Fresh and Crispy

Gotta make progress with emacs

2026-09-01T10:23:36+02:00

I keep getting stuck! I want to learn and use Emacs for my reading and writing but I keep falling down the configuration rabbit hole. I have made a number of attempts to create a vanilla Emacs configuration but rarely get further than Prot's's recommended decent defaults (Emacs: decent defaults I shared with Sacha Chua, Emacs: a basic and capable configuration and Emacs: organise your init file (outline-minor-mode or Org literate config)).

So my plan is now to spend a few weeks working with Peter Prevos' Emacs Writing Studio.

I hope to tune this to exploit MacOS using some of the advice from Emacs on macOS.

I also plan to focus on using Gnu Hyperbole under the guidance of Charlie Holland's series HyWiki: Zero Markup Hypertext, Hyperbole Implicit Buttons: Build your Hyperverse, and Hyperbole HyRolo: Search, Retrieve and Insert Records, Not Lines. I also want to make use of Charlie's article Annotate-in-Place Notes with Emacs and org-remark.

Let's see how this goes!

Temporary Outage Fixed

2026-08-15T14:04:57+02:00

This blog has been a static site since I migrated to Blogmore back in May.

Some time over the past couple of days, my hosting provider, Reclaim Hosting, must have repopulated the directory with WordPress artefacts and my landing page had become a Setup Your New WordPress site page. I managed to remove those artefacts and used the hosting site dashboard (CPanel) to uninstall the whole WordPress app. So, hopefully, this should not happen again.

Back to the wiki

2026-07-09T14:23:51+02:00

Inspired by Charlie Holland's post HyWiki: Zero Markup Hypertext, I have decided to give HyWiki (part of Gnu Hyperbole) a go.

I'll report progress later!

Shout out to Phil Newton

2026-06-15T09:48:51+02:00

Prof Phil Newton is a Professor of neuroscience at Swansea University and a former colleague. He has just published three videos on YouTube and I thought I'd post this shout-out to honour that former connection and also to test YouTube embedding on BlogMore.

The first video is entitled Designing Effective Assessments in Higher Education. A pragmatic introductory guide

The other two videos are:

Phil's channel on YouTube is worth a look.

Blogmore now supports LaTeX math markup

2026-06-08T08:41:42+02:00

In a post published yesterday, Davep has announced that BlogMore v2.41.0 now supports mermaid diagrams and LaTeX mathematics typesetting.

I'm not sure if I'd use mermaid diagrams, but in my professional career as a University lecturer I used LaTeX extensively, and I think that I would occasionally find a use for it here.

Here is an example.

The solution of the quadratic equation

$$ ax^2 + bx + c = 0 $$

is given by the famous formula

x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}.

Typesetting uses either the katex or mathjax libraries. You choose the flavour in your configuration file.

with_maths: true
math_provider: katex|mathjax

I used katex for this example.

The libraries are only included on the pages that actually have LaTeX markup.

Publishing my BlogMore blog with rsync over ssh

2026-06-01T14:24:34+02:00

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.

Exploring Emacs' Markdown Mode

2026-06-01T13:32:27+02:00

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.

blog.cpjobling.net is now a static site

2026-05-31T12:51:15+02:00

After some fiddling about I have moth-balled the WordPress site that hosted blog.cpjobling.net and replaced it with a static site generated by blogmore.

There is a bit of work needed to add proper categories and tags to older posts, and some of the pages that relied on services (like Twitter) that I no longer use, won't work properly.

Hopefully the new version of Fresh and Crispy will start to get some more attention as I use it for note-taking alongside an ongoing project of learning emacs.

Blog More Fresh and Crispy with blogmore?

2026-04-17T22:44:00+00:00

It's been more than a year since I started to move my old WordPress blog to Hugo. Work stopped around August 2024, and I've just this week come back to it. However, I was getting frustrated by having to reclimb the steep learning curve the for Hugo and yesterday I discovered Dave Pearson's blogmore tool (https://blogmore.davep.dev) which seems much more straightforward. Blogmore is a tool, written in Python, that creates a static website, but without many of the complexities of Hugo and similar static website tools. It's designed to be simple and encourage blogging more.

I hope to relaunch Fresh and Crispy at blog.cpjobling.net and use blogmore to blog more!

I'm on Mastodon!

2024-08-13T23:21:00+01:00

I just joined Mastodon where you'll find me as @cpjobling@social.tchncs.de. I joined a German server in anticipation of my post retirement relocation to Germany.

Hello Bluesky

2024-08-13T09:38:13+01:00

I was a twitter use for many years and you'll find the archeological remains of my twitter use in the blog by the broken embedded tweets that remain.

After Elon Musk took over twitter, I decided to leave and I closed down my first account. I still have an archive at cpjobling.github.io/cpjobling-tweets. I had a skeleton presence for some time, but that closed too a few months ago.

Now, I've gone over to Bluesky (bsky.app) where I can be found as @cpjobling.bluesky.social. The recent support from Musk for the riots and against the prime minister, and worsening atmosphere as "free speech" turns toxic, is encouraging other long-time twitter users to make the move.

Perhaps my old friends will move over too. I look forward to seeing you.

📓 August 9, 2024

2024-08-09T13:46:31+01:00

🗓️ Today

Copied from Obsidian.

✅ Did

Hosted the Hugo-generated version of my blog on GitHub pages here: cpjobling.github.io/blog.cpjobling.net repo here: cpjobling/blog.cpjobling.net: Static website version of my blog (github.com)

📖 Reading

My Hugo setup and how this blog works by [[Taylor Jadin]].

Transitioning from Word Press to Hugo

2024-08-08T18:21:12+01:00

Introduction

In August 2024, I decided that I would attempt to move my old Fresh and Crispy WordPress blog to a new static website using the Hgo tool. This is a record of the process that I followed.

Installing Hugo

I installed Hugo by following the instructions given on the Quick Start.

This is the first page that I created using

hugo new content/posts/my-first-post.md

This is what the new blog site looks like after this first step

Export WordPress Site

I logged into my WordPress site for the first time since November 2020 and posted a quick post about my plans to transition to hugo.

I went to the dashboard and exported my old blog to an XML file.

Import to Hugo

There are a number of ways to migrate content from other sources to Hugo which you can follow up by reading Migrate to Hugo.

There seem to be two options available:

blog2md - Blog to Markdown
wp2hugo - WordPress to Hugo

After a quick read of the documentation for both tools, it seemed that wp2hugo would be good for the first attempt.

Building `wp2hugo`

I decided to build wp2hugo from source:

$ git clone git@github.com:ashishb/wp2hugo.git
$ cd wp2hugo/src/wp2hugo
$ make build_prod
# `./bin/wp2hugo` will contain the binary and you can use it as `$ ./bin/wp2hugo --source wordpress-export.xml --download-media`

I ran the application as

~/bin/wp2hugo --source wpblog.xml --download-media

but there were errors downloading the media which caused the program to bail. So, I tried ~/bin/wp2hugo --source wpblog.xml instead.

I got the text of my posts out of WP this way, but would need to manually go through my posts on WP to rescue what images I could.

Tomorrow, I will try blog2md to see if that's more error-tolerant.

Building `blog2md`

This is a node application. This is how I built it:

mkdir ~/code/src/github.com/palaniraja
cd $_
git clone https://github.com/palaniraja/blog2md.git
cd blog2md
npm install
npm audit fix --force # Needed to correct some warnings

Converting blog using `blog2md`

This seemed to work well! From the directory were I built blog2md, I ran:

node index.js w ~/Downloads/delete_me/freshandcrispy.WordPress.2024-08-08.xml out m paragraph-fix

and it seemed to work without issues!

$ ls out | wc
569     569   17725

Viewing the new blog

After conversion, all the markdown files appear in a flat directory. Each markdown file has meta data like:

---
title: 'Welcome to my new home'
date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 21:21:23 +0000
draft: false
tags: ['Uncategorised']
---

These files just needed to be copied over to content/posts in the Hugo site and served using

hugo server -D

On visiting the served site, there was one YAML error that I quickly corrected.

There were a number of files, e.g. social media links, that need to be taken out of the posts content. And I'll need to go through WordPress to reclaim images, etc.

I will start to tidy up tomorrow!

In the meantime, I checked the new content into version control!!

Some tuning

I arranged the posts into folders by year. This was a largely manual process in which I first identified the posts using grep:

grep -l "2024 " *.md > mv2024

I then edited the file mv2024 to prepend mv to each line and add 2024. The result is a file

mkdir 2024
mv .... 2024
mv .... 2024
:

This can then be excuted using

sh mv2004

I am sure that this could be done more cleverly, but it was a one time operation.

Setting up `.gitignore`

The public folder is regenerated whenever the site is previewed and you get a lot of false versions if public is commited to version control. I edited .gitignore to ignore public.

Thinking of transitioning to Hugo

2024-08-08T17:12:19+00:00

Hugo is a static web generator written in Go. I’m thinking of exporting this WordPress site to Hugo so that all the posts, pages and assets are text, easily version controlled and ready for writing as I transition from academia to private life.

I’ll keep notes on the process and post them in the new Hugo site.

My Own 25 Years Of Ed Tech

2020-11-07T14:00:00+00:00

Yesterday, I received my copy of Martin Weller's book 25 Years of Ed Tech. Inspired by Chapter 2 The Web (1995), I travelled back in time to my own first attempt to teach online. I visited the Way Back Machine (web.archive.org) to discover that the first official University website (www.swan.ac.uk) was archived on 11th December 1997.

Navigating through that web site, I discovered that the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering website (which I built) was archived a few months earlier. I also rediscovered that I had published a potted history of the Electronic and Electrical Engineering web site on this blog.

In the spirit of celebrating my own 35-year career in teaching, I looked back at my own first attempt at e-learning. And here is my web site for EE208: Control Systems, circa May 1997.

Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Swansea University, May 1997. Captured from the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine on 7th November 2020.

The course notes were created using LaTex2HTML, but unfortunately, the images and the mathematics, which was presented using images, have rotted in the archive. Today I use Markdown for my lecture notes, and MathJax for math generation, but the technology that delivers my content to students is still web-based.

So for me, like most ed-tech folks, the key technology in my teaching career has been the World Wide Web. The difference now, for most of us, is that we don't need to know that!

Notes on SALT Conference 2020

2020-07-09T09:00:00+00:00

Yesterday was the 12th Annual conference of the Swansea Academy of Learning and Teaching (SALT) which, due to circumstances, had to be held on line. I attended but didn't present but as usual I came away with a head full of ideas and links to follow up on.

https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/1280789564794208256

The highlights for me were the session on formative feedback by Monika Seisenberger and Teaching Award winner Liam O'Brien from Computer Science; the Coffee Lounge where I met up with folks for the first time since March; the talk on aligning our Canvas tools to the future of assessment with Instructure's Jonathan Perry (beamed live from Britains most boring town and Birthplace of Margaret Thatcher Grantham, Lincs.) ; and the panel on the values and assumptions of assessment and feedback chaired by Swansea University's Dean of Assessment Jo Berry.

My unordered notes, thoughts and links shared by the participants are recorded in my Journal.

From my inbox

2020-05-29T13:00:00+00:00

News of several useful Advance HE guides arrived in my email inbox today curtesy of Stuart Norton of the Learning and Teaching Network of Advance HE Connect.

The New Day to Day ...

2020-05-19T09:00:16+00:00

Inspired by Brian Mathers here's a little sketch I made about my daily reality. I seem to spend my entire day on (or is it in?) Zoom -- meetings, working groups, office hours , examples classes and even social events. Meanwhile my grey beard grows and I turn into a caricature of a mad professor.

What's your day-to-day like?

This was the rest of my day Journal, 19th May 2020.

Journal Entry - Tuesday, 28th April 2020

2020-04-28T22:59:00+00:00

Day 36 of the first 2020 Covid-19 Lockdown

I'm a bit envious of the Covid-19 journals of my friends and colleagues Chrissi Nerantzi and Sheila MacNeill so today I thought I'd try an experiment and post my Crispy Journal entry for 28th April 2020 here in my blog. There was a bit of formatting to do to convert TiddlyWiki markup to WordPress blocks which would go away if I used MarkDown in both places. I think it might be better going forward to just link to the Journal page and post some highlights and a reflection. But, hey, what is a Covid-19 lockdown if it isn't a chance to experiment.

My Tweets

https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/1255030119820931072

https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/1255030116624850950

Did

Some Extenuating Circumstance reviews
Some Alternative Assessment Moderation and Sign Off
Zoom office hours for EG-247
Zoom consultancy for EGLM03 - some tricky problems which led to a break through at around 11:00 pm:

https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/1255260283616010241

Attended

Webinar from Leeds Becket University (platform Panopto): A Practical Guide to Developing Online Learning Material with David Spark.

Catch-up Webinars

Webinar from ~AdvanceHE (platform Zoom): Beyond fire-fighting – developing resilient higher education.
Webinar from Lancaster University (platform Teams): Getting the Most out of Teams and Office 365 with Ben Gill.

Thought for the day

2020-04-02T08:32:08+00:00

In this time when personal contact with our students is so important I have to comment:

https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/1245441295314833411

Fresh and Crispy

Gotta make progress with emacs

Temporary Outage Fixed

Back to the wiki

Shout out to Phil Newton

Blogmore now supports LaTeX math markup

Publishing my BlogMore blog with rsync over ssh

Exploring Emacs' Markdown Mode

Blogmore commands discovered

Blogmore documentation

Markdown mode commands discovered

Markdown-mode documentation

Fixing the M-3 issue on a Mac

blog.cpjobling.net is now a static site

Blog More Fresh and Crispy with blogmore?

I'm on Mastodon!

Hello Bluesky

📓 August 9, 2024

🗓️ Today

✅ Did

📖 Reading

Transitioning from Word Press to Hugo

Introduction

Installing Hugo

Export WordPress Site

Import to Hugo

Building wp2hugo

Building blog2md

Converting blog using blog2md

Viewing the new blog

Some tuning

Setting up .gitignore

Thinking of transitioning to Hugo

My Own 25 Years Of Ed Tech

Notes on SALT Conference 2020

From my inbox

The New Day to Day ...

Journal Entry - Tuesday, 28th April 2020

My Tweets

Did

Attended

Catch-up Webinars

Thought for the day

Fixing the `M-3` issue on a Mac

Building `wp2hugo`

Building `blog2md`

Converting blog using `blog2md`

Setting up `.gitignore`