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.
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
is given by the famous formula
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.
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
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.
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-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.Both written by davep:
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 for Emacs by Jason Blevins.
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.
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!