Elsa Gonsiorowski

RSS Feeds by Email

gonsie@me.com (Elsa Gonsiorowski) — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

While RSS is great, it’s not easy to explain to those who haven’t heard of it before. Plus, it’s hard to get someone started on using RSS since it requires a separate application. TwoBitHistory has an great post on the history of RSS that covers it’s fall from grace.

Without RSS, keeping up-to-date on your favorite websites from the independent web becomes a bit more difficult. Most sites now feature a newsletter and email is a great alternative to RSS. Julia Evans describes the MailChimp process to turn an RSS feed into a weekly digest.

I’ve decided to use something even simpler: the RSSby.email service. RSSby.email provides a daily email with posts from this (or any) RSS feed. It is entirely managed by the subscriber via email (see the website for details on how to subscribe and various preferences you can set).

To facilitate the subscription process, I added an HTML mailto link to create the subscribe email for this site:

<a href="mailto:add@rssby.email?subject=subscribe&body=https://www.gonsie.com/blorg/feed.xml"><img src="/images/rss-email.png" id="rss"></a>

RSSby.email will automatically unsubscribe any websites that are not updated within 90 days… which should inspire me to post with some frequency.

Developing ox-jekyll

gonsie@me.com (Elsa Gonsiorowski) — Sat, 12 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous post, I surveyed existing org and jekyll integration workflows. This survey found two common approaches, one that is Jekyll-centric and one that uses Org-publish (Emacs-centric). Unfortunately, neither fit with my workflow and I decided to develop my own Org exporter.

I finally have some functioning code, so I figured I should share details about the project and the development process. You can find the project on GitHub.

Starting Point

In my survey I found some useful resources:

The Worg Documentation on Org Export Engine;
An existing ox-jekyll in org-octopress.

Great artists steal.

I want everything that org-octopress is doing with it’s jekyll exporter, I just want it built on markdown instead of HTML.

So, I’ve copied ox-jekyll.el and replaced “html” with “md”. After fixing a few function names, it works!

Most importantly, the front matter is in the right spot (with and without a table of contents). The next step is to make this work with the particulars of my publishing workflow.

My Publishing Workflow Details

There are a number of things I want my exporter to accomplish. Many of which are particular to my workflow.

I use a single org file per post.
Upon export, the date (YYYY-MM-DD) should get added to the file name.
Subtree level matches export heading level (this is just how I design my site’s CSS)
Code snippets should be easy to export with appropriate syntax. This is where many markdown converters differ, but jekyll currently wraps code blocks with { % highlight LANG %} / { % endhighlight %}. [Ignore the extra space before the %]
Jekyll front matter should be added above org-inserted table of contents. The manual HTML source block is just hideous.
It should be easy to move the generated file to a separate location (I think this addressed in the org-publish workflow).
Org-y way to add tags to the post.
Safe export of title (colon character mucks things up for Jekyll).
Fix up links and export connected images. This one is really a nice to have, not necessary.
TOC should be an ordered list (with the option to make it unordered) WTF is the HTML exporter doing making it an unordered list with numbers in the text.

Many of these are solved with code from org-octopress, particularly the yaml front matter.

Implementing Features

Here are some notes on my implementation.

Thinking about the Table of Contents

I had been including a table of contents at the top of each of my posts. I didn’t actually label it with “table of contents” and I prefer an un-numbered list. This seems to be very contrary to what the org-exporter likes to do. It pretty much does not allow for any fine-grained control of how the table of contents appears.

While I was able to get the code to do what I wanted, it ended up being way too much of a hack. In the end, I’ve decided that I don’t want a table of contents at all. Really, it will be up to the markdown / jekyll / liquid parser to create a TOC if necessary. This makes it easy to apply separate HTML styles to the TOC (to put it in a sidebar or something).

Preserving the Headline Level

I would like :headline-offset (as described here) to work on a file level. This allows me to make sure the contents of my post match up the CSS on the web site (the content’s final destination). This is definitely a more markdown-y way to do things rather than the org way.

Unfortunately, the :headline-offset option is only supported per subtree. I can hack it with a simple function that adds an “offset by 0” property to each subtree:

(defun org-jekyll-headline-offset (headline contents info)
  "proper headline offset"
  (let* ((info (plist-put info :headline-offset 0)))
    (org-md-headline headline contents info)))

I add it to the derived backend :translate-alist like so:

(org-export-define-derived-backend 'jekyll 'md
  ;; ...
  :translate-alist
  '((headline . org-jekyll-headline-offset)
  ;; ...

Now, this function is called each time a headline is translated by the export engine and my headline level is directly translated to markdown.

Setting the Date

I have a strange workflow where I want the #+DATE: tag to be the day I started working on a post and the date in the filename to be the day I hit publish. For my exporter, I can use the option date: to trigger this behavior. The date: option takes precedence over the variable org-export-with-date.

While I would like my code to support putting the #+DATE: property into the filename, this seems impossible with the export engine. The date property is stored in the info plist which I don’t have access to at file naming time.

Instead, I’ve implemented this functionality:

The date: option controls if the value of the #+DATE property is put into the Jekyll front matter.
I’ve added a new option to the exporter: org-jekyll-use-today-date. If t, the exporter will prepend the filename with today’s date.

Results

I’m quite happy with my exporter, I even used it to export this post! I still need to figure out how to use the org-publish workflow, but for now I can successfully export my blog posts.

As with most of my projects, you can find it on GitHub. Please feel free to file an issue and share any feed back you have.

Blog Roll

gonsie@me.com (Elsa Gonsiorowski) — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

There has been a lot of talk about blogs in my sphere recently. First, Digg Reader was shut down and I was forced to transition the 40+ blogs that I follow to a new service. Around the same time Jason Kottke (of kottke.org) asked his sustaining members about their favorite blogs. He recently posted the results and included my response (link here so I can treasure this moment)!!

Let me take some more time to list of some of my favorite blogs.

Best of All time

Obviously, Jason Kottke is the best. I have been following him for probably 15 years and I enjoy his blog so much that I am a sustaining member. His blog covers the best of the internet and talks about life, technology, design, and the intersection of it all.

If you have ever been and Apple fan (and are old enough to remember when they actually were the underdogs), then you should already know about Daring Fireball. John Gruber is a prolific blogger and well know for insightful commentary on the Apple news of the day. Also, he invented Markdown. The term ‘fireballed’ refers to a website that is essentially DDOS’d when DF shares a link to it.

The Swiss-Miss blog by Tina Roth Eisenberg is another favorite. It is focused around design and creative work. She shares a ton of inspirational videos and cool products that I wish I could buy.

The last in this category is the Signal-v-Noise blog by 37signals. This is the group that develops Basecamp. They are a 100% remote company and a huge inspiration for working in tech and loving your job.

Niche Favorites

Sacha Chua is an amazing blogger. Her style of writing is stream-of-thought, but she goes straight for the deep thoughts about how to improve her (and her family’s) life. She is a prolific contributor the Emacs community and includes a weekly roundup of Emacs news.

Autostraddle is a website for the LGBTQ community. This blog includes a ton of helpful resources for allies and helps me understand the community and important issues better.

The Stone Soup is the only blog on food that I follow. Jules teaches you how to cook with the ingredients you have, so that you understand how to assemble a meal rather than just follow a recipe. Plus, everything I have ever made from her is delicious.

My favorite tech-life blogger is Cate. Her style is incredibly intimate and real; I connect with so much that she writes about. My favorite project of hers are the love letters from airports (with the Technically Speaking newsletter as a close second).

A Few More

Penelope Trunk covers career management. Kate Murphy, Natasha the Robot, Julia Evans (also featured by Kottke), Beth Andres-Beck, Domesticated Engineer, and Kate Heddleston all blog about working in technology (software). And the Fancy Beans blog has left the tech industry behind and is FIRE. The Programming is Terrible blog has one of my favorite posts of all time: Write code that easy to delete.

The Kid Should See This: links to great youtube videos. Tools and Toys links to some interesting products and includes interesting links in their Friday roundup. On the more reflective side of things, zenhabits is quite popular and PatrickRhone is very personal. Irreal is an Emacs blog which posts daily, usually short snippets about Emacs or what is going on the community. The Loop and Pixel Envy are good tech and Apple blogs (see also Matt Gemmell, Derek Sivers, Dustin Curtis).

RSS App

The final piece of the puzzle is actually reading the feeds. In the very early days I would manually click on bookmarks (that was well before the iPhone). Then, I was a huge fan of Safari’s built in RSS reader. When that shut down I moved to Digg. I loved Digg reader since it synced across both an iPhone app and a website.

Currently, I’m using Inoreader. They just released a major update to the iOS app and I am really liking the new design.

While I do like the built-in ability to bookmark or save an article for later, that really backfires when the service shut down. I had about 400 saved articles in Digg, of which 300 or so made it to my pinboard.in account.