> But I figured out that if all you have is a title and it's a one-line string, you can just use the `head` and `tail` command line utils to extract either the title string or the markdown body depending on which operation you're in the middle of, and you can still just use bash

I took a similar approach with mine (http://flukus.github.io/building-a-blog-engine.html) but it get's messy pretty quickly. In a future iteration I'm planning on using M4 templates instead, M4 is actually pretty nice outside of autoconf.