Posts tagged with "Coding"

After recently adding Mermaid and maths support to BlogMore, I got to thinking that it now has connections with a handful of third-party resources. While almost all of them are optional (only FontAwesome comes close to being a hard requirement), it does mean that there are resources the user doesn't directly supply or control, and for which the URLs are hard-coded in the source for BlogMore.

I wasn't keen on this. While it's my intention to keep an eye on things and, periodically, check on those libraries and see if they need an update, I felt it was important that the user could override them on their own, without waiting on me.

So v2.43.0 adds a third_party section to the configuration file to give full control over these resources. The full version of it looks like this:

third_party:
  mermaid:
    script_url: "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mermaid@11/dist/mermaid.esm.min.mjs"
  katex:
    css_url: "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.16.9/dist/katex.min.css"
    js_url: "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.16.9/dist/katex.min.js"
  mathjax:
    js_url: "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mathjax@3/es5/tex-mml-chtml.js"
  fontawesome:
    metadata_url: "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/6.7.2/metadata/icons.json"
    webfonts_base: "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/6.7.2/webfonts"
    css_url: "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/6.7.2/css/all.min.css"
    woff2_url: "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/6.7.2/webfonts/fa-brands-400.woff2"
  force_graph:
    js_url: "https://unpkg.com/force-graph"

Of course, it's not an all-or-nothing setting; you can just set one of the values. So if you wanted to override the force_graph value it's enough to do:

third_party:
  force_graph:
    js_url: "https://unpkg.com/force-graph"

Hopefully this adds some useful flexibility. As well as giving the option to use a different version of a resource, it also allows you to host your own copy and refer to that instead. Heck, it would even allow totally replacing a library with a different one that has the same API, should you ever find yourself in that situation.

When I released blogmore.el v4.7.0 yesterday I finished off by saying that it was my intention, at some point, to rework the frontmatter-handling code so that it did proper YAML parsing. As often happens with these sorts of things, "some point" ended up being that evening.

I've rewritten everything to do with handling properties in the frontmatter so that it now uses yaml.el. This has a number of knock-on effects. The first and most obvious effect is that anything that is a list/array in the frontmatter is actually properly treated as a list. A good example here is tags. Now you can have your tags look like:

tags: [BlogMore, Emacs, "Emacs Lisp", Lisp, "blogmore.el", coding]

or:

tags:
  - BlogMore
  - Emacs
  - Emacs Lisp
  - Lisp
  - blogmore.el
  - coding

and blogmore.el will still handle things fine. The same holds for series too.

It should be noted, however, that because I'm now using actual YAML serialisation code, most other forms of a list will all end up being transformed into this kind:

tags: [BlogMore, Emacs, "Emacs Lisp", Lisp, "blogmore.el", coding]

So if you have a bare list:

tags: BlogMore, Emacs, "Emacs Lisp", Lisp, "blogmore.el", coding

and you make an edit to the tags via blogmore.el, it will end up as the version enclosed in []. BlogMore itself supports all three versions so this works fine.

There is a breaking change here too, which in part explains the reason I bumped the version to 5.0.0: because series can now be treated as a list I've removed the blogmore-set-series command and instead replaced it with blogmore-add-series and blogmore-remove-series. Both can of course be found in the transient menu.

Another big change in this release is the way that existing values are loaded up from your blog. Previously, when you went to add a category, tag or series, blogmore.el would use ripgrep (or a combination of find and grep if rg wasn't available) to pull out values to help populate a completion list. This worked fine as long as a) the frontmatter property was all on one line and b) the body of a post didn't contain something that looked like a frontmatter property. With this release of blogmore.el I've dropped this approach in favour of calling blogmore itself and using the dump command to get the actual lists of categories, tags and series.

This does mean that BlogMore needs to be installed in a location where blogmore.el can see it, and to help with this I've added a new defcustom called blogmore-command. By default this is set to call whatever version of blogmore can be found in your exec-path; if this results in unexpected behaviour you can set blogmore-command to point to a specific copy of blogmore.

There is, however, a small downside to this beneficial¹ approach: calling on blogmore and parsing all posts to get the values is generally going to be slower. With this in mind I've built in a cache for these values. The first time you load up the categories, tags or series, the values are held on to so that subsequent prompts are instantaneous (meaning there is no further call to blogmore). To ensure this doesn't confuse things, when you switch blog (blogmore-work-on) the caches are cleared. In the unlikely event that there is a problem with this approach, I've also added a blogmore-clear-caches command to force the clearing of the caches.

There are some other small QoL changes under the hood and also to the interface. I've moved some things around in the transient menu, and also ensured that a couple of options are better-disabled depending on the context.

All of this makes the package even more robust. Something that started as a quick hack back in March has turned into a tool I heavily lean on. Hopefully, for anyone who might happen to use BlogMore and GNU Emacs, it'll be a useful daily-driver for them too.

A quick update to blogmore.el. Having recently added series support to BlogMore it made sense that I then add a quick way of adding a post to a series in the package.

You can, of course, set a new one too, but the idea here (as with categories and tags) is that you can quickly find back an existing series and add the current post to it.

Also, as with tags, the expectation is that either a single series is being used, or if more than one series is in play for a post they'll be listed as a comma-separated list. The issue here is that while BlogMore supports this:

series:
  - Some series of posts
  - Some other series of posts
  - Yet another series of posts

the frontmatter-handling code in blogmore.el isn't very sophisticated at all; it doesn't actually handle it as actual YAML, instead just treating it as a set of key/value pairs separated by a colon.

At some point soon I want to give blogmore.el a revamp and base all of the frontmatter-handling code on something like yaml.el. I did do some experimenting last night to drop it in and handle proper lists. It worked well enough, but I abandoned the work as I realised I really wanted to start again from scratch and build blogmore.el from the bottom up using that package.

Some time soon...

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.

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.

A quick update carrying on from this morning's release: as mentioned towards the end of the post, there was a small problem with the lint command where it would raise an error if a page or post linked to any page related to the new series feature.

v2.40.1 fixes this. The linter now knows about the series feature and the URLs it creates.

I've just released BlogMore v2.40.0. This version contains just one new feature: post series support.

It's hardly a novel feature, plenty of blog engines support this sort of thing; I felt it was high time I added it to BlogMore too. The idea is simple: while categories provide a method of having "sub-blogs" within a blog (they also provide their own feeds), and while tags let you group together posts that touch on related subjects, a series will let you stitch together a collection of posts as directly relating to each other.

Adding a post to a series is as simple as adding a series to the frontmatter of a post.

title: Five days with Copilot
category: AI
tags: Python, AI, LLM, Copilot, GitHub, BlogMore, coding
date: 2026-02-20 15:46:00 +0000
series: Agentic Afterthoughts

With this done, when a reader is viewing an individual post that is within a series, some new navigation appears at the top and bottom of the post that lets them know about the series, and also offers them easy navigation to the previous and next posts.

Also, if the reader were to click on the series title, it will take them to an archive page for that series, where the posts are presented in the usual pagination format, but where they're also presented in series order. To be clear: series order is always chronological order.

To help encourage further post discovery, if one or more series are available, a new Series link appears at the top of the blog. This links to an index of every series available.

Sorted in alphabetical order, the list also shows how many posts are in each series and, if reading time is turned on, the total reading time will be shown.

Worth noting is the fact that a post doesn't have to be restricted to just one series. If you need a post to be in two or more series, you can provide the series as a list:

title: My post that crosses the streams
category: Testing
tags: BlogMore, Series, Test
date: 2022-02-22 22:22:22 +2200
series:
  - Experiments with blogging
  - Eating my own dog food
  - Testing thing

The post will then show navigation for every one of those series, and the post will be in each series' archive page.

Having added this, I've also updated the output of the dump command so that series (the series list as provided in the frontmatter), safe_series (the series list in their URL-friendly slug forms) and series_pair (a list of series title and slug pairs) properties are available.

As of the time of writing this, I have noticed one issue. The linter isn't currently aware of the URLs that are created as part of the series facility. So if you have a page or post that links to the index, or links to a particular series, there will be errors:

blogmore lint
Linting site in content...
ERROR: posts/2026/06/2026-06-06-blogmore-v2-40-0.md: Link points to non-existent internal path: /series/ (resolved to /series/)
ERROR: posts/2026/06/2026-06-06-blogmore-v2-40-0.md: Link points to non-existent internal path: /series/ (resolved to /series/)
ERROR: posts/2026/06/2026-06-06-blogmore-v2-40-0.md: Link points to non-existent internal path: /series/the-virgin-east-coast-saga/ (resolved to /series/the-virgin-east-coast-saga/)
Linting complete: 377 post(s), 4 page(s), 3 error(s), 0 warning(s) [0.45s].

This should be a straightforward fix which I'll make in a follow-up release.

After adding floating and inline tables of contents in BlogMore the other day, it was time to update blogmore.el to include commands to toggle the related frontmatter.

So, with the release of blogmore.el v4.6.0, two new commands are now available:

• blogmore-toggle-show-toc toggles the show_toc frontmatter property.
• blogmore-toggle-show-toc-inline toggles the show_toc_inline frontmatter property.

Both have also been added to the transient menu so they're easy to discover and use.

BlogMore v2.39.0 has a couple of changes, one more or less cosmetic, the other a new feature that I probably should have added right near the start of the project.

First, the cosmetic: in pages and posts, when you use headings (#, ##, etc.), a ¶ is added to the end of each heading, along with some show-on-mouse-hover styling, to make it easy to grab the anchor of a particular section of a page¹. A problem I'd noticed with this recently is that the ¶ shows up in the search text, and also in the content of all the feeds. While not a problem as such, it felt untidy.

So, with this release that particular ¶ character is stripped from the search index and from the feeds.

The second change is a facility that should be useful if you have legacy URLs that you really must have land on an actual page or post: redirection support.

This facility is provided by a new redirect_from frontmatter property. From now on, a page or a post can declare which URLs should be redirected to it. So, if you have a post that, given your current post location setup, would land at /2006/06/06/hello-world/, but in some other incarnation of your blog lived at /posts/2006-06-06-hello-world.html, you can now set this in the frontmatter:

redirect_from: /posts/2006-06-06-hello-world.html

and the old URL will be redirected to the new one. This is achieved by simply creating a very minimal HTML file at the old location, which contains a redirection. The content of the file will end up looking something like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Redirecting...</title>
    <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/2006/06/06/hello-world/">
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=/2006/06/06/hello-world/">
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Redirecting to <a href="/2006/06/06/hello-world/">/2006/06/06/hello-world/</a>...</p>
  </body>
</html>

If a blog has migrated between locations and/or generation tools over the years, and there are a number of different legacy URLs out there still pointing to a post you really want to keep readable to all, you can also redirect from multiple URLs:

redirect_from:
  - /posts/2006-06-06-hello-world.html
  - /posts/2006/06/06/hello-world.html
  - /my/really/old/blog/structure/hello-world-06-06-06.html

While all of this would have been possible anyway, by creating the appropriate file, with the appropriate content, in the extras directory, this approach helps automate the process and also means that the redirection information lives with the page or post being redirected to.

BlogMore has been bumped to v2.38.0. This release includes a small cosmetic change to the stats page, and also adds a fairly big cosmetic feature with some comprehensive control.

First, the change to the stats page: here I've changed the formatting of numbers a little so that numbers that are in the thousands or higher get better formatting. So rather than a count of something being 1234 it'll now display as 1,234. Hardly a groundbreaking change, but something I'd omitted some time ago and yesterday evening it came to mind. This should make the stats page just a little easier on the eye.

The second change is a reasonably big one, with some extra configuration file and frontmatter additions.

BlogMore has long supported auto-generation of a table of contents in the body of a post by including a [TOC] shortcut. Generally I'm not a fan of using this approach, but I can see the utility. Yesterday evening I added a new approach to showing a table of contents that means you don't need to have the list of links within the post.

Starting with this version, if a page or post has one or more headings in it, a table of contents will appear in the "dead space" on the right-hand side of the page, like this:

This follows the same kind of style as is used for the year and month index in the archives page. However, whereas in the archives the index just disappears (by design) if you're on a smaller screen, this new table of contents will switch to being inline in the page or post, in a form that is collapsed:

If the user clicks on it, it expands:

Given that this is a fairly big cosmetic change that could affect many pages and posts on a blog, I've built in as much control as makes sense. This new ToC approach is on by default, but can be turned off. First off, there is a show_toc configuration file setting which controls if the feature should be on or off, by default, site-wide. It is set to true by default.

Because there might be times where you want to control this at the page or post level, there is also a show_toc frontmatter property too. This always overrides the global setting in the configuration file.

On top of this, I can imagine that someone¹ might also want to have the right-side floating ToC, but never have the inline ToC showing on smaller displays. With this in mind I've also added a show_toc_inline configuration option and frontmatter property. These just control if the inline version of the ToC will ever be shown. To be clear: if the ToC is disabled (either site-wide or via a specific page or post's frontmatter), this inline-specific setting is ignored -- the ToC will never show. But if show_toc is true then show_toc_inline controls if the inline ToC ever appears on smaller displays.

I fear I might have made it sound more complicated than it is. Apologies if that's the case. I'm confident that someone needing this level of control will make sense of it easily enough.

Also, just to be clear: the [TOC] shortcut is totally unaffected by any of this. If you have [TOC] in your post, that version of the table of contents will always be generated. I didn't think it made sense to override that explicit markup choice.