Will it work? It’s a bold experiment

January 24, 2024 Reply by email

Here’s the function I just wrote for creating new Journal entries in Blot:

;; Create Blot Journal post
(defun jab/blot-new-journal ()
  "Create and visit a new draft journal post in Blot"
  (interactive)
  (let* ((default-directory (concat "~/Dropbox/Apps/Blot/[Journal]/"
                                    (format-time-string "%Y/%m-%B/")))
         (fpath (concat default-directory (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d-") "journal.md")))
    ;; If folder doesn't exist, create it
    (make-directory default-directory)

    ;; I use YAML metadata in Blot, even though it's not required.
    (write-region (concat
                   "---"
                   "\ntitle: '" (format-time-string "%A, %B %d, %Y") "'"
                   "\ndate: " (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z")
                   "\ntags: [\"\"]"
                   "\nsummary: "
                   "\ndraft: Yes"
                   "\n---\n\n"
           "# " (format-time-string "%A, %B %d, %Y"))
                  nil (expand-file-name fpath) nil nil nil t)
    (find-file (expand-file-name fpath))))

I could tidy and DRY that up, but it works.

October 4, 2023 Blot Emacs Reply by email

I wrote a lisp function for creating Journal entries in Blot. You know, just in case.

The thing about using Tinderbox as my daily notes blog is that each entry becomes its own post. With other tools, each entry is just another paragraph for the day’s note. Everything is in one bucket…one RSS entry. If I publish early in the day, only part of that day’s notes are included in the feed. I don’t love this.

Oh cool, toilet has been leaking.

Leaky toilet fallout

October 4, 2023 Journal Reply by email

Thinking about what it was like to do daily notes in Blot. Now I don’t remember why I stopped, but I’m sure it’ll come back to me.

October 3, 2023 Journal Reply by email

According to the latest Blot.im newsletter, Blot now supports Org-mode files. I haven’t found much documentation, but my one .org test file is not rendering. (This post is written in Markdown). I’ll keep digging.

October 3, 2023 Blot Org-mode Reply by email

I see in Blot’s release notes they it now supports .org files. If this is italic then huzzah! Otherwise, maybe later.

October 3, 2023 Reply by email

Some of the older posts in this Blot blog were rendering as empty documents. I figured it was some sort of Dropbox issue, so I rebuilt the index in Maestral and suddenly there were 287 conflicted copies, each right next to the original zero-byte files. This took me about an hour to fix, but that’s not a situation I want to be in again.

I’m feeling a little gun-shy here.

September 29, 2023 Blot Reply by email

I just noticed that my emacs function for creating Blot posts included a “slug” element in the front matter. Slug is not an officially supported item, and doesn’t work like one would expect. I have links configured as YYYY/slug so I would expect this post to end up at /2023/blot-permalinks, but if I put slug: blot-permalinks in the front matter, the URL ends up as just /blog-permalinks (no year).

I normally add slugs to front matter so that if I change the post title later, old links will still work. While I could add a “Link:” front matter element that includes the year, I think I’ll just leave it out and let Blot handle things.

September 29, 2023 Blot Blogging Reply by email

You see, thing is, when I’m using Emacs for so much of my life already, it makes sense to also use it for creating quick blog posts in Blot. This post, for example, took maybe a minute, start to finish, and I never had to leave Emacs.

September 28, 2023 Blogging Emacs Reply by email

I’ve decided I don’t get $110/year of value from SmugMug so I’ve canceled my subscription. Instead, I’ll be investing my time in jAlbum and publishing static galleries to photos.baty.net. I’ve owned a copy of jAlbum for years but never really dug in. Now I’ll dig in.

September 28, 2023 Photography Software Reply by email