The problem is that every time I create a new blog tool, I think that it's going to be the one platform I can integrate everything into - calories, lights, what's been playing on Spotify, what I've bought from Amazon, all the things - and that turns out to be hard (because getting the data is tricky, integrating it is tricky, and the privacy issues are tricky) so I stop bothering with the blog.

Either that, or something happens to the code and I can't get the entries out of the database any more.

At least this time the entries are stored as plain text files. I also like not needing to add a title. Thanks micro.blog/indiweb, you've got good ideas.

I do still want the "edit the site from the site" experience. I very much miss the site I had when I was doing BT support which was exactly (and really only) that - a textarea with three code for the page inside. (Written in Perl, I think).

Editing through (something like) GitLab IDE is not the same thing. Ignoring that it needs a whole other service (I could self host), it's the commit-build-deploy pattern that's wrong. I want to click "save" and see my changes when the page loads.

Trick is, these days, to pick a language where that works well.

Blog improvement ideas

Or A TODO List

  • Parse entries as markdown. Probably should do that at save time and cache the HTML (as well as the original file). Question: How far should I take it? Other than the header (which changes depending in login status), the site is basically static, so could be rendered at entry save time (and just do two, one for auth'd and one not).

  • Client side markdown preview

  • Spell check

  • Sort options. Allow users to have oldest top or newest top. Which leads into...

  • User options. Stash some stuff client side (sort order, last read). Could do that all with JS and local storage.

  • File upload, for images. Level two is basic image editing - at least crop, resize, rotate. (This is the "Image editor as language/stack of operations" idea again)

  • Maybe that microblog protocol. Not sure, can't decide if that's just a gimmick

  • Editing posts. Probably keep old versions, but then need to be able to view old versions (and can you wait an old version so the history is a tree?(

  • Link to (and show only) a specific post

  • Tags (maybe, and they must be optional).

  • Search. Level one is just match strings. Level 2 is stemming, stopwords, maybe that vector thing.

  • Syndication. (Cross post to Facebook/Twitter automatically)

  • Comments (maybe)

Don't know where to stash metadata for posts.

I can think of two top level options (in the same file as the post, or in a different file) and a couple of sub-options (same file with a metadata header/footer, same file json encoded).

I currently prefer same file with a header, but I'll need to play with the dotnet markdown parser before i commit.

(I need to play with the markdown parser anyway)

To remember your current position in the blog, this page must store some data in this browser.

Are you OK with that?