Posts tagged with "blogmore.el"

I've given blogmore.el a wee bump to v2.1. This release fixes a small problem I noticed today when I tried to use it to edit the tags for a post on my photoblog: the code to find and gather properties from posts didn't handle deeply-nested directory hierarchies for the post markdown files. I should have noticed this when I first wrote the code, but of course I was so busy testing against my primary blog, which only goes one sub-level deep, that I never noticed it wasn't going to work deeper.

So rather than using grep to look for things like foo/**/*.md I swapped to a combination of find and grep. Which works, but is slightly (but noticeably) slower.

Then I got to thinking that if I was doing this by hand, on the command line, I'd be using ripgrep anyway. Given this I might as well use it here. Of course, not everyone who might use blogmore.el will have rg installed so it makes sense to look for that and use it if it's available, otherwise fall back on find/grep.

There's still some low-priority cleaning up I want to do around this; an obvious change I want to make being one where I want to collapse all cases of the same word (Tree vs tree, etc) into one "hit"¹. For now though, as always, it's working well enough for my needs and this change fixed an obvious issue I ran into.

After kicking off blogmore.el, and then tinkering with it more and more, I've found it really quite helpful while writing posts. One thing I have noticed though -- given I use BlogMore for this blog and my photoblog -- is that I wanted to be able to use the package for working with more than one blog.

So today I found myself with some time to kill and the result is that blogmore.el v2.0 has now been released. This version allows for setting up multiple blogs, each with their own settings for where posts live, how their paths are formatted, and so on.

To handle this I've also added the blogmore-work-on command so that the active blog can be quickly changed.

All of this can be configured using Emacs' customize feature.

This has all changed since v1.x, where most of the customize options have now been renamed to include -default- in their name. The idea here is that what was the value for a setting previously is now the default value if a given blog hasn't had that setting defined.

For any given blog you wish to work with, you configure a name (for your own reference) and the path to the posts. Optionally you can also set lots of other values too.

If a value is left on Default, then the corresponding default setting will be used; if it's set, then that value is used for that specific blog.

The defaults out of the box match how I do things with my blogs, of course, so the configuration is pretty straightforward. As of the time of writing my use-package for blogmore.el looks like this:

(use-package blogmore
  :vc (:url "https://github.com/davep/blogmore.el" :rev :newest)
  :init (add-hook 'blogmore-new-post-hook #'end-it)
  :custom
  (blogmore-blogs
   '(("blog.davep.org" "~/write/davep.github.com/content/posts/")
     ("seen-by.davep.dev" "~/write/seen-by/content/posts/")))
  :bind
  ("<f12> m b" . blogmore-work-on)
  ("<f12> m p n" . blogmore-new)
  ("<f12> m p e" . blogmore-edit)
  ("<f12> m s c" . blogmore-set-category)
  ("<f12> m a t" . blogmore-add-tag)
  ("<f12> m u d" . blogmore-update-date)
  ("<f12> m u m" . blogmore-update-modified)
  ("<f12> m l p" . blogmore-link-post)
  ("<f12> m l c" . blogmore-link-category)
  ("<f12> m l t" . blogmore-link-tag))

In the above you can see that I've set only the blog title and posts path for each blog in blogmore-blogs; the remaining values are all implied nil and so will be defaulted. The full list of values for any given blog are:

(BLOG-NAME
 POSTS-DIRECTORY
 POST-TEMPLATE
 POST-MAKER-FUNCTION
 CATEGORY-MAKER-FUNCTION
 TAG-MAKER-FUNCTION
 POST-LINK-FORMAT
 CATEGORY-LINK-FORMAT
 TAG-LINK-FORMAT)

where:

• BLOG-NAME is the descriptive name to use for the blog.
• POSTS-DIRECTORY is the directory where the blog's posts are stored.
• POST-TEMPLATE is a template for new posts. If nil, blogmore-default-template is used.
• POST-MAKER-FUNCTION is a function that takes a filename and returns a string to be used in the post's URL. If nil, blogmore-default-post-maker-function is used.
• CATEGORY-MAKER-FUNCTION is a function that takes a category name and returns a string to be used in the category's URL. If nil, blogmore-default-category-maker-function is used.
• TAG-MAKER-FUNCTION is a function that takes a tag name and returns a string to be used in the tag's URL. If nil, blogmore-default-tag-maker-function is used.
• POST-LINK-FORMAT is a format string for the post's URL, where %s is replaced with the value returned by the post maker function. If nil, blogmore-default-post-link-format is used.
• CATEGORY-LINK-FORMAT is a format string for the category's URL, where %s is replaced with the value returned by the category maker function. If nil, blogmore-default-category-link-format is used.
• TAG-LINK-FORMAT is a format string for the tag's URL, where %s is replaced with the value returned by the tag maker function. If nil, blogmore-default-tag-link-format is used.

While I very much doubt any of this is useful to anyone else, it's at least flexible for my purposes and can probably be configured to someone else's purpose should they happen to be using BlogMore and Emacs.

Yes, the last time I mentioned blogmore.el it was v1.4 and now it's up to v1.7. So I tinkered a little with it last night, okay?

Anyway, the changes and additions keep happening as I have more fun writing some elisp again. Since the last post about the package I've:

• Added a command to refresh the date frontmatter property
• Added a command to add/refresh the modified frontmatter property
• Added a command to insert a link to a previous post into what I'm writing
• Made a few things defcustom rather than defconst for easier tweaking
• Added a hook that can be run after a new post is started
• Dropped the dependency on end-it and used the above hook to do the same thing

While this package is never intended for use by others, I guess it's not impossible someone might want to work with it (I had the same thing in mind with BlogMore itself yet someone else has started working with it!) and so I'm moving it in the direction of being my way by default but easy to modify to other requirements.

So, now, rather than forcing someone to have to use my obsession with end-of-file markers, I still have that without imposing it on anyone else by simply setting the hook.

(use-package blogmore
  :vc (:url "https://github.com/davep/blogmore.el" :rev :newest)
  :init (add-hook 'blogmore-new-post-hook #'end-it))

I think my favourite addition right now is blogmore-link-post. I like to cross-link posts in my blog as much as possible so having something that lets me do that and stay inside Emacs really speeds things up. So now I just run that command, I get speedy picker to find the post:

and the result is some Markdown inserted with the cursor between the two [] ready for me to write the text:

[](/2026/03/20/blogmore-el-v1-4.html)

Other things I link often are categories and tags, so I'm planning on adding commands that does something similar for those two.

Following on from yesterday's post, in the evening I found myself in a cafe with my MacBook Pro and an hour to kill, so I tinkered with blogmore.el a little more. The main aim here was to add a command for adding tags to a post and I now have blogmore-add-tag as of v1.4.

One thing that stood out was just how rusty my Emacs Lisp skills are. It took me a wee while to get the code working, mostly due to me being caught out by the gotchas I'd forgotten about surrounding match data and the need to make good use of save-match-data (I had a combination of re-search-forward, string-split and replace-match going on and it was chaos for a while).

I got there in the end, though, when I bothered to RTFM with a quick C-h f string-split RET.

So now I have the following commands in Emacs when I get the urge to do something blog-related:

• blogmore-new starts a new blog post
• blogmore-edit lets me edit an existing post
• blogmore-set-category lets me set the category from existing categories, or set a new one
• blogmore-add-tag lets me add a tag from the existing tags, or add a new one

As suggested before, I think I'll probably add some other helper commands, things such as:

• Update the date
• Set the cover to a particular attachment
• Insert a particular attachment as a Markdown image
• Insert a link to another post in the blog

I'm sure more will come to me, but they seem like the most common operations I perform that would be helped with a little bit of Emacs Lisp magic.

It's been a moment since I last wrote any Emacs Lisp code, at least anything non-trivial. I've tinkered with my Emacs configuration, I've tweaked the odd personal package here and there, but nothing fresh for ages. I actually can't remember what the last package was that I wrote.

But this morning I realised it would be handy to have a couple of functions in Emacs that let me start a new blog post, or edit an existing one. The code didn't need to be clever, just the bare minimum that gets me started; enough to reduce the friction when it comes to opening a new buffer and starting to write.

So blogmore.el happened. Like I say: nothing clever, it simply adds blogmore-new and blogmore-edit; the former starts a new post with the bare minimum frontmatter filled in, the latter lets me quickly pick an existing post and go edit it.

As time goes on I might expand on this. For example: it might be useful to have a command that updates the date frontmatter; perhaps another to add a modified¹; one to set the category from any of the categories I've used so far would be good; ditto the tags property.

I doubt this will be useful to anyone else, although I will try my best to keep it so that it's easy to configure, so it's only ever going to stay amongst my list of personal packages.

Which reminds me... this is the first personal package I've not bothered to add to delpa. That approach to managing my own packages made a ton of sense at the time, but Emacs has moved on since then. Thanks to use-package and :vc I can easily pull blogmore.el into any of my environments with a simple declaration in my .emacs.d.

(use-package blogmore
  :vc (:url "https://github.com/davep/blogmore.el" :rev :newest))

Given how simple and clean that is I'm minded to "retire" delpa and use this approach for all of my personal packages.