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News and updates

The lists below give you a idea of what I’m working on. I tend to announce signiﬁcant news on Blot’s Twitter account. Blot’s source code is dedicated to the public domain. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

To do

Finish archive template

Add new folders with public domain material
Announce new archive template (+ documentation and video) by linking to archive template page

Finish default feed theme

Record new demo video

“Bring your own interface” show demo of simple custom text editor built in electron or something which has autocomplete tags, drag and drop images, explain that you can build something like this yourself.
Show sites I run using Blot:
- Blot's developer blog
- My visual scrapbook on the archives theme: shows tag folders, photo blog
- My personal site: simple landing page, edit with a doc ﬁle?

Finish tidying Kerim's template from Jekyll and add the bio to the homepage, along with posts tagged 'Homepage'

Fix bug with image zoom on the magazine theme when you click back on the zoomed image to close and tell Florence

Fix bug with Rodrigo's Word Document ﬁles

Image and thumbnail bugs

Fix bug for images containing upper-case characters on Jonas' blog
Fix bug with image miniﬁcation which produces larger ﬁle than source ﬁle and tell Jan
Fix bug with gifs and the image cacher. Animated gifs from imgur.com were not playing, just the ﬁrst frame was fetched. Tell Oleg
Fix bug with thumbnails and tell John
Fix Anders image path bug. A ﬁle titled “_på besøg hos gomorgen danmark.jpg” cannot be embedded in a blog post. Write test which ensures this doesn't happen again. This should also ﬁx bug with case-sensitive paths to thumbnails + Dropbox client and tell Jan-Erik on Twitter DMs. Make resolve work more impressively, attempt to resolve a path in a case insensitive manner. Or is this a good idea? Maybe we should only resolve paths which match stored metadata? Or should we make a best-effort? As long as we are resolving case-only it should be ﬁne… Tell Michael it now works. This should also ﬁx bug with accents in image paths for Wesley. Incorporate retries into the thumbnail fetcher…

Tell Chris, Nash and John know about new themes

Fix bug with double escaped embedded ampersands then tell Gavin and Ryan his

Fix bug with template editor which resets content of a view. Follow up with Nathan who has extensive steps to reproduce, and John Fix bugs with git removed / renamed ﬁle unit test on Travis

Fix bug with pandoc's video embed feature which automatically adds the autoplay attribute when turning a raw url to a video into a video player then tell Wesley

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

Fix bug which means that a date speciﬁed in a ﬁle's path takes precedence over a date speciﬁed in the ﬁle's metadata. Current behaviour conﬂicts with the documentation. Tell Sean. CANNOT REPRODUCE.

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

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 Kevin's URL encoding bug. Each entry's url property is not encoded as a URI component on the server but it needs to be.

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

Fix bug which occurs when you change your username while using the Git client (caused by the broken repo url) and tell Koen

Work out how to pipe custom error messages down
Pipe custom message when you change a blog's handle (breaking repo url)
Tell Koen about the broken repo URL ﬁx

Fix bug 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.

Fix bug with case sensitivity for tag folders. Need to recursively check all directories for proper case when extracting tags then tell Thomas

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

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

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

Metadata bugs

Fix bug with metadata parsing a URL on the ﬁrst line of a ﬁle and tell David
Fix permalink issue with periods and tell Farzain
Fix encoding bug with greek URLs then tell Rodericus know
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
Fix bug in metadata parser which gets tripped by a URL on the ﬁrst line of the ﬁle then tell Jan, Pete and Kim know

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

Improvements to public site

Clean up error messages in logs for public site
Add 404 log
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
Featured sites on homepage are generated automatically
Collapsible sidebar
Fix logged out page
Pixel perfect logo SVG (no blur)
Logo spacing from Chrome tab
Fix tags across site
Upload new Twitter avatar and background
Tell this person that there is now documentation on how to mirror a repo to GitHub
Favicon with white background for folder
HTML miniﬁer
CSS comporessor
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 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

Add support for HTTP2

Verify that GZIP is disabled at the node.js level and is handled by NGINX instead

Set NODE_ENV environment variable to production

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

Why are images downloading so slowly on the portfolio theme? Should I go back to using cloudfront?

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

Research state of static site generators:

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

Add button to clear 404 log and tell Jamie

Add frequency indicator for each route 404 log and tell Jamie

Create a status page and uptime monitor and tell Amit

Start quarterly newsletter with improvements, changes, send ﬁrst edition on the ﬁrst day of Spring

Let John know

Prune redis keys and begin storing more on disk

Use a redis analysis tool to see if I can squeeze more out of REDIS

Generate list of external API dependencies and follow changes for each

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

Generate thumbnails for gifs and tell Mike

Add daemon for zero-downtime node restart

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

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

Finish re-write of template system

Add titlecase helper function?
Think about serving 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
- 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
Ask to conﬁrm, but remove ﬁles from blog folder when disabling local editing
Add support for 'creating' a template inside '/Templates/'
Move to uuid based template IDs instead of slug
Read and write package.json for local editing, then tell uncrtn, Aurynn and Brian know when it's possible to set variables locally and Eli
Allow paginated list of entries on other pages and tell Kevin and Eli
Fix bug with ﬁltering paginated list of entries and tell Roy
Fix bug with title and partials in local editing then tell Luke and Frank
Add a popular entry list
Add a related entry list and tell Thomas know
Don't write my own DSL, use SQL Something like this in front matter? recent_posts: SELECT POSTS WHERE …

Add support for YAML-style custom metadata and tell Shibel and Casey and Amit

Support 2FA (Two factor authentication)

Tell Luke
Tell Max
Tell Chaz

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…

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

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 theme 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

Backups

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

Increase annual price to $40. This will not affect existing customers.

Create an API for Blot

Add webhooks and tell Aurynn and Shawn

Offer to make websites for in return for a link:

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

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.

Add support for IPv6 and tell Raul

Increase default quality for sharp's output images

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
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 themes. Tell Amit.

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

Add support for HTTPS on preview subdomains

Add public share url for templates and tell Marcus

Allow download of templates as zip of local contents on dashboard?

Distribute static built blogs on dat or something similar

Ensure the nginx service can be controlled properly using Upstart. It seems like Monit's attempts to reboot the service which failed, caused the downtime. Potentially worth reviewing commands in this: https://gist.github.com/andmej/1953239

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

Make dashboard requests idempotent to prevent multiple form resubmits, multiple new blogs created accidentally? More information about idempotent requests

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.

Look into mirroring a site across multiple domains and follow up with Thomas

Create server dashboard to visualize load etc. using something like this: https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui or https://github.com/yaronn/blessed-contrib

Move to cool user subdomains? Pretty to proper blog IDs instead of integers

Self-hosting documentation then tell Jake and Mohammed

How do we share info, like a link on a menu, or a header image across themes? Could there be a shared info repository that themes 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 themes have control over? How do we share existing links between themes? 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 themes have control over?
Port the jekyll theme Neocactus to Blot and document the process then tell Robert
Install and test a few of these static site generators
Make themes ﬁle or folder based
Consider making ﬁle-based theme directory a git repo and using this to implement basic undo-redo functionality.
Disable re-rendering for locals
Add better customization options
Local theme editing does not clear cache
Use Hogan for precompiling and rendering themes?
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 theme 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?

Dashboard

Add a broken link checker
Dumb quotes are still smartiﬁed, even without typeset enabled, possibly by pandoc?
Tolerate missing 'www' in personal domain ﬁeld on dashboard for users with a custom domain when checking validity
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
Route requests to new dashboard if toggle is on to allow thorough testing
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

Public site

Log 404s on the public site to identify neccessary redirects
Personalize the documentation for logged in users

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

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
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
Add support for checkboxes and tell Matt and Shridhar
Add support for Pelican-style metadata in HTML posts using
Expose exif data on Photo posts? See if you can add comments to image metadata and tell Riley, also tell Mike

Clients

OneDrive Tell Shantesh, ekskog and John
SFTP https://www.npmjs.com/package/ftpd
Google Drive Tell Cecil: https://twitter.com/Blot__/status/988162892594860032?s=20 Tell Jonathan: https://twitter.com/chin_jon/status/1032392398473650176

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}})?

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

Increase price for new customers to $60 a year. This will not affect existing customers.

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.
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?

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?

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

Improve error pages
Recompile nginx with neccessary dependencies for auto-ssl instead of openresty?
Install nginx fail2ban & http2

Support linking to another blog post by its ﬁle path

This would help with the importer to ﬁx broken links
See how Pelican does it

Removing Date metadata from a post should reset its date to the ﬁle's creation date

Currently nothing changes.

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

Thumbnail generator

Improve transformer so it checks a ﬁle's MTIME against a stored value before rehashing the ﬁle
Generate thumbnails for GIFs / SVG thum
Prioritize faces
Aim to generate distinct thumbnails across the blog
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
Run quickly ﬁrst time, then run in the background to pick the best thumbnail
Offer imgix style API for embedding thumbnails

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

Remove the dirToModule code and hard link the require references.

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

Handle queries properly https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?zx=tqp989l7y4yi#inbox/15b575fbc8d80ad1

Giphy url support

Catch rename failed to ﬁnd a match for scrapboox/patch_bunny_slippers.jpg -> /patch_bunny_slippers.png

Indicate that some posts' permalink will not change (if metadata) on the dashboard when setting the blog's permalink format. Tell Chet.

Add ﬁltering by date to 404 log and tell this person

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?

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

Enable hyphenation again then tell rodericus

Add password protection for blogs then tell Ed, this person, this person, Modomiro and Roy's friend Tim.

Add option to enable hard line breaks

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? http://redcloth.org/textile/phrase-modiﬁers/

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

Noindex blog search results pages

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

Expose list of rendering errors to callback

Push archives feature https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/14fb1a48c08fe9be

Make drafts preview ﬁle identical (construct iframe based on window.location.href) and use copyref?

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

Plugins:

Implement custom CSS for syntax highlight plugin
Fix image caption plugin to be semantic using
Ensure Youtube plugin still functions if apis fails
Prevent image zoom plugin from zooming emojies
Add soundcloud embeds then tell Jonas, Nashp, and Anders

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

Move from preview ﬁles -> webloc / .url ﬁles? Everything requires an internet connection

Consider adding date format localization with Moment

Add an embed plugin https://github.com/ritz078/embed.js

Look into how Jekyll does data ﬁles and possibly support?

Add .lhs support and tell Roy

Internationalize i8n and tell Christian about Portuguese and Simon about French

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

News and updates

To do

Done