Posts from April 11, 2026

Recently I've been thinking that it would be interesting to get to know a little about the Model Context Protocol and see what it's about and get a feel for how useful it might be, if at all, for anything I do.

As always happens when I want to try out something new, I reached for a problem I know well so I don't have to get bogged down in solving the problem itself. As almost always happens, I decided I should base it around Norton Guides.

Part of the point of MCP seems to be providing an interface over sources of data and actions, that an LLM might not otherwise be able to cope with, and so it sounded to me like providing a bridge to the content of Norton Guide files would be a perfect test. Of course, this isn't the first time I've bridged LLMs and NG files, but this is obviously intended to be a more generic solution than throwing a Markdown file at NotebookLM.

Earlier this afternoon I sat down and did some reading, and then decided to throw the problem at GitHub Copilot. I told it I wanted to use my NGDB library as the core of the tool, and that it should wrap it up with FastMCP. The initial result was... a bit of a mess. It sort of worked, sort of, but it also seemed to try and put together a project that mostly looked how my Python repos look, but with some bits just wrong.

I did some cleaning up, did some testing, did some tweaking, and eventually I had something working.

So far I've given the code a fairly quick read over, and I can see what it's doing and how it's going about this. This approach obviously has the disadvantage that I didn't hand-write it so there's still a lot to read to really appreciate what's going on; on the other hand, it does have the advantage that it's implemented a tool based on my library so I know what to expect it to be doing.

There will be more code reading happening, and I also intend to look to tidy up the code more and perhaps hand-add some more features.

I very much doubt that this particular MCP server is going to be any use to anyone, but as a proof of concept it works well for me. If I were in a position of needing to build something genuinely useful, I now have a start and a vague idea.

On the other hand: once again, as with other projects I've done related to Norton Guides, this is a tool that helps keep the content available and accessible; that alone is one reason for me to tidy this up and move it towards v1.0.0 and keep it maintained.

If you fancy having a play, some (currently Copilot-generated) documentation can be found on the server's dedicated site. When I get a bit more time I'm going to flesh this out.

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.