Since switching over on the 19th of last month I've been making lots of changes to BlogMore. While there's been a good few bug fixes and QoL changes, I've also been adding new features that I've found myself wanting.

Here's a list of some of the significant additions I've added in the last couple of weeks (and, yes, as per the experiment, all of these have been developed by me prompting GitHub Copilot):

  • All parts of a date in a post's timestamp can be clicked to get to an archive of that point in time.
  • Added fully-client-side full text search (I'm finding this especially useful).
  • Added sitemap generation.
  • Added a general fallback description for any page that doesn't have one.
  • Added fallback keywords for any page that doesn't have any.
  • Added author metadata to the header of all pages.
  • Hugely optimised the use of FontAwesome.
  • Made best possible use of all the usual og: type metadata in the head of all pages.
  • Added optional CSS minification, improving page load times.
  • Added optional JavaScript minification, improving page load times.
  • Where appropriate, all pages now have rel="prev" and rel="next" tags in the <head>.
  • Added a rel="canonical" tag to the <head> of all pages.
  • Improved the style and workings of the pagination of all archive type pages.
  • Improved the cosmetics of the category and tag clouds.
  • Improved how the first paragraph is discovered for a page or post, when using it as the default description in the <head> of a page.
  • Cleaned up the generated HTML so it's more compact.
  • Added support for custom 404 pages.

As I say, they're just the improvements I've made that have come to mind as I've used BlogMore. I've also done a lot of bug fixing too. You can read the full changelog over on the BlogMore website1.

I feel that the pace of updates and additions has started to slow; I think I've now got more or less everything I wanted from this. I'm pretty sure I can do everything I ever bothered to do with Jekyll and Pelican, and I am enjoying "owning" the code such that, if I have an idea for something I want, it's easy enough to make it happen.

I'm also pretty happy with how well the results perform. Despite the fact I'm not a web developer, and despite this blog being served by GitHub Pages (which, let's be honest, isn't the most speedy host), the measurements for a single page in the blog look fairly good:

Desktop

That's measuring loading in a desktop context. Even measured as mobile (which I've tried to make work well too) it's not too shabby:

Mobile

I think I can rightfully be satisfied with those values, given this isn't normally my primary focus when it comes to software development.

Anyway, if you like messing with static site generators, and one that is blog-centric sounds useful, and if you're not put off by the fact that this is a deliberate "use GitHub Copilot" experiment, feel free to take a look.

  1. Which, somewhat amusingly, is built with MkDocs. ↩