Since kicking off the work on BlogMore and blogmore.el, I've absolutely found that I've reduced the friction involved when it comes to writing a quick (or not so quick) blog post. I've also found that I want to go back and tidy up lots of my old posts. Over the past few weeks I've gone and cleaned up the size and positioning of images; converted most images to WebP format; cleaned and consolidated the tags used; hunted down and fixed broken internal links; and a few other things besides.
Another thing I want to do is go back and hunt down, and clean up, typos and spelling mistakes, and the like. While I'm careful to try and not make any errors when typing out a post, and while I've always made a point of reading my posts back to try and catch problems, I've not always been successful. Sometimes I'm just blind to the errors, sometimes I'm just rushing. There's over a decade of mistakes on this blog.
So, with this in mind, I've added a couple of little tools to the build environment for this blog to help me go back and catch problems that might need addressing.
The main tool is a script for running aspell over all the Markdown and building a list of errors. This shows the names of the Markdown files that have errors, and lists the unknown words for them. For example:
=== content/posts/2019/2019-11-04-my-pylint-shame.md ===
flycheck
prepending
whitespace
=== content/posts/2020/2020-08-23-the-pep-8-hill-i-will-die-on.md ===
parens
whitespace
=== content/posts/2020/2020-06-22-swift-til-1.md ===
backticks
=== content/posts/2020/2020-06-14-my-journey-to-the-dark-side-is-complete.md ===
Macbook
Macbooks
scrollbars
=== content/posts/2020/2020-01-19-dnote-el.md ===
dnote
Dnote
=== content/posts/2020/2020-01-11-where-i-live-and-work.md ===
adwaita
eshell
powerline
This alone makes it nice and easy to go back and clean up some obvious issues. A problem I ran into though was that I was getting a lot of false reports for things in the front matter of the files (especially parts of the cover: file name) and also in the end-of-file comments I like to use. So, with a little help from Gemini (because it's a moment since I last wrote any awk in anger), I wrote a filter to "clean" the Markdown content before running it through aspell.
Already, using this setup, I've caught a few things that deserved cleaning up, and because there will be a lot of words that are correct but particular to this blog and what I write about, I'm also building up a local ignore list.
While this setup isn't going to make the content of this blog error-free, it should give me everything I need to go back and slowly improve some of the older text, and to harmonise some of the spellings of some technical terms.