It's probably bad news if I have a Saturday afternoon and evening spare, a fully-charged laptop and a comfy sofa. It seems that when that happens, something like BlogMore v2.41.0 happens. This is a release where I've added two features that could be generally useful, but which I'm unlikely to use in my own blogs.
The first, which to be fair is one I might use (I've used it in documentation plenty of times over the years), is optional Mermaid support. This is off by default, so has no overhead if you don't turn it on. It is turned on by setting with_mermaid to true. Even with this enabled, the Mermaid third-party scripts only get included on pages that include a Mermaid diagram, reducing the overhead.
To include a Mermaid diagram you use a fenced codeblock with mermaid as the language identifier. For example:
```mermaid
graph TD
A[Start] --> B[Process]
B --> C{Decision}
C -->|Yes| D[Success]
C -->|No| E[Fail]
```
If Mermaid is enabled the resulting page will show this:
There are, of course, all sorts of diagrams that can be used and I'm not going to go into them here, or in the BlogMore docs; Mermaid is well known enough and well-documented enough that anyone turning this on is likely to know what they're doing, or where to go to find out what to do.
The second new feature, which I am almost certainly never going to need to use on my blog, is LaTeX-style maths support. As with Mermaid, this is off by default and has no overhead if not used. Even when turned on with the with_maths setting, the external scripts will only be pulled into pages that include maths markup.
Two providers of rendering engines are supported and this can be configured with the maths_provider setting. The available options are katex (which is also the default) and mathjax.
To use either, when turned on, you use the usual $ or $$ convention for LaTeX-maths-in-Markdown:
You can make some fun images using:
$$
z_{n+1} = z_n^2 + c
$$
We can say $z_{n+1} = z_n^2 + c$ inline too.
The result of the above will be something like:
Note that some care has been taken to ensure that ordinary use of a $, in currency values for example, is left unaffected. This can't be guaranteed in every possible case, so keep this in mind when turning on with_maths. From what I have read this is a common issue when using such markup.
Both these features were fun to add, with me planning out the implementation with Antigravity, and having a back and forth a couple of times to address issues and get it all working "just so". I'm especially pleased with the fact that it's done in a way where there is no overhead, even when either feature is enabled, if a page isn't showing a diagram or maths markup.