 
Configuration from /home/owner/octopress/_config.yml
Building site: source -> public

ERROR: YOUR SITE COULD NOT BE BUILT:
------------------------------------
(<unknown>): did not find expected key while parsing a block mapping at line 2
column 1 in /home/owner/octopress/source/_posts/2014-05-31-testing-double-
quotes.markdown

I opened source/_posts/2014-05-31-testing-double-quotes.markdown to view its contents.

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---
layout: post
title: "testing "double" quotes"
date: 2014-05-31 22:53:24 +0800
comments: true
categories: Octopress
---

Hello world!

At line 3 of the faulty markdown file, escaping the " inside the outer pair of double quotes with \ can resolve the problem.

title: "testing \"double\" quotes"

Exclamation marks

When I started writing the post My Desktop Crashed!, I attempted typing the following command.

$ rake new_post["My Desktop Crashed!"]
bash: !"]: event not found

The solution is again simple: changing " to '.

Exclamation marks and quotes

Before writing Internet Explorer a Security Risk: Use Firefox or Chrome, I tried issuing the following command.

$ rake new_post["Don't use Internet Explorer\!"]
(in /home/owner/octopress)
mkdir -p source/_posts
Creating new post: source/_posts/2014-05-31-dont-use-internet-explorer-slash.markdown

Although the above command works, the link of the new post doesn’t look great. Therefore, we have to avoid using backslashes inside the square brackets This time, there’s an apostrophe inside the title, so we can’t use ' to surround !. To create such kind of posts, some simple tricks will do.

• Pass a title with ', but without " and !.

$ rake new_post["Don't use Internet Explorer"]
# Creates source/_posts/2014-05-31-dont-use-internet-explorer.markdown

• Add the things back to title in the header of the generated markdown file.
  • For example, change title: "Don't use Internet Explorer" into title: "Don't use Internet Explorer!"