While the additions have, for sure, slowed down, I'm still tinkering away with BlogMore. Recent changes stem from the fact that someone else has been mad enough to want to experiment with rebuilding their blog with it too, which, if I'm honest, is massively helpful with the ongoing GitHub Copilot experiment. Somehow it feels a little different, ganging up with the agent to implement changes for someone else's benefit.

Recent changes include:

  • Tweaking the size and layout of the "social" icons that appear in the sidebar (this one was for my benefit)
  • Making it possible to customise the title for the socials section in the sidebar (also for my benefit)
  • Providing control over the path used for posts -- this one was a request that made a ton of sense, it's at this point it stops being a tool for me and starts being a more general tool

Next up is the first breaking change where I'm going to remove a feature. This came from my very initial experiment last month, where I was concentrating purely on building a tool for my blog and my blog alone. I'd made it such that the /attachments directory in the content directory had special status, and it would be copied over to the output directory in full. Oddly, however, this never made it into the documentation.

Meanwhile, the /extras directory also had special status with its content, full hierarchy included, being copied over but moved up one level in the output. So, for example, extras/humans.txt became /humans.txt in the resulting site, etc.

Presumably, at this point, you can see where this is going. Why the heck did I have a special attachments folder being copied over, when a folder of any name could live below extras and also get copied over?

So, now, my blog, which uses /attachments for all inline images and covers, has been updated so that the attachments live under extras and it all works as it did before; no special messing with a special folder name.

Given all this, the next release of BlogMore will remove treating /attachments as a special case, making it less hard-coded for my habits and more of a general tool that could be useful for others.

Mildly related to this: I did a lunchtime talk at work today, having turned Five days with Copilot into a 20-25 minute presentation. It was fun to do. I've not written or given a talk or presentation in a long time -- probably the last time was when I helped run Newton's Astronomical Society in the early 2000s -- so the preparation for this was a little daunting to start with.

While doing this, not wanting to break a long streak of never having used PowerPoint, I discovered and gave sli.dev a go. Writing a single Markdown file to power the talk was exactly my kind of approach. I don't have any experience with any other such tools, but if you're ever looking for something like this I recommend giving it a try.

I'm also open to suggestions of other options, given I might end up doing this some more.