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:
- 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
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
- 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/'
- 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
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
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 for
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 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:
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?
Done
- Refactor backup code and add removal of old backups (#393)
- Refactor backup function
- Changes backup bucket
- Cleans up s3 config (#392)
- Maxmemory bump for redis
- Fixes issue with shitty Magazine template
- Clarify documentation on link format and pages
- Bump redis maxmemory
- Tune up newsletter subscription UX
- Fix typo in hashfiles
- Improve pandoc setup speed in GitHub actions (#391) * Npm cache * Comments * More comments * Different pandoc setup method * Clarifying commands * Tweak to path * Pandoc tests * More path messing * Pandoc * Pandoc * Adds pandoc caching * Comments out pandoc caching * Adds to path * Refactor pandoc flow
- Updates folders readme
- Adds folders to gitignore
- Tweaks to GitHub actions (#390) * Uses different redis action * Adds sparse checkout * Further tweak * Further tweak to checkout * Further tweak to checkout * Foo * New npm ci strategy * Fix git config * Test for cache * Revert changes to npm
- Moves test folders to own repo
- Adds comment warning about RSS post bug
- Comments
- Adds caching for npm ci
- Update version of node action used
- Rename tests directory so it doesn't run
- Update tests.yml
- Update tests.yml
- Update tests.yml
- Update tests.yml
- Update tests.yml
- Update tests.yml
- Update tests.yml
- Update and rename node.js.yml to tests.yml
- Update node.js.yml
- Update node.js.yml
- Update node.js.yml
- Update node.js.yml
- Update node.js.yml
- Delete .travis.yml
- Update node.js.yml
- Update node.js.yml
- Update node.js.yml
- Create node.js.yml
- Fixes typo in test file
- Fix leaking tests that need to be renabled eventually
- Adds test case for task lists to Markdown converter
- Tidies up magazine template css
- Adds css for better checkbox render
- Use guid property of entry instead of permalink in guid field of RSS feed
- Removes duplicate code and changes label for tracking code
- Adds cloufdlare analytics option
- Fixes typos
- Renames label on title settings page
- Cleans up redirects page
- Added comment to dashboard view
- Adds support for punycode domains
- Revert “Removes strict domain validation”
- Removes regex to test for valid domain
- Fixes 404 log
- Just log error in each blog script
- Finishes winter newsletter
- Adds new testcase for previously breaking docx
- Finishes guide to updating pandoc
- Updates demo video ideas
- Updates newsletter
- Updates test case
- Adds guide to updating pandoc
- Updates test output
- Updates version of pandoc used in travis