Posts from April 11, 2026

Following on from yesterday's release of BlogMore, I've been looking at some more information in the Google Search Console, which helped me uncover a couple more bugs in relation to URL generation.

This time I noticed a couple of issues, both related to the clean_urls setting. The first was that, in the recently added calendar page, all of the URLs for the links into the date-based archive weren't taking clean_urls into account. That's now fixed.

The second problem was the canonical <link> tag in the headers of the various archive pages (categories, tags, date-based): none of the URLs used in the tag were being cleaned up if clean_urls was true. That's now also fixed.

The main "problem" those two issues were causing was Google was seeing the sitemap for my blog declare one URL, but discovering different versions of the URL elsewhere; the main offending part here being the canonical URL declaration that disagreed with the sitemap.

To the best of my understanding the above fixes should clean a lot of that up.

Also in this new release is a small new feature. After cleaning up the sitemap generation in v2.12.0 I got to thinking that, perhaps, there would be occasions where a user would want to be able to add extra items to the sitemap. With this in mind I've added the sitemap_extras configuration property. With this you can declare extra URLs to drop into the sitemap, if one is being generated.

sitemap_extras:
  - /some/path/
  - /some/file.html

I don't think I have a use for this right now, I'm not sure I'll ever have a use for it, but it feels like a low-cost feature to add that could be useful to someone at some point.

This was a nice find yesterday: I think I came across it when someone I follow on Mastodon boosted a post from the account related to the site; it's a site called powRSS. The concept is pretty simple: collect links to all sorts of small blogs on all sorts of topics, and then provide a honking great discovery feed/pool. You can read more about the idea on their about page.

For sure, this sort of thing isn't exactly novel: those of us of a certain age will fondly remember the fun of webrings and other similar initiatives, not to mention feed aggregation sites where you could discover trending blogs or see what your friends were reading, and all that. But, to some degree, that fell out of favour and/or the limelight when social media got really popular.

So with this in mind it's good to see people still providing such sites. I've added this blog to it and I'll be diving in there now and again to see if there's anything new I should be following.

It'll be fun to populate OldNews with more things to read.