News

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

To do

Work on Tim's template and follow up on Monday

Fix integration test dependency issue

Make sure cache volume is remounted after boot

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-using-volumes.html#ebs-mount-after-reboot
https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/8chnbh/i3_instances_initializing_nvme_instance_store/
https://gist.github.com/andreas-wilm/3460a788d6548370a136e63b5b91281e
remove lines from fstab
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/Stop_Start.html
use userdata to run the script? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/user-data.html
can this be resilient enough to run ok if the mounting fails?

Make sure server is hardened to ssh brute force log in attempts

Use nonstandard ssh port?
Was this cause of downtime last week?

Set up template previews on HTTPS (query string? custom header? cookie? wildcard cert?)

Write fall newsletter to send out on September 23

Tweak script to import posts from Hugo for Jack

Finish Feed template then tell Chris and John and Jan

Create folder with public domain material, ideally would be about a uniﬁed subject yet contain images, code snippets, mathematics, essays, quotes and links

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

Deploy strict metadata change and tell Tamara

Translate Ana's designs to Blot

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.

Add image partial template which would render inside each entry to provide ways to access exif, etc. then tell Stuart and Nash

Rebuild all the thumbnails and cached images for every blog

Weird things happened to the ferox blog – it was not attached to its user owner… Can we reproduce bug locally with production dump?
The stores contain old urls, e.g. “/_image_cache/…” even though we have updated new entries
This might break something? What if the cached images are no longer available?
I'm worried there are old references to blotcdn in the thumbnail data stores too, my purge-cdn script did not account for that…

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…

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

Increase price to $4 per month for new customers. This will not affect existing customers in any way.

Work more on Tim's template

Fix column formatting for layout.css on default template and tell Ryan

Translate Paul's template into Blot

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

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 'hello.txt' with title and permalink 'foo'
Then rename ﬁle to 'world.txt', and edit title to 'bar' at the same time
we expect /foo to redirect to /bar, but it doesn't perhaps due to the rename?

Catch 404s in Google search results and set up redirects

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

Add support for checkboxes and tell Matt and Shridhar and Nash

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

Investigate log-in issue. Does this only happen when I reboot the server? There's no reason sessions should expire any sooner than say after a week of inactivity. Tell Marcus

Tell Marcus when it's possible to switch from annual to monthly billing

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 with case-sensitivity when transfering from Git to Dropbox and tell Shantesh and Ish
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
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

Finish support for RFC3339 dates and tell Shawn.
Handle edge case of date surrounded by quotes, e.g. Date: '2018-01-02' and tell Amit
Fix bug parsing ISO8601 date format and tell Thomas
Fix bug with how the date parser. It doesn't handles a space (or lack of space) between the date and the time. For example, '2017-08-27 18:16:59' works but '2017-08-27-18:16:59' doesn't

Markdown bugs

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

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

Add Q and A section to site where users could post

Disable access to s3 blogs bucket

Reply to Jamie about gitwatch and other newsletter suggestions

Improve scheduler

Adds a command to restore database from backup.
Adds a scheduled task to ﬂush old backups using app/scheduler/backup/remove.js in branch 'scheduler' which was ported from the old remove method of the upload module
Adds offsite (i.e. non AWS backups)
Rotates log ﬁles

Wait a month and then delete s3 blogs bucket

Add white background to folder logo in Blot's favicon

Metadata parser

Make custom metadata more strict, follow up with Chris](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxwCgpdRvrccbzfckkZRtPXHzqjs)
Add support for YAML-style custom metadata. Consider using something like StrictYAML or Graymatter. Tell Shibel and Casey and Amit
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

Finish converting Jack's site from Hugo to Blot using this Wordpress-style export view for a Hugo template.

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

Create a status page and uptime monitor and tell Amit. I like this style (just a JSON response)

Add hasBreakpoint property to entry to allow greater control over display of {{{teaser}}} and tell Pratik

Generate thumbnails for gifs and tell Mike

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

Add way to ﬁlter entries by post type (e.g. photo) and tell Justin.

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

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

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

Write script to download all the redis data + ﬁles for a particular blog, then restore it in my local environment. The hard part will be using Redis's DUMP command.

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

Fix Transformer bugs

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
Handle query strings in path to image ﬁles

Add notiﬁcation emails for monit events

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

Research state of static site generators

Improvements to brochure

Write new view renderer for express which would allow middleware like render_tex and would save templates to disk pre- mustache render but post minifyHTML.
Add integration tests for brochure site to test sign up ﬂow
Create credits page listing the names of the people involved in all the open source software used by Blot
Add latest news item from footer
Clean up error messages in logs for public site
Personalize the documentation for logged in users
Add script to fetch 404s with interface to set up redirects
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
Fix formatting guide
Prune unused font-face declarations from CSS passed to dashboard
Use blotcdn for video and other static ﬁles
Logo spacing from Chrome tab
Fixtags across site
Favicon with white background for folder
HTML miniﬁer
CSS compressor
JavaScript miniﬁer
Custom video player on index page
Add types and examples to items on reference page
Add a resource page to the documentation with guides like Chad's and Martin's guide to citations
- And useful text editors like this one recommended by Andrew
Make formatting guide searchable
Make reference page 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
Ask for critiques

Set NODE_ENV environment variable to production

Add support for HTTP2

Fix bug with question mark in image name, e.g. drag and drop 'x?y.jpg' into a blog folder.

Fix bug with question mark in image path's name inside a markdown ﬁle, e.g. embed a ﬁle 'x?y.jpg' in a markdown ﬁle.

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

Finish re-write of template system

Local editing
- Fix bug with title and partials in local editing then tell Luke and Frank
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 when the name of a locally-edited template in your blog's folder updates
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 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 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
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
Add persona/cargo style customization buttons
- Add font picker and tell Michael
- Serve previews of templates from a domain with HTTPS
- Add iframe of site in edit page of template editor
- Work out how to make live modiﬁcations quickly to a CSS ﬁle for preview purposes
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
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

Subscription refactor

Add support for subscriptions via PayPal
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

Improvements to backup system

Add hourly local redis rdb dumps
Add script to roll back into hourly local db dumps and remote backups
Delete backups older than a month from s3 automatically
Archive logﬁles with backups and wipe on a rolling basis

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
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?

Add tool to services page which would ensure that all posts in the folder had a date as part of their ﬁlename or metadata. Tell Nash

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.

Port Jane hugo theme to Blot and tell Jack and Josh on micro.blog

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 Microformats in the default templates. Tell Amit and Jamie

Add JSONFeed to default templates. Tell Jamie

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

Add support for HTTPS on preview subdomains

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

Templates to translate:

Anders Norén
Radek Kozieł
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.
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

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
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 Roy's friend Tim.

Write new clients to sync blog folders

OneDrive then tell Shantesh, Nathan, ekskog and John and Simon and Josh if OneDrive for Business is supported and
Syncthing and tell Jason
SFTP and tell Calvin
NextCloud and tell Andrew
Google Drive then tell Cecil, Jonathan and John and Saptarshi and Raph and Josh and Kevin and David and Kerim and Simon
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

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

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

Add support for other payment methods

Bitcoin and tell Chaz
Paypal

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

Let Logan know

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

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?

Thumbnail generator

Generate thumbnails for GIFs / SVG thum
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 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

Recompile nginx with neccessary dependencies for auto-ssl instead of openresty?
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

Investigate commento as an alternative to Disqus

Automate setting up application environment using /etc/proﬁle.d:

sudo echo “export BLOT_CACHE=true” > /etc/proﬁle.d/blot.sh sudo chmod +x /etc/proﬁle.d/blot.sh

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

Daily update email

Move generator from scripts to app folder such that the server no longer depends on anything in /scripts
Allow conﬁgurable timezone for when I travel?
Write integration test

If entries share publish date, sort them by blot creation date

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.

Incorporate typographic features from Textile?

Queue scheduled entries in redis somehow to make each server less stateful

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

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

Follow up with Eli about work on the documentation and user's guide

Add URL rewrite feature, e.g. rewrite /randomColor to /public/randomColor

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

Investigate atompub support for Marsedit and tell Chet

Investigate PubSubHubbub support and tell Thomas

Look into how Jekyll does data ﬁles and possibly support

Add .lhs support and tell Roy

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

Add support for github style checkboxes and tell Christian

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

Consider allowing users to buy domains on Blot through DNS simple

Distribute static built blogs on dat or something similar

Internationalize i8n and tell Christian about Portuguese and Simon about French

Add embedabble support for giphy URLs and tell Nash

News

To do

Done