It looks like some of those friendships have lasted a while.
Some saw the opportunity to create content out of the situation.
Some have figured out that the thing that costs money, costs money.
Someone used up half their monthly allowance on just 8 requests.
Although, of course, there's always someone who has to do it better.
To be fair though, at least one person loves the new system.
As for my subscription, which came about after I initially experimented with free access to the tool, I've not actually cancelled yet, but I can't see me making use of it much more. I might try a couple of prompts with it, along the lines of what I was doing while working on BlogMore, just to get a feel for how different the usage is now.
Meanwhile, though, I've found that I'm getting on a lot better with Antigravity and getting the bits done I want to do. I suspect this is how I'll keep tinkering with BlogMore, until Google come to their senses anyway.
Another quick update to BlogMore: this time doing a little bit of tidying up in support of my use of it over on my photoblog.
The new items I've added to the stats page are working out really well, but over on the photoblog they were lacking a bit in a couple of areas. Because no post on the photoblog has any body text -- it's just title, category, tags and image -- things like the word count and yearly focus didn't really have any content. The minimum and maximum word counts were zero, and every single year of the span of the blog had no focus whatsoever.
To clean this up I've made it so that the word count section just doesn't show at all if the minimum and maximum word counts are both zero. I've also changed how the corpus of words for the yearly focus works too. If a particular post has no body text, the text that is used falls back to using the title of the post and the tags. With that change, the yearly focus list for the photoblog goes from being completely empty, to looking quite informative.
One other change in v2.36.0 is a small fix to headings as they appear in user-supplied pages. While it was possible to grab an anchor for a heading so you could link to it, the ¶ character that should appear on hover, to help make this obvious, wasn't appearing on those pages. That's now fixed.
Well, I wasn't expecting to release a new version of BlogMore quite so soon, given I made a release earlier today. But an issue came in that the Bluesky icon wasn't showing in the socials section on someone's blog, despite the fact that the docs suggested it should work.
It's interesting to note that Copilot/Claude (which is what did this work originally) produced one thing in the code, and then made an unsupportable claim in the documentation. Furthermore, it didn't construct the tests to at least match the documentation's claims. None of this is a surprise, of course, but it is a good illustration of the fact that agent-based coding is just fancy auto-complete with no real ability to maintain a coherent view of the whole project.
Anyway, v2.35.0 is now available and I too can have a Bluesky link in my socials. Oddly, I hadn't thought to add it before now.
I've just realised that, somehow, I've managed to post something on this blog, every single day this month.
A large part of this is, of course, because I've been doing a lot of stuff on BlogMore, but there's no getting away from the fact that BlogMore exists and I feel compelled to make use of it, and also that blogmore.el helps make it a lot easier to kick off and edit a post.
Thinking back to other blogs I've maintained over the past couple of decades, I don't think I've ever come close to this. Last month did come close, broken only by the couple of days I was chilling in Whitby. The month before also came close, minus 2 days where I just didn't have something to write.
I don't imagine this will last; in fact, I know for sure that there will be fewer posts next month (I have a trip coming up). What I do know is that I feel more compelled to jot something down when an idea turns up, and I'm enjoying the habit of blogging more frequently. While I expect this run to calm down, I hope I don't fall back to leaving it months at a time before opening a fresh Emacs buffer and kicking off some new Markdown.
The first change is a small fix to the url_path property, which wasn't being populated; now it is.
The second change adds two new properties to the output which relate to links that can be found inside posts: internal_links and external_links. As the names suggest, the first gives you a list of all the internal links that can be found in a given post, with the values given being the same format as the id used for every post in the dump. For example:
There is, of course, some overlap with the link dumping command, but given that the information is available it seemed to make sense to provide it here; it also means that it's available in a more structured form.
Also providing this sort of information in the JSON output means there's a lot of flexibility when it comes to analysing all the posts in my blog. For example, I can now easily satisfy my curiosity if I want to know exactly which posts in my blog have no links whatsoever.
Since kicking off the work on BlogMore and blogmore.el, I've absolutely found that I've reduced the friction involved when it comes to writing a quick (or not so quick) blog post. I've also found that I want to go back and tidy up lots of my old posts. Over the past few weeks I've gone and cleaned up the size and positioning of images; converted most images to WebP format; cleaned and consolidated the tags used; hunted down and fixed broken internal links; and a few other things besides.
Another thing I want to do is go back and hunt down, and clean up, typos and spelling mistakes, and the like. While I'm careful to try and not make any errors when typing out a post, and while I've always made a point of reading my posts back to try and catch problems, I've not always been successful. Sometimes I'm just blind to the errors, sometimes I'm just rushing. There's over a decade of mistakes on this blog.
This alone makes it nice and easy to go back and clean up some obvious issues. A problem I ran into though was that I was getting a lot of false reports for things in the front matter of the files (especially parts of the cover: file name) and also in the end-of-file comments I like to use. So, with a little help from Gemini (because it's a moment since I last wrote any awk in anger), I wrote a filter to "clean" the Markdown content before running it through aspell.
Already, using this setup, I've caught a few things that deserved cleaning up, and because there will be a lot of words that are correct but particular to this blog and what I write about, I'm also building up a local ignore list.
While this setup isn't going to make the content of this blog error-free, it should give me everything I need to go back and slowly improve some of the older text, and to harmonise some of the spellings of some technical terms.
I've released v2.33.0 of BlogMore, which extends the stats page some more, and also adds a tool so a user can do all sorts of fun things with the raw data of their posts.
The addition to the stats page is a list of years along with the top five words that characterise the focused subject for those years. This is done using TF-IDF. While the results for my blog don't come as a surprise, I am pleased to see that it does turn out pretty much how I would have expected:
This feels like another fun way to learn something about the post history for your own blog.
Which got me thinking: there's probably any number of other niche and bizarre things that could be done with the content of a blog to gain some insight as to its history, and I really shouldn't just keep adding more and more things to the stats page. But what if I wanted a way to run some code over all the posts? Wouldn't it be useful if I could get all of the parsed post data in JSON format so I can play with it?
With that idea in mind, I added the dump command. When run, it will print to stdout a full dump of all of your posts, as JSON, so you can then write your own nifty tool to read it back in and do any number of interesting checks, tests, reformats or manipulations. For example, if I wanted to use jq to pull out the metadata for this particular post I could:
I can see this being pretty useful to blogmore.el at some point, if I want to add some better querying tools or similar (not that I'd want to run a dump every time, it does require that a full parse and render has to happen).
Hopefully this will be useful to someone else. I know I'll be toying with it to find out other things about my posting history.
Now that BlogMore is so obviously feature-complete and there's nothing else I could possibly need to add to it... here's v2.32.0 with a quick new feature.
The work to add the relatedness of posts got me wondering about other things that could be measured about the content of posts, and a bit of reading and looking for ideas resulted in my (re)discovering the Gunning fog index. That got me thinking it might be interesting to see what the highest and lowest values were for my blog, and perhaps what the average is, perhaps even get a feel for the distribution.
So now BlogMore has a with_gfi configuration setting (and a matching command line switch). When enabled, it adds the score for a post next to the reading time (if that's enabled, if not it's in the same location as the reading time would be). It also adds a load of stats to the stats page.
As well as this change, I've also tweaked the stats page so it's easier to get a link to a particular section. As with headings in posts, when you hover over a section heading you'll get a little anchor you can click on that will result in you visiting that particular heading. That should make it easier to highlight a particular statistic, if you need to.
A quick update to BlogMore, with a small accessibility improvement, and also a whole new set of data for the graph.
The accessibility update follows on from a change published yesterday. In that release I did a little bit of work to disambiguate links to categories and tags that had the same link text; this time I've given the same aria-label treatment to the post dates where they link to the year, month, and day archives. While we're never really going to get ambiguous year links (unless there are also links in the body of a post that are four digit numbers), it's highly likely we're going to get the occasional month and day that are ambiguous.
So now those links make it clear, with aria-label, what's being linked to.
The other main change in v2.31.0 comes from a thought I had last night about the new "related posts" feature I added yesterday. Currently the graph shows the relationships the posts have based around their common categories and tags:
But now I've got this code that can work out how posts might be related based on their text content. What might that look like? It might be cool to be able to switch the graph view between the two sets of data, if the blog owner is building with related posts turned on.
While I'm not sure it really tells me anything, I like that I have yet another method of (re)discovering posts.
BlogMore has been bumped to v2.30.0. This release is pretty heavy on new features, but it does also include one small accessibility tweak too. While looking through some of the neutral feedback from PageSpeed Insights I noticed it mentioned that in some cases I had a category and a tag linked on the same page, where the text of the link was the same. That's pretty common on my blog. For many of the categories (especially things like AI, Coding, Emacs, Python, etc.) I'll also have a corresponding tag. The idea is that categories are essentially sub-blogs within the blog, whereas tags characterise a post.
Given that the same text for different purposes doesn't give much context from an accessibility point of view I've added appropriate aria-label attributes to differentiate these links.
Now for the new features.
The first is another "discover other posts" type feature, that might encourage a reader to venture further into a blog. While BlogMore does support backlinks (as was added back in v2.16.0), I have been thinking that a "related posts" feature would be interesting to add. So now it's added. This is enabled with the with_related configuration option (or the --with-related command line switch) and provides control over how many related posts are shown; the default is three.
The rest of the new features are more admin-based and are all commands on the BlogMore command line. The first is the drafts command which simply lists the filename of all the posts that are in a draft state.
The second new command is links
dump. This is a utility command for dumping a CSV list of all the external links that can be found in your posts, along with the filename of the post the link was found in. This could be useful for all sorts of things; for example writing your own external link statistics tool, or perhaps writing your own external link checker.
Talking of external link checkers: I've also added links
check. This is a bit experimental, but is intended to be a simple checker of all the external links, seeing if they're still out there. By default, when run, it'll check every link it finds and, if there's a problem with it, it'll report the issue. There's a --verbose mode as well if you want feedback on all the links that are working.
It seems like every time I think I'm done adding features, something else is either suggested or pops into my head. I feel like I'm near the end of adding stuff now and should be getting back to refining the code.
