Recent Posts

After adding the streak display to the stats a couple of days back, I got a little more obsessed with knowing what sort of runs of days of posting to the blog I had. I even said in that post:

It almost makes me want to do a whole-blog-lifetime version of it, or perhaps some sort of more calendar-oriented version of the archive.

Despite saying that I fancied the idea of that calendar-type view, first off I got to thinking it would be interesting to see a table of my 10 longest streaks. So that got added and can now be found in the stats page.

Having added that, I kept thinking about the whole-blog visual view of "here's the whole time of the blog, and here are the days you posted". I did think it might be interesting to use the same style and layout as the streak display -- perhaps something that would look like my whole contribution history on GitHub that I wrote about back in 2023 -- but the problem with that is it's tricky to make it work well on all display types. I needed something that would collapse better on smaller displays.

So I decided that a more conventional calendar display might work better. While it took a bit of work to get it to really land as I wanted, it turned out pretty much how I wanted.

So now there is a with_calendar configuration option that, if set to true, will add a calendar link at the top of the site. By default it looks like this:

If it looks a little unconventional at first glance, that's because it is. I wanted something that started with the most recent month in which there's a post, and which then worked backwards. This way I can see things as a proper history. But I can also see that this might seem odd to some people. Given this, I've also added a forward_calendar configuration option that can be used (when set to true), to flip the calendar into a more normal flow.

As you might expect, the calendar links to other parts of the site: clicking on a day with a post takes you to the archive for that day, clicking on a month name where there are posts in a month takes you to the archive for that month, and the same again for a year title.

I'm pretty pleased with the result. In testing it seems nicely responsive to different display types and I'm also finding it to be yet another interesting way to discover older posts (and get a sense of when I was encouraged to post going back over the last 11 years of this particular blog¹).

One final little feature I've added is a small enhancement to the read time that can appear on each post. While it's long since been possible to decide if you want it there or not, the calculation itself has been hard-wired to the assumption that 200 wpm is the reading speed of the reader. I've now added read_time_wpm as a configuration option so you can set it to suit your own taste.

I wondered yesterday:

...those question headers are displaying differently, with the background colour no longer spanning the width of the window. I'd like to understand why.

Turns out it was pretty straightforward:

diff --git a/quiz.el b/quiz.el
index 2dbe45d..c1ba255 100644
--- a/quiz.el
+++ b/quiz.el
@@ -40,7 +40,8 @@
 (defface quiz-question-number-face
   '((t :height 1.3
        :background "black"
-       :foreground "white"))
+       :foreground "white"
+       :extend t))
   "Face for the question number."
   :group 'quiz)

and so v1.7 has happened.

It looks like, perhaps, at some point in the past, :extend was t by default, but it no longer is? Either way, explicitly setting it to t has done the trick.

Today's Emacs Lisp package tidy-up is of a package I first wrote a couple of employers ago. While working on code I often found myself viewing FASTA files in an Emacs buffer and so I thought it would be fun to use this as a reason to knock up a simple mode for highlighting them.

fasta.el was the result.

While I doubt it was or is of much use to others, it helped me better understand simple font-locking in Emacs Lisp, and also made some buffers look a little less boring when I was messing with test data.

As for this update: it's the usual stuff of cleaning up deprecated uses of setf, mostly.

If bioinformatics-related Emacs Lisp code written by a non-bioinformatician is your thing, you might also find 2bit.el of interest too. Much like fasta.el it too probably doesn't have a practical use, but it sure was fun to write and taught me a few things along the way; it also sort of goes hand-in-hand with fasta.el too.

I've released an update to BlogMore, with another little straightforward addition. This time I'm revisiting the statistics page and adding a streak tracker, of sorts.

Modelled after the GitHub contribution tracker, or indeed any number of other streak trackers, it shows which days in the recent past I've blogged on, and also an indication of how many posts I've made that day.

Of course, it's not quite a full streak tracker. It's only going to show the days up to the day the site was last generated; so when a reader visits and looks, if you've not generated the site for a month, it's not going to show that you've not blogged for a month¹. The point is that if you last blog in January, come March or so the reader isn't going to see 2 months of empty days, until you regenerate the site.

So, not perfect, but good enough I think. Also it gives the reader another method of discovering posts (each cell will take them to the archive for that day, so they can read the post or posts for that day).

I've also tried to make it vaguely responsive. There are narrower date ranges as the display gets narrower. We start out at 10 months (as you can see above), then drop to 9 months:

and then dropping to 5 months once we get to mobile-type screens:

For all its flaws, I feel it's kind of fun and I like it as a new discovery tool. It almost makes me want to do a whole-blog-lifetime version of it, or perhaps some sort of more calendar-oriented version of the archive. For now though I'm going to settle with this and see if it encourages me to keep up a blogging streak.

While it isn't my intention to write posts for the sake of it, I am enjoying writing something more frequently, so this might just help keep me doing that.

A quick little refresh of one of my old packages, this time quiz.el. This is a nice little distraction when you're working in Emacs, letting you spin up a quick trivia quiz in a buffer.

It's backed by the Open Trivia Database, so there's a good few subjects, questions, and levels of difficulty to play with.

The only changes I've made to it in this release are the usual clean-ups of the deprecated uses of setf, plus I've added q as a binding to the quiz window to quickly quit the quiz.

I might have to come back and revisit it soon, as it looks like the default face choices could probably do with a rethink, and I can see at the moment that the attempt at a window-wide "header" for each question isn't working any longer. For comparison, here's how the package looked when running back when I first wrote it back in 2017:

Leaving aside the fact that I was still running a very light Emacs then, those question headers are displaying differently, with the background colour no longer spanning the width of the window. I'd like to understand why.

While I have been doing a lot of hacking on blogmore.el, I haven't forgotten my plan to revisit and refresh some of my older personal packages. This evening I've paid some attention to expando.el.

This started life a long time ago, as part of my grab-bag of handy functions that got carried around and copied from machine to machine, until I did a big tidy-up of everything back in 2017 and turned various things into packages that I managed via a self-hosted (well, GitHub pages hosted) package index.

It's a pretty simple but very useful bit of code that lets me quickly macroexpand a sexp at point and pretty print it into a display window. I've often found it indispensable when it came to writing my own macros.

This release simply adds a lexical-binding header to the file, and also adds a q key binding to the resulting view window so that it can be quickly and easily closed.

Also, as with all my other personal packages, I've swapped away from using delpa to simply using :vc to pull it in.

(use-package expando
  :vc (:url "https://github.com/davep/expando.el" :rev :newest)
  :bind
  ("C-c e" . expando-macro))

Or perhaps I should say...

(progn
  (use-package-vc-install
   '(expando (:url "https://github.com/davep/expando.el") nil) nil)
  (defvar use-package--warning69
    #'(lambda (keyword err)
        (let
            ((msg
              (format "%s/%s: %s" 'expando keyword
                      (error-message-string err))))
          (display-warning 'use-package msg :error))))
  (condition-case err
      (progn
        (if (fboundp 'expando-macro) nil
          (autoload #'expando-macro "expando" nil t))
        (let*
            ((name "C-c e") (key [3 101])
             (kmap
              (or (if (and nil (symbolp nil)) (symbol-value nil) nil)
                  global-map))
             (kdesc
              (cons (if (stringp name) name (key-description name))
                    (if (symbolp nil) nil 'nil)))
             (binding (lookup-key kmap key)))
          (require 'bind-key)
          (let
              ((entry (assoc kdesc personal-keybindings))
               (details
                (list #'expando-macro (if (numberp binding) nil binding))))
            (if entry (setcdr entry details)
              (add-to-list 'personal-keybindings (cons kdesc details))))
          (define-key kmap key #'expando-macro)))
    ((debug error) (funcall use-package--warning69 :catch err))))

Despite having bumped it from 2.x to 3.x yesterday, I'm calling v4.0 on blogmore.el today. There's a good reason for this though. While tinkering with some of the configuration yesterday, and also answering a configuration question last night, I realised that it made sense to make some of the internals into public utility functions.

Now, sure, Emacs Lisp doesn't really have internals in the private function sense, but I've always liked the approach that a package-- prefix communicates "internal, might go away" vs package- which tells me "this is a stable part of the API of this package". With this in mind I've always tried to write my code using this convention. I did this with blogmore.el too and a lot of the code had the blogmore-- prefix.

There's plenty of code in there that someone might want to make use of, if they wanted to add their own commands, or do fun things with the configuration. So with this in mind I've "promoted" a bunch of code to being "public" and, in that case, I feel this deserves another major version bump¹.

Things that are now part of the "public" interface include:

• blogmore-clean-time-string
• blogmore-get-frontmatter
• blogmore-remove-frontmatter
• blogmore-set-frontmatter
• blogmore-slug
• blogmore-toggle-frontmatter
• blogmore-with-post

Each one is documented via its docstring (just a quick Ctrl+h f function-name RET away) and hopefully is pretty self-explanatory.

blogmore-with-post is especially handy as it provides a quick and easy way of pulling information from a post file. So something like this:

(blogmore-with-post "~/write/davep.github.com/content/posts/2026/04/2026-04-05-blogmore-el-v3-1.md"
  (list
   (blogmore-get-frontmatter "title")
   (blogmore-get-frontmatter "date")))

resulting in:

("blogmore.el v3.1" "2026-04-05 20:04:44+0100")

Meaning that this snippet from yesterday's post:

(with-temp-buffer
  (insert-file-contents-literally file)
  (parse-iso8601-time-string
   (blogmore--clean-time-string (blogmore--get-frontmatter-property "date"))))

becomes:

(blogmore-with-post file
  (parse-iso8601-time-string
   (blogmore-clean-time-string (blogmore-get-frontmatter "date"))))

Not massively different, but it reads better and now all the calls are to the "public API" of the package.

Not all the changes are "promoted internals". I've also added a blogmore-remove-tag command (and also added it to the transient menu).

I've also changed the way that blogmore-add-tag works so that, now, if it's called from the transient, it immediately goes back to the tag input prompt, allowing for another tag to be immediately selected (you can quit out of this with Ctrl+g). Removal of a tag works in a similar way, making things a lot quicker.

I've also added some extra tests too, which makes it even easier for me to make future changes with confidence. The more I work with it the more I appreciate that ERT is available.

When I first started writing blogmore.el it was just going to be a handful of commands that let me spin up a new blog post, and insert the odd link here and there when needed. Initially it only handled a single blog, and everything it did was based around how I lay my personal blog out, and was also very much geared to how I'd made BlogMore work.

But then I wanted to use it to edit both my personal blog and my photoblog. So then I had to add support for configuring different ways of laying out posts for different blogs, etc.

Still, it was mostly written as a personal tool that worked for my stuff. I tried to make it so that it was easy enough to configure (and let's be fair: it's for Emacs and written in Emacs Lisp, it's kind of hard to not be very configurable if you're happy to get your hands dirty with some coding), but there were still some parts of it that weren't as easy to change as I'd have liked.

Also, when I'd originally added the multi-blog configuration, I'd chosen a format for the list of blogs that was an assoc-list of pure lists wrapped by a cl-defstruct to make for easier access. It worked well but was very positional in its nature.

So when the request came in to be able to have better control over the name of the file when starting a new post, which meant I was going to need to rearrange the structure again, it was time to try and do something about it.

Which is how I'm now on v3.1 (yes, there was a v3.0 but I quickly found something in that that needed fixing¹). It's a major version bump because I've totally changed how the blogmore-blogs variable holds the data.

From now on I'm using EIEIO to create a class that holds all of the data for a given blog. This, I believe, makes the code easier to read and should also make it more resilient to the addition of any new properties. Also thanks to how such classes can work with the customize system the customize experience remains pretty much the same too.

Personally I don't use the customize UI, instead I declare everything via use-package. As of the time of writing my declaration for blogmore looks like this:

(use-package blogmore
  :ensure t
  :defer t
  :vc (:url "https://github.com/davep/blogmore.el" :rev :newest)
  :init
  (add-hook 'blogmore-new-post-hook #'end-it)
  (blogmore-work-on "blog.davep.org")
  :custom
  (blogmore-blogs
   (list
    (blogmore-blog
     :title "blog.davep.org"
     :posts-directory "~/write/davep.github.com/content/posts/"
     :post-subdirectory-function (lambda () (format-time-string "%Y/%m/")))
    (blogmore-blog
     :title "seen-by.davep.dev"
     :posts-directory "~/write/seen-by/content/posts/")))
  :bind
  ("<f12> b" . blogmore))

There's a bunch of other changes and tweaks under the hood in this release too. All of these should come together to make blogmore.el a little more configurable than it was before. I think, to get the best out of it, anyone wanting to configure it "just so" for their purposes will still have to do a little bit of work, which makes me want to spend some time soon writing some proper documentation, complete with examples of how you might achieve different things.

One big change I've made under the hood is to the code that is used when you insert a link to a post (blogmore-link-post). When this runs it lets me pick a file in your filesystem that is a post from my currently-active blog. Once it has the filename it needs to turn it into a root-relative link. So this:

~/write/davep.github.com/content/posts/2026/04/01/2026-04-01-foo.md

needs to become:

/2026/04/01/foo.html

Until now I just did some regexp faffing that took the 2026-04-01- at the start of the filename and swapped each - for /. Nice and easy. Simple enough to code up and get things working a few weeks back. Not at all flexible.

So as a proof-of-concept of how sophisticated someone could get with configuring this I've changed blogmore-default-post-maker-function from this:

(defcustom blogmore-default-post-maker-function
  (lambda (file)
    (replace-regexp-in-string
     (rx bos (group (+ digit)) "-" (group (+ digit)) "-" (group (+ digit)) "-")
     "\\1/\\2/\\3/"
     (file-name-base (file-name-sans-extension file))))
  "Default function to generate a link for a blog post from its filename."
  :type 'function
  :group 'blogmore)

and turned it into this:

(defcustom blogmore-default-post-maker-function
  (lambda (file)
    (format
     "%s/%s"
     (format-time-string
      "%Y/%m/%d"
      (with-temp-buffer
        (insert-file-contents-literally file)
        (parse-iso8601-time-string
         (blogmore--clean-time-string (blogmore--get-frontmatter-property "date")))))
     (replace-regexp-in-string
      (rx bol (= 4 digit) "-" (= 2 digit) "-" (= 2 digit) "-")
      ""
      (file-name-base file))))
  "Default function to generate a link for a blog post from its filename."
  :type 'function
  :group 'blogmore)

So whereas before I was simply messing with the file's name, now I'm loading the date frontmatter from the chosen file and using that to create the date portion of the path in the URL that I use on my blog. The benefit here is that someone might want to keep the date portion of the path in the URL, but never want it as part of the Markdown source file's name, and so this change means they can call the file anything they want; it doesn't look at that but instead uses the actual date from the post's frontmatter.

I think this nicely demonstrates that, especially thanks to how powerful Emacs and Emacs Lisp are, it's fairly easy to make blogmore.el work just the way you want. I think I've provided almost all the hooks necessary to configure it all sorts of ways, but if you do happen to use it and run into something I might have missed, let me know.

After releasing blogmore.el v2.6 this morning, I noticed something about the post: the text that was marked up with <kbd> wasn't really standing out as keys. In blog posts, as in documentation, if I mention the name of a key, I like to mark it up with <kbd>. Ideally, with such markup, the styling of the page it's being used on will make it clear that it's supposed to be read as a key.

I've never put any such styling into the default styles made available in BlogMore.

So here we are with BlogMore v2.9.0, now with a bit of markup, and theme support, for keys marked up with <kbd>. So now, hopefully, if I say you should press Ctrl+F4 to make this blog look better, those keys should stand out a little better than they used to.

There's no question that the experiment that is BlogMore has resulted in me blogging more. Although my previous setup wasn't exactly all friction, there's something about "owning" most of the tools and really knowing how they work, and being able to quickly modify them so they work "just so", that makes me more inclined to quickly write something up.

I can see this if I look at the numbers in the archive for this blog. In March alone I wrote 43 posts; that's more than I wrote in any whole year, other than 2023. While I suspect this will start to calm down as work on BlogMore and blogmore.el settles down, I sense I'll be writing a bit more often for some time to come.

Because of this I decided to do a little bit of housekeeping on the posts directory in the blog's source repository. Originally I had the Markdown source for every post all in one directory. Then last month I broke those down by year. Then earlier today, seeing how this year is going, I decided to break 2026 down by month.

Then I realised I had a problem in blogmore.el. It assumed that the Markdown file for a new post (blogmore-new) would always be created in a subdirectory named after the year, underneath the defined posts directory. Until today that was the case¹, but now I wanted it to work differently.

So this is why I'm making a second release in one day: I added the ability to configure the subdirectory where a new post is created. I've changed the default now so that it assumes the user wants the subdirectory to be YYYY/MM/DD (because more granular feels like the right default). In my case I don't want that, I just want YYYY/MM, but now I can configure that. The value that is set is a function that returns the name of the subdirectory, so in the case of my blog I have it as:

(lambda () (format-time-string "%Y/%m/"))

On the other hand, for my photoblog I want the full date as a subdirectory so I can leave it as the default. The whole use-package for blogmore now looks like:

(use-package blogmore
  :ensure t
  :defer t
  :vc (:url "https://github.com/davep/blogmore.el" :rev :newest)
  :init
  (add-hook 'blogmore-new-post-hook #'end-it)
  (blogmore-work-on "blog.davep.org")
  :custom
  (blogmore-blogs
   '(("blog.davep.org"
      ;; Root directory for posts.
      "~/write/davep.github.com/content/posts/"
      ;; Subdirectory for new posts, relative to the root.
      (lambda () (format-time-string "%Y/%m/")))
     ("seen-by.davep.dev"
      ;; Root directory for posts.
      "~/write/seen-by/content/posts/")))
  :bind
  ("<f12> b" . blogmore))

Technically this is a breaking change because it bumps the meaning of each "position" in the values within blogmore-blogs. However, in my case, because I was only ever defining the blog name and the top-level directory for the posts (both mandatory), this didn't break anything; I also strongly suspect nobody else is using this so I very much doubt I'm messing with someone else's setup². If I have I apologise; do let me know.

Anyway, all of this goes to explain why the heck I made two releases of the same package back to back in the same day. This is what happens when my namesake is having fun outside and so I just want to sit on the sofa, hack on some code, and watch the chaos in the garden.