This can get pretty pedantic. Where do you draw the line between what is the blog generator and the tools required to do it when counting the number of lines of code? One could easily argue in this case you might want to be counting the lines of code in pandoc, not this bash script.
That said, I do think this is the way to go, using a popular and generic tool (notably that you do not have to maintain) to accomplish a specific task. And more importantly, composing utilities together in a succinct and efficient way.
Also, if you used semicolons, or xargs with a pipe, you could make this one line :) newlines can be pretty arbitrary, I wonder if there's a better measurement for simplicity, like branches or statements/expressions.
The real story here is not the 60 lines, but the literate programming style used for it.
Aside from that, this approach is very similar to Marijn Haverbeke's (the CodeMirror author) generator, although your 60 lines does lean more heavily on third-party packages.