Posts from June 01, 2026

Publishing my BlogMore blog with rsync over ssh

Blog

BlogMore comes with a built-in facility to post the generated static website to GitHub pages. The host of blog.cpjobling.net is however a standard LAMP) stack which is updated by recursively copying the contents of the public directory to a folder blog.cpjobling.net on the host. That folder has been registered as the base directory for the DNS record.

The easiest way to do that is using rsync over ssh.

I used the advice given in How to Setup Rsync without password with SSH on UNIX / Linux? to set up my publish.sh script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

cd ~/blogs/blog.cpjobling.net # local files
blogmore build --clean-first # build blog using default`posts` and config `blogmore.yml`
echo "Syncing files using SSH (see https://superuser.com/questions/555799/how-to-setup-rsync-without-password-with-ssh-on-unix-linux)"
rsync -avz --delete -e ssh public/ user@host.hosting.com:blog.cpjobling.net
ℹ️ Note

I use the --clean-first flag for the blogmore build command and --delete in the rsync command to ensure that no orphan files end up on the server.

blogmore rsync ssh

Exploring Emacs' Markdown Mode

emacs

In my second tag-blogmore post (and first category-emacs post), I thought this would be a good opportunity to explore the BlogMore API as well as markdown mode.

I immediately hit a problem because in Emacs on my Mac, M-3 does not enter the "pound" symbol needed to mark a heading/subheading. Is there an "insert heading function" command in markdown-mode? Fortunately there is and it's on the keyboard shortcut C-c C-s 2 (heading 2 because heading 1 is the post title).

This is what I found.

Blogmore commands discovered

  • blogmore-toggle-draft -- toggles the draft: true tag in the current posts' metadata block.
  • blogmore-link-tag -- adds a link to a tag page in the current blog.
  • blogmore-link-category -- adds a link to the category page in the current blog.
  • blogmore-update-date -- updates the post's save date which is useful if you are writing a large post and you want the date to reflect the actual publication date.

Blogmore documentation

Both written by davep:

  • BlogMore -- documemtation for the BlogMore tool that I am now using to create this blog.
  • davep/blogmore.el -- provides tools that help in the creation of blog posts for a BlogMore blog.

Markdown mode commands discovered

  • C-c C-s 2 (markdown-insert-header-atx-2) -- inserts level 2 heading.
  • C-c C-c p (markdown-preview) -- previews content of the current markdown-mode buffer in the default web browser.
  • C-c C-l (markdown-insert-link) -- isert a URL or Reference link.

Markdown-mode documentation

Markdown Mode for Emacs by Jason Blevins.

Fixing the M-3 issue on a Mac

[I found this fix some time ago but I hadn't gotten around to adding it to my latest Emacs configuration.]

On a Mac with a UK keyboard, the keystroke to generate the "pound sign" (S-3) literally produces the currency symbol £. To get the hashtag symbol # we have to press Option-3 (M-3), but this is intercepted by emacs. This makes it very difficult to deal with markdown and org-mode files that use # extensively.

To fix this, we have to redefine the global key M-3:

;; Allow hash to be entered on Mac UK keyboard
(global-set-key (kbd "M-3") '(lambda () (interactive) (insert "#")))

On my prelude-based configuration, this code has been added to ../prelude/personal/01-settings.el.

blogmore markdown markdown-mode