I've released BlogMore v2.42.0. This version is all about changes to the dump command.

When I first added it it simply dumped all of the data available about posts within a blog, meaning it was possible to do all sorts of things with the data outside of BlogMore itself. Having done this, and used the result to good effect (and also having seen at least one person also make use of it), I got to thinking that I should probably expose some other data that's going to be helpful.

Given that blogmore.el needs to dive into things like available categories and tags, and given that I'd also like to add support there for the recently-added series support, I realised that dumping those values as JSON would also be helpful.

So this release extends the dump command, adding a set of sub-commands:

  • posts: dumps the data about all posts in the blog (this is the default if you just run blogmore dump, so keeping the command backward-compatible).
  • categories: dumps all categories as slug/title pairs.
  • tags: dumps all tags as slug/title pairs.
  • series: dumps all series as slug/title pairs.

For example, getting all categories from this blog:

blogmore dump categories

[
  ["ai", "AI"],
  ["coding", "Coding"],
  ["creative", "Creative"],
  ["emacs", "Emacs"],
  ["gaming", "Gaming"],
  ["life", "Life"],
  ["meta", "Meta"],
  ["music", "Music"],
  ["python", "Python"],
  ["tech", "Tech"],
  ["til", "TIL"]
]

Or all the available series right now:

blogmore dump series

[
  ["agentic-afterthoughts", "Agentic Afterthoughts"],
  ["buying-the-steam-controller", "Buying the Steam Controller"],
  ["edinburgh-fringe-2023", "Edinburgh Fringe 2023"],
  ["reading-2bit-files-for-fun", "Reading 2bit files (for fun)"],
  ["swift-til", "Swift TIL"],
  ["the-great-github-copilot-meltdown-of-2026", "The Great GitHub Copilot Meltdown of 2026"],
  ["the-virgin-east-coast-saga", "The Virgin East Coast Saga"],
  ["emacs-d", "~/.emacs.d"]
]

While this data could have been gathered from the content of the dump of posts, this approach makes it far easier to work with and more accessible; simply put, it means there's less work for the user to do if they just want all the tags (for example). With this, and with a little bit of caching in the code (because this does require parsing all the posts every time), I think it will make for a better approach to category, tag and (when I add it) series completion while writing a post.