Posts from April 07, 2026

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.