News

Architecture:

• cdn.blot.im -> NODE via IP
• blot.im -> REVERSE PROXY CACHE -> NODE
• exampleblog.com -> REVERSE PROXY CACHE -> NODE

Migrate DNS back to route 53 Make sure redis is available on elastic ip Set up latency based routing between two reverse proxy caches

Monitoring:

• Write status page check that checks CDN connection to Blot
  • should not be cached, should test connection
• Move log aggregator into redis?
• Set up fail2ban on nginx logs
• Get systemd_status working on node and reverse proxy

Bugs:

• It seems cache purging wasn't working for some routes… why?
• blot.im/redis-health was not responsive to purge for blot.im
• Fix all 'blot.im/cdn' links in people's cached images
• Redirect blot.im/cdn to cdn.blot.im on reverse proxy
• Fix template editor 'save'
• Fix oauth redirect
• Resolve screenshot issues on production server
• Fix question search on docs

Performance:

• Why are static routes getting 'max-age= 0' on the docs?

Try to get a node server running on the reverse proxy capable of rendering pages from DB then we can use the reverse proxy to cache pages?

Look into setting up another openresty 'edge' node in europe then using latency based routing at DNS level to route traffic to the closest edge node

When we 'write' to the static directory we should also upload the file to bunny storage so requests dont need to hit the server

Can we store the wildcard cert in redis?

• can NODE be responsible for renewing and updating the wildcard cert?
• can NODE tell all the reverse proxy caches to update their certs?

Purge old docs CSS and JS from CDN storage cache

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Finish redis server setup:

• write cron script to save redis-server disk usage and free memory stats in the db then monitor this from scheduler
• launch staging redis server from backup on s3
• clean up documentation of process to set up instance
• install fail2ban on redis server? al2023 makes this hard

Clean up old unused volumes and snapshots, with care

Write tests for openresty

• https://github.com/leafo/gh-actions-openresty

Checks for servers

• Check in on backup bucket on S3 for removal of old backups
• check that daily backups are on s3
• Check that redis logs have been rotated - /etc/logrotate.d/redis6

If everything is smooth, buy reserved instance

Data use minimization:

• Write automated script to archive overdue blogs from disk and db
• Write script to remove unused and unaccessed static files from within blog folders

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Write and send out summer newsletter

Openresty server:

• Can we delegate caching to this server rather than node?
• We could still choose an instance with an attached SSD
• add openresty server which connects to redis and has the certs required to boot
• Determine which IP we need in 'trust proxy' and refactor it into config
• Fix the /health endpoint for the openresty server
• Render nginx config using same environment variable
• Eventually we could think about moving the reverse proxy onto its own server, but then we need to share a disk? Or we could use a networked file system from the node.js server to the nginx server?
• Can we turn these into our own CDN? c6gd.medium with 60GB SSD cache for $12/month each! They all connect to same redis

Think about using EFS infrequent access one zone for blog data? Can we do this on top of sc1 cold storage?

Test reboot for all servers Eventually configure cloud watch reboot sequence then test it

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Investigate if we can rewrite git client so we don't need to store double the data - right now we have 48GB duped

Fix auto titles of 'screenshot at 12:22pm' and make sure the date parser can handle them

Fix title generator so h2 titles within the file dont become the title of the post – this is helpful for obsidian

Consider exposing the option to purchase the removal of subscription fee for a blog on the dashboard for $440

Get to bottom of issues with questions/tests/list and re-enable disable test suite

The password check on the delete blog page does not print the error message if the password is incorrect? Or just for admin

Fix post navigation on Portfolio template and tell Questioner

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Fix Vaughn's navigation on mobile

Work on templates

• Tell these people about new templates, and to subscribe to newsletter:
  • Chris
  • John
  • Jan
  • Jamie

Improve image posts

• Add opt-in EXIF extraction for photos and enable in the photos template
• Add support for other image formats, by converting them into jpg/webp
• Add support for large image tiling and zooming with photoswipe

Add support for textbundle files and tell questioner

• this will help me understand how best to accomplish multi-file posts

Release a new film showing some of Blot’s more recent features

• Finish setting up Office
• Ensure each template is good enough for the new film
• Finish the test folders for each template
• Finish video in brochure/readme.txt

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Work out why we get a 'Zombie process' notification email every morning at 9:05am

Make 'close' button on entry permalink page of reference template work like the photo template and tell Marco

Investigate Google Drive client

• Resolve whether to use drive.change.watch or drive.activity.query
• This seems to re-download google docs every time
• How do we properly get notifications about changes to the doc? do we need to set up notifications channels for every doc in the drive directory?
• do the google docs edit events we are missing on drive.changes.watch appear on drive.changes.list?

Wikilinks should have a class property of 'wikilink' rather than a title attribute and tell questioner

Prevent double submission on template editor at insertion and front-end levels

Add search bar to template editor

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Write some end-to-end tests which verify NGINX config

• how do we handle SSL?

Tell bukit when it's possible to change the URL of the /tagged/x pages in the template engine

Investigate Google Drive client

• Resolve whether to use drive.change.watch or drive.activity.query
• This seems to re-download google docs every time
• How do we properly get notifications about changes to the doc? do we need to set up notifications channels for every doc in the drive directory?
• do the google docs edit events we are missing on drive.changes.watch appear on drive.changes.list?

Wikilinks should have a class property of 'wikilink' rather than a title attribute and tell questioner

Preserve file name for SEO purposes when uploading to image cache CDN and tell Jean

Add a property to entries which lets you list all the images in a post so Jean can add them to his sitemap

Resolve issue with Stephen's large blog

• It also seems like server crashes when a massive google drive folder is synced, with a directory containing 6772 items

Add lazy loading option to image settings and tell questioner

Make it possible to rename locally edited template folder and tell questioner

Fix bug with videos on Reference template and Tell Marco

Check in on log rotation for nginx.log and nginx.error.log

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Add support for data files to templates and tell Kev

Improve CI testing

• Add spell checking test
• Write browser based integration tests for core functionality
• how can we test the 'reload-server' script?
• how can we test the 'scheduler' functions? we ran into error where it was running twice

Methods to improve server performance

• consider expanding the replication of the perma_cache across more regions
• consider switching to more expensive CDN type (i.e. not volume)
• switch to more expensive EBS for disk of server

Fix Git client bugs

• Fix bug which occurs when you change your username while using the Git client (caused by the broken repo url) and tell Koen and Andre and Josh and Ryan and David
• Work out how to pipe custom error messages down
• Pipe custom message when you change a blog's handle (breaking repo url)
• Tell Koen about the broken repo URL fix

Fix bug so that script fix is able to remove tag items without posts

• how to reproduce this bug?
• it seems there is a phanton entry which no longer exists on a tag index
• can we iterate over all tag keys during fix to detect this?

Fix bug for 'edit this page' link in production

Fix bug with undeleteable template files prefixed with dot and tell Stuart

Fix bug with leading emoji and title case plugin and tell questioner

Fix 'back' button in photo template and tell Bibi

Fix bug with images zooming inside footnotes and tell Nathan

Fix issue with template with invalid metadata (cat log for error), it seems the name and error properties were not set

• run fix on all existing templates

Fix duplicate GUID issue and tell Jason

Fix bug with menu which occur when multiple pages are added at once Menu needs concurrency or atomic operations (so we can build posts in parallel)

Fix bug with rename catcher which allows two posts to share a guid. It caused a bug with Disqus comments. To reproduce this bug: Rename an entry. Create new entry with old name. Both entries have same GUID.

Fix bug with .emf files in Word Document and follow up with Todd. Can we convert EMFs? Can we pass a flag to pandoc to let them deal with it? Is this just caused by Tiff files? I need a Windows machine to test this.

Come up with a workaround for Silas's Dropbox business issue

Fix issue with favicon and tell questioner

Fix bug with bandcamp embeds in Word Documents and tell Art

Fix missing posts on preview of reference template

Fix bug with template editor and ensure POST error messages are passed to client properly through ajax

• to trigger, submit a >5mb file on web template editor

Fix navigation link bug with blog tempalte and tell Jason

Investigate this date metadata bug

Fix bug with chinese characters in template name and follow up with Alex

Fix bug with this question

Fix issue with git client mirroring on GitHub by follow steps in email and follow up with n

Fix bug with subdomains with numbers in them cause SSL certificate errors (e.g. foo2.blot.im)

Fix bug with the typeset settings do not actually affect anything (you can only disable/enable)

Fix bug with rename detector which caused old permalinks not to redirect to their latest version and tell Shibel

• To reproduce, create file 'foo.txt' with title and permalink 'foo'
• Then turn off server
• Then rename file to 'bar.txt', and edit title to 'bar' at the same time
• we expect /foo to redirect to /bar, but it doesn't

Fix bug not exposing issue with invalid JSON in package.json for locally-edited template on dashboard and tell Jason

Fix bug with particular emoji and tell John

Fix case-sensitivity issue for relative (and absolute?) paths to files in folder in production and tell Marco

Fix bug with footnote links in a teaser by switching #frag to {{permalink}}#frag

Fix bug with many twitter embeds and tell Nash

Fix bug with a once-scheduled post, based on the file's path or previous date metadata. The post remains scheduled even if the date is removed, and even if it is then rebuilt.

Fix bugs with RSS feeds validation. Perhaps extend absoluteURLs helper function? Tell John

Fix bug with date metadata on Vincent's blog and follow up. I suspect it's to do with the ordering of date tokens.

Fix bug with tokens inside blog posts and follow up with Karoly

Fix bug with potentially TeX-related escaping issues and tell Anthony and Roy

Fix issue with variable passed to dateFormat function and tell Leo

Fix bug with two entries with the same guid, possibly related to an entry rename event (i.e. copying the guid across). Make sure that when a rename happens, the old entry is permanently deleted and its guid cannot be reused. I imagine that WRITE foo.txt MV foo.txt bar.txt WRITE bar.txt could trigger this bug.

Fix bug with image zoomer on mobile devices and tell Alessandro

Fix bug with handling of queries and tell this person.

Fix post encoding bugs

• Fix Kevin's URL encoding bug. Each entry's url property is not encoded as a URI component on the server but it needs to be.
• Fix encoding bug with greek URLs then tell Rodericus know
• Fix bug with template tags in blog post and tell Shibel

Fix bugs with RSS feeds validation. Perhaps extend absoluteURLs helper function? Tell John

Fix bug with Rodrigo's Word Document files

Fix bug with image minification which produces larger file than source file and tell Jan

Date parser bugs

• Fix bug parsing ISO8601 date format and tell Thomas

Investigate bug with template views whose names include hashtags and follow up with Jay

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Migrate to k8s cluster on Linode

Improve express disk cache

• can more of the documentation become markdown?
• can we turn the documentation design into a blot digital garden template?
• add PNG lossless compression for brochure
• add JPG lossless compression for brochure
• add SVG lossless compression for brochure

Improve Are.na importer so it handles descriptions + also other file types (e.g. PDF, text) and tell Marco

Improvements to server

• move development cdn onto its own host to better simular cross-domain issues
• test maintenance and redirector on dashboard
• restrict post to /dashboard route so we can tune nginx logic?
• tune performance of express-mustache in production and development
• add optional HTML/JS/CSS minification to express-disk-cache
• Test overdue subscription re-start
• Disable call to stripe for every pageview on /account
• Create blog > Dropbox > Create blog > Dropbox failed to set up properly
• Prevent GET request to log in page from setting connect.sid cookie
  • or otherwise work out how to try and cache everything at nginx
  • log in route should clear 'logged_in_to_blot' cookie if not logged in
• Use Lory to add a slider to the homepage

Improvements to sync/reset scripts:

• Fix should produce a report which I get email
• Resync should produce a report which I get via email
• dropbox reset TO BLOT should handle removed folder
• dropbox reset FROM BLOT should handle removed folder
• dropbox reset TO BLOT should handle revoked token
• dropbox reset FROM BLOT should handle revoked token
• make google drive reset TO store metadata for case of file/folder name
• make google drive reset FROM abortable
• make google drive reset TO abortable
• make dropbox reset FROM abortable
• make dropbox reset TO abortable

Improve Google Drive client:

• How do we handle two files with same name and same parent? How does our fileId:path hash handle this? Make sure we delete the right file. Will file.title as opposed to file.name give us the deduped version?
  • Bug: move file with deduplicated name from sub folder to other folder
  • download should check for an existing file with same name but different fileId and dedupe before storing the path?
• Handle revoked credentials without tanking server
• Can the google drive client handle a server restart during setup?
• database.folder should throw ENOENT and EEXIST errors for del, set, move etc.
• Error handling
  • Retry when we get google drive's This service is not available error
  • Handle storage quota errors
  • Handle 429 errors with exponential backoff retry
• Implement folder.rename method to take advantage of Google Drive's true rename feature
• Add a way for sync/build to accept a ctime as an option. We can't set this at the operating system level but google drive's API does return a createdTime value and we could use this as the true file's created date, rather than the date the file is made on the server
• write should use the best method for large file uploading
• Work out if we can test this using Mocks

Improvements to Dropbox client:

• Determine if we can hack our way to determining the file upload date on Dropbox using their API?
• Parallelize build/download a little more, so posts appear when many files are dropped into folder?
• Efficiently handle Dropbox file renames with internal hash of fileIDs
• surface errors during setup on dashboard
  • surface sync issues with Dropbox client on the homepage of dashboard
  • How do we make errors sticky? To make sure users click through to clients page to re-connect to Dropbox, etc…
• run reset-to-blot when sync fails / errors
• ensure that when a process dies, any blogs syncing will be reset-to-blot
• ensure that when a process dies, any blogs setting up db client will be re-attempted
• reconnecting with the same account and same permissions should not create a new folder for full_access=true
• make full_folder use the old app folder directory – is there a way to disconnect it from the Blot app? otherwise add a big warning to prevent confusion about where the new folder is when transitioning permissions
• handle the download of large files gracefully too
• consider adding back in download/upload stream, but add a check to see if the download is stuck then fall back to other method?
• add a check for folder storage before doing mass upload
• handle folder full error appropriately
• handle a sync lock failure on second blog when migrating an app folder
• check content hash for upload possible

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Add support for Indian payments and follow up with Indian customers

• Pradeep wants to join

Add support for Obsidian media embedding

• ![[_image.png]]
• https://help.obsidian.md/Linking+notes+and+files/Embedding+files
• Look into Wikipedia's blended wikilinks
• Update response to question about adding class="wikilink" replacing it with title="wikilink"
• Tell John
• Tell Robert
• Tell Levo
• [ ]Follow up with Marco about: ![La Escocesa 2006-2010](files/_laescocesaold.png) ![[files/_laescocesaold.png]]
• Tell Matthew

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Look into Pandoc's RAW HTML extension for resolving issues mixing HTML into markdown files:

• markdown_in_html_blocks
• raw_html
• native_divs

Move Wikilinks to Pandoc

• Update version of pandoc
• Support Obsidian's syntax for embedding files and images, and tell John and Robert and Levo
• Follow up with Marco about: ![La Escocesa 2006-2010](files/_laescocesaold.png) ![[files/_laescocesaold.png]]

Add explanation for which files are causing which menu links

Add export button to overdue subscription page

Add way to restore a blog from export

Add way to escape commas in tags and tell questioner

Add way to expose template build metadata errors on dashboard

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Investigate ignored files situation

• does rebuild update ignored files list too?
• handle new pathNormalizer behaviour
• 'ignoredFilesKey'
• why are ignored files not added to ignored list?
• add 'ignored ghosts' check to sync/fix

Improvements to importer

• Can we offload an import into a resource constrained child process?
• Can we queue up imports and process them one at a time?
• Add interface to move import into folder directly
• Add scheduled imports on regular basis into folder directly
• Add nice import step under 'Services' and as part of sign up
• Fix bug with script to import wordpress posts and follow up with Simon
• Improve Ghost importer and tell Vin
• Create importer script for John's posts from flickr
• Create importer script for tumblr text files and tell Sawyer
• Create importer script for Weebly and tell David
• Map excerpt metadata to summary for Jekyll converter importer
• Look into how Hexo has written imports for blogger, joomla, rss, wordpress.
• Add an importer for Twitter and sell Sawyer

Add 'confirm email address' flow to prevent typos in emails

Add simple form endpoint, could be used for contact forms

Add a 'light local server' for template development which zips then posts template files to Blot's endpoint for live-auto updating previews for a given blog – there would need to be authentication with a one-time pass

• some blogs could be used unauthenticated

Add a bootswatch template and tell Michael

Add theme with photoswipe and use sharp's tile generation feature along with

Add Ignore: yes metadata to trigger the ignored file behaviour

Add hot reload for preview subdomains

Tell Jarrod when local template folders better reflect template names

Add way to set the slug-part of a URL for a post and tell George and follow up for post in Questions and tell Jarrod

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Can Blot blogs be federated? Respond to Nigel once I do some research on this

Rebuild folder sites and tell Michael that the broken image link is fixed

Follow conventional delimiters for KateX

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Support larger files on DB client and tell Marco

Add support for new formats:

• jupyter notebooks (via pandoc)

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Add 'download as zip' option to template editor

Explain that the git client uses the master branch and repos from github will use main in the docs and on the dashboard then tell N

Inject title metadata into h1 tag for all the text-based default templates and tell questioners

Send out cancellation confirmation emails with option to give feedback

• auto-refund people who immediately close their account after signing up

Get to the bottom of the slow cloudflare issue and follow up with Wen

Add scrubbing pagination to images template

Git client improvements:

• Surface status of git client intialization when you first set up your blog on the git client.
• Fix issue which occurs when you change your username with the git client
• Fix issue with switching from Dropbox client to Git client, in production which affected Nat

–

Re-enable partial templates in posts/pages

• Tell Matt

Add tag to iterate over all images in a folder and tell Laurel

Fix bug with Work out why Pandoc cannot handle 'linked' images (instead of conventionally embedded images). For instructiosn on reproducing bug, see SG's email and follow up when resolved.

Fix bug with tags that contain slashes and tell Jack

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Determine why we get zombie processes after running reload server script.

Create starter kits for each template

• e.g. a starter kit on the blog template for a writer, or a photographer, or a journalist, or an academic.
• these could be downloaded as folders on the template page?
• Get David's feedback when one exists for writers

Create an index of customer-created templates and add Matt's theme

Add 'Hidden: yes' metadata to replace 'Menu: no' and tell Sebastien

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Add method to merge updates into custom templates and tell Dave

Improve backlink's tolerance

• Add support for full qualified URLs in the backlinks list for each entry. For example, if your blog is example.com, the following link will not appear as an internal link: Foo because build/prepare/internalLinks is not aware of the blog domain/handle
  • Tell Eli
• Add support for internal links without a leading slash
  • Tell Laurel

Add support for 2FA (Two factor authentication) then tell Luke, Max, Chaz, Prathamesh and Tom.

Add support for SSO then tell Prathamesh

Make retreiving files from server case-insentive

• i.e. add resolve case insensitive path to file to blog/asset.js

Prevent full disk from affecting access to people's blogs.

• switch into a read-only mode?
  • the specific issue that takes down the server seems to be the redis error (cannot persist on disk, out of space)

Investigate Adam's broken template

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Improvements to dashboard:

• Smooth over the custom domain adding process
  • cache domain validity and display checkmark on dashboard
  • validate the domain is pointing to Blot before allowing resty-auto-ssl to request a cert. we seem to get into a DNS mismatch where a client thinks a domain points to Blot, and triggers a cert request through resty-auto-ssl but whatever DNS server Blot's server points to has the stale record (pointing elsewhere)
  • Disable redirect to HTTPS for blogs by default (to ensure old browsers without SNI work) but ensure all prominent links to the blog on dashboard use HTTPS
• Improve clients
  • cache sync validity and display checkmark on dashboard
  • surface errors for clients on dashboard index
  • add a change button next to the dropbox folder selected on the dropbox client where possible
  • add blocking process to dropbox connection when writing folder contents
  • ensure the app permission access_token is destroyed when switching to full-folder and vice versa
  • add a folder chooser during full-folder setup
  • ensure you can move the folder in full-folder permission mode

Move citations out of {{{html}}} and tell questioner and Mikka

Add OneDrive client

• Tell John
• Tell Shantesh
• Tell Nathan
• Tell ekskog
• Tell John
• Tell Simon
• Tell Andrew
• Tell Naveen
• Tell Emad
• Tell John
• If OneDrive for Business is supported tell Josh

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Re-order blog engine routes such that pages/entries are evauluated first, making it possible to set up custom redirects and tell Marco

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Write new converters to turn files into posts

• Add AVIF image post support and tell Simon
• Add support for Jupyter Notebook .ipynb using Pandoc and tell Arnab
• Add support for .doc using libreoffice and tell Kyle
• Video posts (.mp4) - add way to opt-in to these
• Add support for .tiff images
• OPML files and tell John
• Audio posts (.mp3 for now?) and tell Kevin - add way to opt-in

Write new clients to sync blog folders

• SFTP
  • Tell Coraline
  • Tell Calvin
  • Tell Fabrice
• NextCloud
  • Tell Vincent
  • Tell Coraline
  • Tell Andrew
  • Tell Mike
• Box
  • Tell Eric
• Syncthing
  • Tell Jason
• Github
  • Tell John
• pCloud
  • Tell Omaid
  • Tell Anders
  • Tell Tim
  • Tell JMN
• Dropmark
  • Tell Rado

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Improvements to backup system

• Add hourly local redis rdb dumps to /cache
• Test maintenance mode
• Add script to roll back into hourly local db dumps and remote backups

Apply helper/imageminify to images in posts with opt-in

• Run these changes past John, get opinion on optimized images
• Talk to Marius about his opinions on the compression settings

Begin collecting proper measurements for page-rendering speed on the server

Add raw-link -> open graph cards/embed function, which would fetch the title, description and thumbnail for a link using tags. Tell Robert

Improvements to teaser generator

• Improve estimate of teaser length
• Remove trailing non-text elements (like

  ---

  )
• Add {{small}} and {{long}} versions of teaser?
• Fix bug with makeTeaser for ~/Dropbox/bug.html which locks main process painfully
• Internal links (e.g. #section) in {{{teaser}}} should be resolved against the entry's permalink.
• Add hasBreakpoint property to entry to allow greater control over display of {{{teaser}}} and tell Pratik
• Fix issue with teaser generator that locks up a build process, sometimes for 10+ seconds.
• Make it possible for users to select length of teasers and Leo

Performance improvements

• Consider switching redis client, perhaps to ioredis?
• Use a docker image to speed up test suite: https://github.com/davidmerfield/Blot/pull/463
• Faster server, with SSL termination across CDN
• set up 'cdn.blot.im' as cloudfront distribution endpoint?
• Streamline and cache loading of data on dashboard
• Ensure node.js server has one process per CPU
• Detect CPU intensive functions in node.js process
• Use the –trace-sync-io command-line flag to determine if Blot is using any sync methods inappropriately
• Can we keep the pandoc child_process running and pipe stuff in and out for speed? Measure before after to ensure this helps
• Add request level timeouts to prevent server swamping
  • ensure to remove the timeout from the SSE streaming routes (drafts, sync status on dashboard)
  • read this guide: http://expressjs.com/en/resources/middleware/timeout.html
  • it seems we also need to cancel the resources involved in responding to the request (i.e. disk io, db calls) for this to be really useful
  • Add a timeout of 15 seconds for building posts.

Server changes

• Write useful benchmark tool for Blot
• Work out how to detect stray build processes. There were a bunch of zombies consuming memory on Blot's server. Work out how to kill them safely
• Experiment with different EBS types, perhaps try to use ephemeral disk more since lower latency?
• Take full advantage of attached SSD
  • use rsync/inotify to synchronize 'source of truth' EBS disk with the local SSD cache then modify NGINX to check the synced folder on the /cache disk
  • on boot we would gently copy across all /blogs folders and the /static directory in background task

Add line numbers to highlight.js hljs code tags

Convert Vitepress to Blot and tell Nicolas

Expose log files on blog's dashboard and tell Roman, Sönke and questioner and John

Improvements to brochure:

• Write build scripts which can be run to produce results checked into git
  • inline css in blot.css
  • inline css in katex.css?
  • base 64 encode and inline small images on homepage
  • Optimize all images in image directory
  • compute content hashes then Use blotcdn for video and other large static files
• Add end-to-end tests for brochure site to test sign up flow (use Playwright? Phantom? Chrome headless)
• Add guide to useful text editors like this one recommended by Andrew
  • do this as a marketing strategy, e.g. target 'blog with microsoft word', 'blog with google docs', 'blog with ia writer' etc… contact the people who make text editors and ask them to link to us?
• Personalize the documentation for logged in customers
• Add contributor / language and repo information to source code page using GitHub API.

Improve wikilinks lookup algorithm:

• Add support for 'shortest path where possible' on Obsidian
  • search current directory for filename
  • search subdirectories for filename
  • search parent directories for filename
• Add support for 'absolute path' on Obsidian when the vault is a sub directory of your blog folder
  • How best to accomplish this?

Support Obsidian-style media embedding and tell questioners

Improvements to simple local server (npm run local):

• Consider using redis-mock and mockery
• Persist data somehow? import/export from local folder .blot?
• Fix 'Visit' link on dashboard
• Can we expand this to a simple self-hosting process ('npx blot-server')?

Add options to preserve linebreaks in Markdown and tell Matt

Template engine plan

• create data/blogs/blogID/templates directory
• show error message on preview-of subdomain
• only allow valid templates to get stored in data/blogs/blogID/templates, used for live site?
  • maybe we only store in redis valid templates, live site pulls

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Improve server-side scheduled tasks:

• Write task to identify and delete long overdue customers

Fetch dimensions of images even if optimize and cache is disable, so that image zoom can work. Tell Joshua

Add action to lint code with jshint and eslint

• any other static code analysis tools?
• separate code to check for broken links, run in parallel

Improvements to metadata extractor:

• Improve date parser to use time from file creation date if it's within the same day as the date specified in metadata and follow up with Nicolas
• Fix summary generator such that a subtitle is used for summary text (i.e. an h2 directly following an h1) We still want to prevent the scenario in which a later h2 becomes the summary, though. Notify Jessica and rebuild Jessica's site
• Add support for entry property with escaped double quotes, tell Jay

Reduce image compression settings and tell Joshua

Improve questions section of site, in approximate order of importance:

• Add way to mass-rename tags
• Add display aliases for tags e.g. how -> How to use Blot, etc.
• Fix breadcrumbs within Questions section
• Fix pagination
• store version history of the question and answer edits
• add option to hide/delete a question
• question tagging, including a list of all tags, and popular tags
• give the 'ask' and 'answer' textarea inputs the full functionality of the GitHub issue/PR comment inputs (i.e. code snippets / preview / copy/paste screenshots from clipboard)
• email notifications (There's an existing system in place for sending emails in app/helper/email)
• upvoting for topics and upvote-based ranking on the topic index
• show vote count and answer count next to each question on index
• add a filter for topic index to show questions by: 'Newest', 'Active', 'Unanswered', 'Votes'
• 'run code snippet' feature / similar to trinkets.io

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Redirect URLs with trailing slash when possible (i.e. not directory browsing) to fix possible duplicate content penalties and tell Marius

• Add rel=canonical to all the default templates, or fix the issue that Blot serves the same thing to URLs with a trailing slash, and without.
• If we do add rel=canonical, make sure to consider the situation where someone mounts a page to the index of their site, e.g. /page/1 and / will now be different.

Add way to nest tags / hierarchy for tags and tell Uzoamaka

Adjust the chargeForRemaining function in create-blog such that the balance is added or deducted from the proration charge.

Rewrite transformer (in app/helper/transformer)

• Speak HTTP properly, respect backoffs, use/send eTags
• Share information across blogs?
• Improve transformer so it checks a file's MTIME against a stored value before rehashing the file?
• Adjust interface to accept a number of directories. Make it 'unaware' of blog IDs?
• Add method which accepts a path or URL and flushes what is stored for it, update the rebuild entry script
• Cache errors. When a post contains multiple identical links to images that timeout/404, the thumbnail generator should only make 1 attempt to fetch them. Right now we have a post that is filled with identical broken image links (in this case to a spacer.gif) can suck up the build process for hours.

Add a 'page link format' option to the dashboard – the link format now only applies to entries. Tell Mike

Prevent long-overdue customers from accessing the service, then tell Matvey

Add support for arbritary template folder location – any subfolder could be a template folder if it contains a valid template.json file. Tell Bernardo

Generate proper favicons from uploaded avatars (to prevent streched favicons when non-square avatars are uploaded)

Experiment with GitHub actions setup

• Look into potentially useful actions for code quality / linting / automtatic dependency updates
  • super-linter?

Improvements to server infrastructure

• Work out way to recover from expired cert in the cache. To reproduce, consider a member who signed up, connected example.com, then moved the domain to another service. The attempt to renew the cert for example.com will fail. When the customer re-registers with Blot, for some reason open-resty-auto-ssl will serve an old certificate. I followed these steps to reset but we should automate this
• Create DMARC record for Blot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/dmarc.html
• NGINX doesn't appear to be following the symlinks created by node.js to serve the contents of each blog's folder and the contents of each blog's static directory. Is this a permissions issue? Is now finally the time to set up users with appropriate permissions for blot, nginx, build etc…

Improve the automatic title generated for screenshots with default MacOs filename from 'at 14:40pm'

Add support for posts generated from Excel files, would generate a table. Use this library?

Use blurhash to generate placeholders when lazy loading images and tell David and Marius

Work out how to cache 404s at the NGINX level

• I tried extending express-disk-cache to store images inside /https/blot.im/missing/foo-bar.html but I can't set a 404 status code for the specific tryfiles directive which could match that file.
• The application server ends up spending a lot of time serving 404s

Improvements to template engine

• Make it possible to change URL of tagged pages and tell Jarrod
• Add blog.statistics and entry.statistics (total words, etc.) and tell Pratik
• Work out how to make live but saveable modifications for preview purposes on the template editor. I have already established a messaging channel between preview HTML pages and the template editor with the script injected in render/middleware.
• Add background patterns to template editor tools, tell Ish
• Add 'group by' function which would allow you to group posts by month/ year in the same way that {{#archives}} lets you and tell Jay
• Respond to Michael's thoughtful emails about the template system
• Local editing
  • Fix bug with title and partials in local editing then tell Luke and Frank
• Add support for chronological template ordering and follow up with questions
• Add way to iterate over public and private pages to allow sitemap to work properly and tell Rodrigo and questioner
• Fix bug with template editor which resets content of a view. Follow up with Nathan who has extensive steps to reproduce, and John
• Allow the name/slug of a template to change and tell Marcus and Pratik and Brad when the name of a locally-edited template in your blog's folder updates
• Allow ordering of posts by file name and tell Jacopo
• Expose request query to views and tell Abhishek
• Add way to query list of posts using SQL? Something like jsql com/mail/u/0/#inbox/1588e3df7489b554)
  • Don't write my own DSL, use SQL Something like this in front matter? recent_posts: SELECT POSTS WHERE …
  • Add support for entry lists of variable length and tell Logan
• Add support for 'creating' a template inside '/Templates/'
  • Tell Myron and Ryan and Jussi on Twitter when it is possible to rename the folder created for a template in local editing.
• Support template views inside a subfolder inside template folder, e.g. {{> partials/footer}} and then tell Nash
• Add support for the setting of custom headers (e.g. to enable CORS) and tell Roy
• Add support for listing files in arbritary folders (e.g. use a custom folder as a 'public' folder) and tell Nash and Marco
• Move to uuid based template IDs instead of slug
• Add way to list directory contents and tell Diego
• Move to data directory for templates
  • Serve the template directory as a static folder, allowing things like favicon.png and humans.txt to not become blog posts. Follow up with Jamie
• Re-do url redirector to use route-parser and properly support regular expressions
• Add support for paginated list of entries on other pages and Dan tell Kevin and Eli and Sven and Nikhil and Adam and Madino and Ryan
• Add dynamic querying of entry list and tell Naoki
• Fix bug with filtering paginated list of entries and tell Roy and Josh and Logan
• Add a popular entry list
• Add a related entry list and tell Thomas and questioner
• Add way to list files at a path and tell Matt

Re-send receipt when the customer changes their email after initial payment, pre-account creation.

• Once stripe allows programmatic receipt delivery

Improvements to entry builder

• Adjust title metadata extractor to fallback to file name rather than first sentence of file if the post does not contain a title tag. The current behaviour has suprised a number of people. If this breaks John's template create new first_sentence property of entry to use on the template.
• Fix bug with slashes in tags and tell Dave
• Generate a list of titles which you could use to generate a table of contents and tell Zach
• Use time draft was moved into blog folder for entry created/publish date, rather than the time the draft file itself was created. Tell Kerim and Shibel
• Parse Word Document subtitles as h2 and tell Matt
• Add way to filter entries by post type (e.g. photo) and tell Justin.
• If entries share publish date, sort them by blot creation date
• Fix bug with blockquotes and tell Kerim. Multiple “>” symbols on the blank paragraphs between other quoted text are not formatting properly.
• Fix bug with indented code in pre tags and tell Michael

Improvements to dashboard

• Fix bug with file list on dashboard in Safari and tell Ryan
• Fix missing error messages on overdue subscription payment form
• Use <select> optgroup on timezone select dropdown to subdivide zones by current time, and steal the presentation format used by basecamp.
• Add a broken link checker
• Make dashboard requests idempotent to prevent multiple form resubmits, multiple new blogs created accidentally? More information about idempotent requests
• Indicate that some posts' permalink will not change (if metadata) on the dashboard when setting the blog's permalink format. Tell Chet.
• Dumb quotes are still smartified, even without typeset enabled, possibly by pandoc?
• Undo option for form changes
• Add transactional emails notifying customer of changes to their email or password.
• When a customer pastes the whole tracking script into the preferences page on the dashboard, strip out everything except the ID which we need… perhaps create a page explaining what is happening before doing this.
• Handle noscript on dashboard / signup gracefully (remove all dashboard js?)
• Allow customers who are restarting an account with multiple blogs to disable some before restarting.

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Add password protection for blogs then tell Ed, this person, this person, and Will, and Modomiro and Julian and Raph and Jeremy and Tara and Phil and Florian and Roy's friend Tim and Kaleb and Lotus and Khaled and Noel and Franz and Justin and Kyle and Devan and John and Anita and Emerald and Ben and Giuseppe and Annie and Jan

• Should we just go all the way and support htaccess? Add URL rewrite feature, e.g. rewrite /randomColor to /public/randomColor?

Finish template translation offers

• Anders Norén
• Radek Kozieł
• Port Jane hugo theme to Blot and tell Jack and Josh on micro.blog
• Ghostwriter and tell Simon
• Work on Tim's template
• Translate this theme to Blot and tell Naveen
• Translate Ana's designs to Blot
• Translate 2019 to Blot and tell Gabriel
• Translate Paul's template into Blot

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Improve the markdown converter:

• Add plugin option to enable hard line breaks in Markdown parser? Tell Wil
• Fix bug with nested Markdown and tell Martin:

  - ![This is a picture of me testing **Sonikebana**, a nine channel sound piece for mobile loudspeakers that respond when moved. Photo (and artwork) by [Anna Chapman Parker](http://www.annachapman.co.uk)](http://example.com/images/_landingImage_01.jpg)

• Extend the Markdown converted to add support for Ulysses highlighting and iAWriter highlighting syntax, using the example files provided by Marco. Tell Marco
• Fix bug and tell Vanessa which injects <p> tags into the following:

  <div class="img-gallery"><img src="_Floralia.png" title="Floralia"><img src="_Flower.png" title="Flower"><img src="_Mechanical.png" title="Mechanical"><img src="_Curv.png" title="Curv"><img src="_Curvus.png" title="Curvus"><img src="_Futuristic.png" title="Futuristic">
  </div>

Finish script to identify long-expired customers with blogs to safely delete and free up space.

• Sort by date expired
• Write script to safely delete blogs
  • wipe blog folder
  • wipe static directory
  • wipe all keys

Ignore files inside 'assets' inside .textbundle directories to improve support for textbundles and tell Thomas

Rebuild all the thumbnails and cached images for every blog

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Add support for paying with Bitcoin

• Consider https://github.com/btcpayserver https://github.com/btcpayserver/node-btcpay
• Tell Chaz
• Tell Anita
• Tell Arc

Add support for paths to static files with a trailing slash then tell Sean

Add copy button to code snippets in <pre> tags and tell Atif

Add support for Ulysses .ulz file format and tell Nash

Add support for Ulysses image syntax and tell Konstantin

Add new template lambdas

• Whitespace trimming and tell Chad
• Number formatting (e.g. add commas to int.) and tell Chad

Add way to filter archives page by year or month and tell Chad

Add a cool bookmarklet which drafts a post a la this demo

Add broken link check for all email templates for logged in and logged out customers

Make it possible to search entire page on web template editor and tell Precious. At the moment, only the text on the viewport is searchable.

Follow up with Shibel about how to ignore arbritrary paths and keep clean URLS (no underscores). Sitewide .blotignore file?

Adjust length of slug to use as few words as possible until collision and tell Chet

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Improve scheduler

• Adds a command to restore database from backup.

Remove dependence on AWS

• Adds offsite (i.e. non AWS backups) backups
• Write out plan to move off AWS
  • DNS
  • EC2
  • S3 for backups
  • Cloudfront for CDN
  • backup blogs folder + db somewhere offsite at least once per week

Metadata parser

• Make custom metadata more strict, follow up with Chris](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxwCgpdRvrccbzfckkZRtPXHzqjs)
• Add support for Pelican-style metadata in HTML posts using
• Removing Date metadata from a post should reset its date to the file's creation date. Currently nothing changes.
• Fall back to file name before first sentence when generating title metadata and tell Rob
• Add support for setting the index of an item in the menu to metadata and tell Silvio

Implement hidden link section on Menu page under profile settings. Default links not on the menu would appear there, making it easy to restore them in future. Tell Josh

Add new variable for last-build-time for a blog, and use this for in the sites' RSS feeds. Tell Shawn

Redirect old draft URL to live published post and tell Shibel

Improve 404 log page on Dashboard

• Add button to clear 404 log and tell Jamie
• Add frequency indicator for each route 404 log and tell Jamie
• Add filtering by date to 404 log and tell this person

Add way to auto-refresh page during template development on preview subdomains. Tell Ryan

Add support for nesting multiple layout tags e.g. “{<>} {||} Y” and tell Marius

Look into accessibility issues with scrolling and code blocks and tell Eli if I make any changes

Improvements to Git client

• Add support for LFS and tell Jamie
• Remove git folder when switching to Dropbox client and tell Jamie
• Backdate existing commits (perhaps set file ctime using info from git log?) This would sidestep the frustration experienced by Gavin when he imported an existing repository.
• Fix bugs with git removed / renamed file unit test on Travis
• Extend sync lock during long syncs
• Write test to simulate process dying and restarting mid-pull. Does the client recover? What happens if a pull fails midway? Does git recover?
• Write tests for a series of random client operations (pull, add, push, move, reset, delete) that can be seeded and reliably re-run in the case of failure.
• Move to neat promise chain api when 2.0 comes out
• Test that client must keep sending new entries and deleted entries when it recieved an error from entry.build otherwise you get ghost posts…
• send nice error message with instructions for 413 request too large: “git reset HEAD^” etc…
• Thoroughly document:
• Tidy up tests and reduce size and runtime
• This client should acquire a lock on the blog's folder before doing stuff to it more generally, especially during initialization etc…
• what happens if customer changes their handle? will pushing break?
  • I want them to be able to keep using their old one until someone else claims it, then I want 401 unauthorized, please reauthenticate with new username… but the remote path will be wrong?
• Rate limit authentication route?

Dropbox client

• Handle file renames using Dropbox IDs to avoid the 'new entry' bug when you rename a file
• Build posts incrementally while big syncs are taking place
• Revert lowercase for all files when disconnecting the client
• add support for Dropbox Paper files using paperDocsDownload and tell Emad
• Add integration test with a dropbox Webhook call. I want to not push some code which would prevent syncing customer folders.
• Does client.remove support the removal of folders? If not, make it so and add a test
• Add a step to authentication flow which says: 'there is already a folder called 'Your blog title' in your Dropbox, would you like to use that?' then overwrite the files inside. This prevents the proliferation of confusing 'Your blog title (1)' when you re-authenticate.
• Add a progress bar to the dashboard when writing existing files to Dropbox. It takes a while and confuses people.
• Adding an additional blog to existing app folder under constant webhooks failed. New blog had correct folder but old blog still used root. I guess we need to acquire a lock on ALL blogs interacting with that dropbox account.
• Extend sync lock during long syncs
• Write test to simulate process dying and restarting mid-pull. Does the client recover?
• Write tests for a series of random dropbox client operations (pull, add, push, move, reset, delete) that can be seeded and reliably re-run in the case of failure.
• Look into getAccessTokenFromCode on DBSDK repo to avoid the mess in get_account.js https://github.com/dropbox/dropbox-sdk-js/issues/64
• Gracefuly retry wrapper around Dropbox
• Can we write to a folder_id instead of a path? It would be nice to be able to move the blog's folder even when writing the initial files to it, for example…
• This should be simple once we copy the exisiting state of the blog folder across. But right now it doesn't really do much. It resets the local server folder. Then resyncs.
• Update to latest version of Dropbox client.
• Make the folder in Dropbox rename automatically when the customer changes the username for one of their multiple blogs?

Add media-query to prevent typeset hanging punctuation on small screens (it looks weird) and tell Shibel

Make Redis performance improvements

• Research Redis clustering
• Prune redis keys and begin storing more on disk
• redis analysis tool
• Move to using unix socket with redis client per documentation for better throughput. Read this issue first, I might need to make some user group permissions tweaks to ensure things are secure.

Restructure application folder

• make serving static files from NGINX easier?
  • ln /data/blogs/{blogID}/folder /data/cache/{hostname}/folder/…
  • ln /data/blogs/{blogID}/static /data/cache/{hostname}/static/…
• consolidating the data stored about each blog
• Specfic ideas:
  • Move cache directory from /cache to /data/cache
  • Move blog's folder contents from /blogs/{blogID} to data/blogs/{blogID}/folder
  • Move static files directory from /static/{blogID} to /data/blogs/{blogID}/static
  • Move db directory from /db to /data/db
  • Move logs directory from /logs to /data/logs
  • Remove /tmp directory and instead use os.tmpDir

Switch to streaming JSON parser. There are npm modules that offer asynchronous JSON APIs. See for example:

• JSONStream, which has stream APIs.
• Big-Friendly JSON, which has stream APIs as well as asynchronous versions of the standard JSON APIs using the partitioning-on-the-Event-Loop paradigm outlined below.

Add notification emails for monit events

• Include secure one-time link to reboot the AWS instance?

Research state of static site generators

• https://www.11ty.io/docs/
• https://www.staticgen.com/

Investigate support for xattr to read image metadata on Blot? Or source for dragged images?

Set NODE_ENV environment variable to production

Add support for HTTP2 and tell Ryan and questioner

Could we have multiple syncing method attached to one blog?

Generate list of external API dependencies and follow changes for each

Add simple minimal version of Blot that could be npm installed, then tell Pedro who is frustrated editing templates locally with the git client

Subscription refactor

• Different payment methods per blog
• Seperate blog subscriptions behind the scenes to avoid the crazy calculations. Think of them like domains, you wouldn't do what Blot is doing for those…

Create script to export Blot sites to common formats like Wordpress and let Roberto know

Move to Linode?

• Preserve AWS elastic IP and proxy to Linode
• Think about eventual multiple locations around the world from day 1
• Work out the pricing model carefully
• Use blockstorage this for storing all customers' folders
• Use backups
• Use nodebalancers

Increase price to $5 per month for new customers. This will not affect existing customers in any way.

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Create an API for Blot

• Add webhooks and tell Aurynn and Shawn

Allow logged in customers to see public homepage. Perhaps use dashboard.blot.im for dashboard?

• Add a slack.com style dropdown on the public homepage for logged in customers which takes them to the dashboard for their sites.

When the customer's blog does not have a client, client.write and client.remove need to remove the files from the source folder. Create some kind of local client which we fall back and use when none is configured?

Work out how to host podcasts on Blot and tell Adrian

Client.write does not propogate sync errors… to demonstrate this, revoke dropbox token then try to enable local editing.

Re-enable image minifier and fix the bugs it creates

Prune package.json

• To minify HTML
• To minify CSS (alternative)
• To minify JavaScript (alternative)

Reconsider default slug length or add new short slug property and tell Josh

Write self-hosting documentation then tell Jake and Berndl and Joel and Mohammed and BP and Rado and Nuno and Omaid and Brian and Jarod and Francesco and Aryan and Todd and Anita and Kaushik and Michael and Frank and Zip

• Tell Nick when it's possible to deploy a self-hosted Blot on Vercel and Zia

Add option to sort posts by filename alphabetically and tell Steve

• How do we share info, like a link on a menu, or a header image across templates? Could there be a shared info repository that templates could access?
• add support for dynamic partials to make collections possible, e.g. {{> /:tag.html}} ?
• Add neat interface to customize blog level variables?
• How do we transition from a global date display format to one that templates have control over?
• Port the jekyll template Neocactus to Blot and document the process then tell Robert
• Install and test a few of these static site generators
• Make templates file or folder based
• Consider making file-based template directory a git repo and using this to implement basic undo-redo functionality.
• Disable re-rendering for locals
• Add better customization options
• Local template editing does not clear cache
• Use Hogan for precompiling and rendering templates?
• Parse tokens and params from routes and tell Jason
• Add way to allow all entry lists to access {{#months}} sorting options just like the archives page.
• Tell Marco when arbirary list sorting is ready
• Fix Frank's strange template bug
• Warn customers that underscore will not work for hidden pages
• Fix _ entries to true public files, tell john & other folks who depend on the menu: yes, page: no side effect
• Tell Rodrigo don't write previews for _ posts
• Add support for fetching only some properties of an entry (ideally only those that are used). prevent some properties from being fetched in some lists (html, for example in all_entries). Would be a good candidate for hgetall or hget?

Embed feature

• Add support for native PDF embeds in posts, just put a link to a PDF or a path, e.g. /_assets/file.pdf –> would become a nice embed.
• Add support for native MP3 embeds in posts, just put a link to an MP3 or a path, e.g. /_assets/file.mp3 –> would become a nice embed then tell Luke and Nash and Andy and Charlie and Konstantin
• Add soundcloud embeds then tell Jonas, Nashp, and Anders and Richard
• Add are.na embeds and tell Marco

Expose exif data on Photo posts? See if you can add comments to image metadata and tell Riley, also tell Mike

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Improvements to thumbnail generator

• Prioritize faces in crop?
• Try to crop out ruined borders. E.g. when making a square crop of a rectangular image with a border, crop into the image as well to remove the border-on-three-sides effect
• Extract color palette too for the image
• Offer imgix style API for embedding thumbnails

Improvements to reverse proxy:

• Ensure I am doing request coalescing on NGINX and lower proxy timeout limit
• Read the 5 hour CDN post and discussion
• Ensure nginx is handling all static file delivery
• NGINX Install nginx fail2ban & http2 & reasonable rate-limits
• Add support for IPv6 and tell Raul

Add support for comments via webmentions like Disqus and tell Amit and Luke

Migrate code from require('mime') to require('mime-types') since it doesn't use a global default type. Remove the mime node module.

Plugins

• Fix image caption plugin to be semantic using

• Ensure Youtube plugin still functions if apis fails

Think about responsive images and optimizing at request time and tell Marius and Jan

Reply to Jamie about gitwatch and other newsletter suggestions

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Consider allowing customers to buy domains on Blot through DNS simple

Consider buying the .com

Consider distributing static built blogs on dat or something similar

Consider adding internationalization (i8n) and translation into other languages:

• Yannick has offered to act as French translator
• Tell Christian about Portuguese
• Tell Simon about French

Consider adding embedabble support for giphy URLs and tell Nash

Consider adding educational pricing and tell Matt with my decision.

Consider adding support for Microformats in the default templates

Consider adding JSONFeed to default templates. Tell Jamie

Consider using sshfs for server and for customers

Consider establishing bug bounty program

• Contact Husnain for his DMARC report

Consider adding simple server-side analytics and tell Tom and John and Romain

Consider adding simple commenting system and tell Precious

Consider moving to pretty IDs for everything public-facing

• https://jsfiddle.net/m1e9wc6q/
• cool customer subdomains
• generating dope domain names

Consider supporting Micro pub and tell Jamie

Consider offering newsletter service and tell David and Nash and Kyle

Consider adding support for PubSubHubbub support and tell Thomas

Consider atompub support for Marsedit and tell Chet and David

Consider incorporating typographic features from Textile?

Consider supporting org-mode and tell Rashawn

Consider supporting Open Graph and tell Luke

Consider making it possible to use Blot's brochure site as a template and tell Uzoamaka

Consider adding support for nested page structure

• generate nested menu items from nested folders in /pages

Consider adding a global 'ignore' setting on services page of dashboard?

• could ignore all '.jpg' say, or all 'index.html' files, etc.

Reach out to Wesley about using notebook's features in a template

Consider adding a {{titleLink}} property to each entry, which extracts a link from the {{titleTag}} for use in RSS feeds, etc. and tell Guy

Consider adding 'default metadata' option to dashboard

• Tell Mike

Consider switching to same-site lax and remove all redirects?