News

This page explains what I’m working on and what I have planned. You can subscribe below to receive a newsletter at the start of each season. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

To do

Write script to identify and safely delete long overdue users

Work out how to cache 404s at the NGINX level

Improvements to templates

Fix bug in image zoom and tell Cameron
Respond to Michael's thoughtful emails about the template system
Tell these people about new templates, and to subscribe to newsletter:
- Chris
- John
- Jan
- Jamie
Fix bug with 'Previous' page link in Magazine theme and tell Alex
Fix column formatting for layout.css on default template and tell Ryan
Fix Diary template mobile issues and contact Jonas and Brandon

Server changes

Write useful benchmark tool for Blot
Add memory monitor
Migrate to lower-cost r6gd.xlarge instance, which is not possible using the AWS console due to some difference in architecture (intel vs. amazon chip?).
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 rely on ephemeral disk more?

Add Q and A question section to site where users could post and tell Taylan and Adil

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

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

Investigate potentially TeX-related escaping issues and tell Anthony and Roy

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

Fix duplicated entry in tag page for Marco the example is here

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

Tweak {{slug-without-diacritics}} in permalink format such that “ö” becomes “oe” instead of “o” and tell Domink

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

Add queues and progress bars to entry building, client-switching and follow up with Jacopo

Expose 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

Add custom metadata to turn off/on search indexing on speciﬁc post or page and tell Hani

Test cloudﬂare analytics integration from scratch and resolve issue with diklein.com

Prevent long-overdue users 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 user 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?

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

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

Add status page information to news page:

customize the design of this page a little (could we self-host on a different service, e.g. linode, a page which makes an API call to updown?)
embed a brief status history in the brochure site somewhere
link to this status page in the 502 bad gateway error page

Improvements to template editor

Add layout options to template editor for native templates
Work out how to make live but saveable modiﬁcations for preview purposes on the template editor
Add background patterns to template editor tools, tell Ish

Improvements to template engine

Make date-format settings template speciﬁc and tell Mike “I forked the Archive template but did not install it. And yet, changing settings like “Hide the publish date for your posts” affected the currently installed template.“”
Local editing
- Fix bug with title and partials in local editing then tell Luke and Frank
Add way to iterate over public and private pages to allow sitemap to work properly and tell Rodrigo
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
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 titlecase helper function?
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
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 tell Kevin and Eli and Sven and Nikhil and Adam and Madino
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 know
Add way to list ﬁles at a path and tell Matt Improvements to brochure
Catch 404s in Google search results and set up redirects
Add integration tests for brochure site to test sign up ﬂow
Personalize the documentation for logged in users
Tooltips for lock and CVC on sign up page
Loading state for submit button on sign up page
Unify dashboard header style post-payment
Navigation collapse on mobile devices
Prune unused font-face declarations from CSS passed to dashboard
Use blotcdn for video and other static ﬁles
Logo spacing from Chrome tab
Sprite for images associated with featured sites
Add types and examples to items on reference page
Add a resource page to the documentation with guides like Chad's
- And useful text editors like this one recommended by Andrew
Make formatting guide searchable
Generate high quality optimized favicons from new logo
Extract SVG of logo which can be used to produce hover effects, and on black
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

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

Once stripe allows programmatic receipt delivery

Improvements to developer guide

Tell Pedro

Record new demo video

Finish video script in brochure/readme.txt
Work out how a photographer might use Blot, does lightroom work well?
Tidy up fontarchive.org
Find a neat public domain song to play
- https://archive.org/details/Grab_Bag-12446/03_-_Trust.mp3
- https://archive.org/details/Winter_Sunshine_EP-8201/Evgeny_Grinko_-_01_-_Winter_Sunshine.mp3

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
Fix bug with case sensitivity for tag folders. Need to recursively check all directories for proper case when extracting tags then tell Thomas and Steve and Michael
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 issue with teaser generator that locks up a build process, sometimes for 10+ seconds.
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 git client

Remove git folder when switching to Dropbox client and tell Jamie

Improvements to dashboard

Fix bug with ﬁle list on dashboard in Safari and tell Ryan
Fix missing error messages on overdue subscription payment form

Finish template translation offers:

Anders Norén
Radek Kozieł
Port Jane hugo theme to Blot and tell Jack and Josh on micro.blog
Work on Tim's template
Translate Roberto's theme to Blot and tell Roberto
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

Think about appeninding ﬁle extension to make requests with query strings cacheable

think about emptying cache directory, LRU. But how do we handle .css?query=x?
nginx will have to look up a series of extensions -> $requestURI, $requestURI.html, $requestURI.xml, $requestURI.css, $requestURI.js

Fix bug with script to import wordpress posts and follow up with Simon

Fix bug with nested Markdown and tell Martin:

Finish script to identify long-expired users 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

Add more fonts to font picker:

Abel
Alegreya
Alte Haas Grotesk
Authentic Sans
Avara
Averia Serif Libre
Bagnard
ANRT Baskervville
Chivo
Cormorant
Computer Modern (entire family)
Crimson Text
Darker Grotesque
DINosaur
DM Sans
Eb Garamond
ET Book
Euler AMS
Faune
Fjalla One
Fondamento
Golos Text
Halibut Serif
Happy Times at the IKOB
Helmet Neue
iA Writer Quattro
Inﬁni GF
Inter
Interstate
Inria fonts
JetBrains Mono
Junicode
Karla
Le Murmure
Lincoln Mitre
Libertinus
Literata
Lunchtype
Messapia
Michroma
Mister Pixel
Montserrat
Neuton
Nunito
Optician Sans
Ortica
Oswald
Pilowlava
Pinyon Script
Plex
Quicksand
Roboto
Rosario
Recursive
Routed Gothic
Rubik
Space Grotesk/Mono
Spectral
Syne
Terminal Grotesque
TeX Gyre
Typewriter Condensed
UnifrakturMaguntia
Violet Sans
VCR OSD Mono
Vollkorn
Work Sans
Wremena
Young Serif

Add support for YAML-style custom metadata. Consider using something like StrictYAML or Graymatter. Tell Shibel and Casey and Amit and Martin and Kyle and Brett and SKYue and Eric

Add support for paying with Bitcoin and tell Chaz

Add support for paths to static ﬁles with a trailing slash to work and tell [Sean](https://mail.google. com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxwGBwbZsfsWKHCGcbzXXSPhQWXx)

Add copy button to code snippets in

 tags and tell Atif

Add support for Ulysses .ulz ﬁle format and tell Nash

Add support for Ulysses image syntax and tell Konstantin

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

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 users

Fix bug in Alex's draft and speed up its build time

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

Tell Thiago once it's possible to create stand-alone HTML pages whcih don't become blog posts.

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?

Fix bug with image zoomer on mobile devices and tell Alessandro

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

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.
Determine cause of Markdown converter failure for Dropbox/Apps/Strange encoding bug
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

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
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

Date parser bugs

Fix bug parsing ISO8601 date format and tell Thomas

Performance improvements

Streamline and cache loading of data on dashboard
Ensure node.js server has one process per CPU
Ensure nginx is handling all static ﬁle delivery
Detect CPU intensive functions in node.js process

Reply to Jamie about gitwatch and other newsletter suggestions

Improve scheduler

Adds a command to restore database from backup.
Rotates log ﬁles

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

Think about adding way to add/edit ﬁles from the dashboard directly, bypassing need for a client. Tell Jamie about the decision. What about a web-based client for Blot with a basic text editor, posts listed on sidebar, conventional tag interface?

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

Finish public share url for templates and tell Marcus and Chad and Nash.

Create simple reference to original template that is uneditable by default (but forkable, like default Blot templates). This would mean the template would auto-update.

Move away from reds and investigate good full text search options

Improve Ghost importer and tell Vin

Add new variable for last-build-time for a blog, and use this forin 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 hasBreakpoint property to entry to allow greater control over display of {{{teaser}}} and tell Pratik

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

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

Improvements to Git client

Add support for LFS 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 user 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?

Improvements to Dropbox client

Migrate App permissions before September 2021
Add integration test with a dropbox Webhook call. I want to not push some code which would prevent syncing user 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 user 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.

Improve transformer

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

Add notiﬁcation emails for monit events

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

Research state of static site generators

Investigate support for xattr to read image metadata on Blot? Or source for dragged images? https://github.com/LinusU/fs-xattr

Set NODE_ENV environment variable to production

Add support for HTTP2 and tell Ryan

Fix bug with makeTeaser for ~/Dropbox/bug.html which locks main process painfully

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.

Could we have multiple clients attached to one blog?

Use the –trace-sync-io command-line ﬂag to determine if Blot is using any sync methods inappropriately

Replace some of the assert() tests which run every time the server starts with Jasmine tests that run via npm test.

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

Make sure color schemes have enough contrast

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…

Add nice import step under 'Services' and as part of sign up

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
Finish Ghost template import for Kingi
Map excerpt metadata to summary for Jekyll converter importer
Look into how Hexo has written imports for blogger, joomla, rss, wordpress.
Add importer for Twitter and sell Sawyer

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 users' folders
Use backups
Use nodebalancers

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

Create an API for Blot

Add webhooks and tell Aurynn and Shawn

Create a mock version of these websites and send an email showing the folder structure for them. Offer to convert entire site in return for a link on Blot's homepage:

Design:
Type:
- Just van Rossum
- Stan Nelson
- Tobias Rechsteiner knows about Blot
- Nick Sherman
Writers:
- Warren Ellis via Kevin knows about Blot
- Maciej Ceglowski
- Robin Sloan
- Paul Ford
- Craig Mod
Programming:
Created popular text editors:
- Oliver Reichenstein
- Zachary Schneirov

Search HN for popular indie-blogs and contact the authors with similar offers.

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

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

When the user'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

Add support for IPv6 and tell Raul

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

Can we keep the pandoc child_process running and pipe stuff in and out for speed? Measure before after to ensure this helps

Webloc converter

Generate screenshots as thumbnails for webloc posts perhaps using pupeteer and PNG8, which seems efﬁcient for screenshots and tell Tom
Download the webpage for bookmark ﬁles and try to extract title + summary

Prune package.json

Cluster the main process. How will I verify that there is not statefullness somewhere in the server? I also want the main 'server' running on different threads to the CPU intensive stuff like image processing. Will this ﬁx the bug with additional child processes if main process runs out of memory? Something wasn't being killed during the Nash WAV bug of August, 2018. There were duplicate node rebuild processes running.

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

Add support for Dropbox Paper .paper ﬁles and tell Emad

Make improvements to template editor color picker:

Think about customizable svg icon colors?
Expose array of rgb values for selected color so we could adjust opacity of color in template, for borders, light text etc: {{#text_color}} color: rgba({{r}}, {{g}, {{b}}, 0.5); {{/text_color}}
Random color button
Recommended presets for color scheme as a whole
Swatches
- used on other templates

Add support for Micropub in Blot's API. Tell Amit.

Add an EXPIRY to the log entries for a blog's 404 log

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

Set up Dependabot to automate dependency upgrade PRs

Follow up with Christian about DataValet blocking

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.

Self-hosting documentation then tell Jake and Mohammed and BP and Rado and Nuno and Omaid and Jarod and Francesco and Aryan

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

Review pCloud as a potential client and tell Omaid and Anders

Review Dropmark as a potential client and tell Rado

Add option to sort posts by ﬁlename alphabetically and tell [Steve](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/ 0/#inbox/FMfcgxwJXpTLwnKwSRTFKRqXKNgQkFDv)

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 menu to one that the templates have control over? How do we share existing links between templates? How do we deal with the order of pages in a user's folder?
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 users 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?

Improvements to Dashboard

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 user of changes to their email or password.
Implement a ﬂags page for toggling all the settings (including hidden ones) for a given blog
When a user 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 users who are restarting an account with multiple blogs to disable some before restarting.
Take a look at Notion and Cargo for some neat ideas

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

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

File converters / codecs

Video posts (.mp4)
OPML ﬁles and tell John
Audio posts (.mp3 for now?) and tell Kevin
Multi-ﬁle posts from inside one folder? 'Folder>' Tell Kevin, Nash and Roberto and Calvin and Ariel and Lara
Multi-ﬁle posts with the same name but different extension (image.txt and image.jpg)
Markdown Write a pandoc compatible markdown converter in javascript to resolve some of the performance issues with pandoc. Perhaps just use Markdown-it

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

Add password protection for blogs then tell Ed, this person, this person, Modomiro and Julian and Raph 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

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

Write new clients to sync blog folders

[Box] then tell Eric
OneDrive then tell Shantesh, Nathan, ekskog and John and Simon and Josh if OneDrive for Business is supported and Naveen and Emad and John
Syncthing and tell Jason
SFTP and tell Calvin and Fabrice
NextCloud and tell Andrew and Mike
If it ever becomes possible to create an iCloud client for Blot, tell Andrew and David and John and Dave and Shawn and Andrew and Chris and Kerim and Wilt and John and Arlo and Anders

Allow Blot to fallback to client.read if the ﬁle does not exist on the blot server. Say the harddrive is wiped, we still would like to serve blog ﬁles

Sync

Re-implement folder veriﬁcation feature and make use of the local content hash computation script to verify we have the correct version of a given ﬁle
Make the sync / rebuild proceses run with unpriviledged user permissions to ensure shit isnt fucked with user input… – Re-instate feature to check if a rogue sync took down the server and run sync on a seperate process
Add method to pause syncing and prevent future syncs then use this method with the create/remove blog migration too.
Ensure sync script is run by less priveledged user (just access to /tmp ? /blogs/{{ID}})?

Add soundcloud embeds then tell Jonas, Nashp, and Anders and Richard

Increase price to $6 per month for new customers. This will not affect existing customers in any way.

Buy the .com

Remember to bump LetsEncrypt rate limits if needed
Remember to transfer Dropbox webhooks to new domain on the Dropbox developers console

Incorporate

Support embedding an image in a post by copy-pasting the Dropbox share link

Let Logan know

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

Consider supporting org-mode and tell Rashawn

Consider supporting Open Graph

Tell Luke

Search engine

Improve search engine results and tell Tim

Add support for entry property with escaped double quotes, tell Jay

NGINX Install nginx fail2ban & http2

Add a ﬁle dependency / dependents list to each entry then use this to rebuild dependent entries when, for example, a public image is updated.

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.

Migrate code from require('../../../') to shortcuts in node_modules

Use <select> optgroup on timezone select dropdown to subdivide zones by current time, and steal the presentation format used by basecamp.

Move to pretty IDs for everything

Enable hyphenation again then tell rodericus

Improvements to Markdown parser:

Add support for fancy_lists and tell Regan
Add option to enable hard line breaks in Markdown parser?

Move all unit tests which run on server start (the helper folder is littered with these, CMD+F for 'require('assert') into CI tests.

Re-enable CSP on blot site in a way that works in Safari

Expose list of rendering errors on dashboard

Push archives feature

Plugins

Fix image caption plugin to be semantic using
Ensure Youtube plugin still functions if apis fails

Menu needs concurrency or atomic operations (so we can build posts in parallel)

Look into how Jekyll does data ﬁles and possibly support

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

Consider allowing users to buy domains on Blot through DNS simple

Consider distributing static built blogs on dat or something similar

Consider adding internationalization i8n and tell Christian about Portuguese and 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 users

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 supporting SASS and tell Max

Consider supporting Micro pub and tell Jamie

Consider offering a DNS server with cloudﬂare like UX to avoid issues connecting the domain

Consider adding a crop of a livestream of the sky above me to the contact page. Possibly sourced from something like this. Just like this: https://sistercitynyc.com/

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?

News

To do

Done