Fri 2 Oct 2026
In my last post I mentioned that I keep forgetting the syntax for adding images here, so this is a note on how to create an editor snippet with YASnippet for Emacs. Markdown mode has a shortcut for inserting images, but for Jekyll I use the Liquid relative_url filter which prepends the site’s baseurl to an image’s URL. Not needed now since my site is not at a subdomain, but if it were to change, the filepaths could stay the same. Some time ago when I tested this on localhost the images weren’t showing up, so I do it now as a precaution. (But maybe that wasn’t the issue then, as of course right now everything works when I leave the filter off). Either way, it’s a fun opportunity to learn about editor snippets.
When I want to share images, I write something like this in my markdown files:
Hard one to remember!
YASnippet
YASnippet is a template system for Emacs. It allows you to type an abbreviation and automatically expand it into function templates.
I’d learned about Emacs YASnippet a while back and I used it sporadically when I wrote out this site by hand, but it’s been a few months since then so I’m jotting down notes on how these snippets are created for future reference.
My snippets are saved at ~/.emacs.d/snippets/. There is a directory for each major mode with available snippets (YASnippet used to come bundled with pre-made snippets but apparently not anymore).
My init.el file has these lines:
(setq yas-snippet-dirs
'("~/.emacs.d/snippets"))
(yas-global-mode 1)
Creating a snippet
Snippets can be created with M-x yas-new-snippet or the keybind C-c & C-n (you gotta type the ampersand too).
I created this file:
~/.emacs.d/snippets/markdown-mode/+images+
The name of the file could be anything, so the + symbols around it are not necessary, but the new snippet wizard adds them in so I left it alone.
The YASnippet documentation is great, and at this point I also used this guide I found from Arjan van der Gaag. My needs were much simpler, but it’s nice to know YASnippet can execute Emacs Lisp code wrapped around backticks. In the future I might find an excuse to use this.
The full snippet looks like this:
# -*- mode: snippet -*-
# name: Insert image
# key: img
# --
$0
The comments at the top are metadata about the snippet. The main one here is the value for the key directive, which is the abbreviation you type before expanding the snippet by hitting TAB. Running M-x yas-expand does the same.
In the snippet body, each $1, $2 is a tab stop field. I labeled these fields with placeholder text enclosed within {} brackets as a hint of what to enter, but this is not necessary. The $0 tab stop is where the cursor ends after tabbing through each value.
In practice I type img and hit TAB and it looks like this:
That’s it! This post served as an excuse to practice adding images and even a GIF.
Unrelated, but I also spent some time adding code block syntax highlighting and tweaking some CSS, which is fun in and of itself. Now the word snippet is starting to look funny.
Thu 1 Oct 2026
Happy October! This week we had a couple of rainy days and even a brief thunderstorm… but now the city is back to clear, sunny skies and temperatures of (92°F / 33°C). I’m looking forward to cooler days and for the season to feel more like fall 🍂
I’ve been watching Vampire Diaries lately and it’s such a fun show I’m suprised I hadn’t come across it before! It’s so funny how much I’ve changed my mind on which characters I like and trying to guess the next plotlines. I saw this post online about how vampires become popular around recession times. Perhaps that’s true?
(Salon.com) - Beware the rise of vampire shows. It could mean a recession is looming.
I made some changes to powRSS too. The biggest one is the Editor’s Pick. Hello! I’m the editor. On this blog and elsewhere I’ve talked about how I think curating content is the way to go in terms of sharing more of the personal web. Voting mechanisms in our circles tend to skew heavily towards technology topics. A democratic web should be welcoming to newbies too, and too much talk of frameworks, servers, static site generators and the like ends up being overwhelming in the best of cases.
All this to say that because the number of blogs on powRSS is quite manageable, I end up reading most of the posts shared. Even when they are in other languages, which I’ve been enjoying a lot. So now some posts on powRSS will feature a golden star. Take those as my personal recommendation for you, the way I’d share a link with a friend when I come across something cool and interesting.
I’m also testing out a new feature called Mentions. This one is a way to track conversations across blogs, as well as links being shared to sites all around the web. I really enjoy those posts that start with “re:” which lead to fun conversations about whatever topic(s) we discuss across our personal sites. Mentions is a simple way to visualize those discussions.
For blogs on powRSS, they’ll show up as conversation threads, and for outbound links (e.g. GitHub and other silos) you’ll see a list of links very much like Blogdex used to display. I learned about it thanks to Richard MacManus and his post What the Internet Was Like in 2001 over at Cybercultural.
Cloudflare
I’m a little sad that some of the blogs using Cloudflare go unseen or have stopped working. Last month I mentioned that Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users. These past weeks I had a great discussion with WinnerWind about Cloudflare and he explained to me why powRSS couldn’t access his blog:
Turns out that Hetzner GMBH’s entire ASN is blacklisted by CF by default. The RayID you provided in the last e-mail turned out to be a huge help in that investigation.
If anyone ever e-mails you about it again, tell them that whitelisting by IP will not work here. I just wrote a catch-all rule to allow all RSS readers to view the site freely. Here’s the rule (to be placed under Security > Security Rules)
(http.user_agent contains "rss")
And the action must be “Skip” with all the WAF components ticked. Finally, the execution order must be First, otherwise Cloudflare’s security rules will take over and block your reader. Hope future folks have a smoother time!
I’m so grateful WinnerWind took the time to get this working. If you’ve noticed your blog has stopped updating on powRSS, consider letting RSS readers access it! I’m otherwise unfamiliar with Cloudflare but if I can help in any way I’m happy to do so.
Emacs for Managing this Blog
Lastly, I spent some time with Sublime Text but I inevitably keep coming back to Emacs. I’ve noticed that I’ve been writing more posts since I added a shortcut to generate the markdown files for new posts on Jekyll. That makes it easy to call M-x new-post and get writing. Next on my to-do list will be to come up with something for adding images to posts in Markdown format because it’s still pretty tedious (both to get them in the right folder and also to link them within a post). I also keep forgetting the syntax!!
Mon 21 Sep 2026
I read note taking: analog and digital from lucky instar so I thought it’d be fun to write about taking notes. The question is: How do you take notes on things?
Physical Notes
The answer is it depends on what I need the notes for! For personal interests like books it’s always a legal pad and a pen. Before that I used a small Moleskine notebook but it’s cumbersome to lay flat on my desk and write on the left-hand pages, so I switched to legal pads and that’s what I use now. When I was in school I also took notes by hand during class. I always told myself one day I’d transcribe them for studying but that never happened. For assigned readings it was always easier to print out the pages and write in the margins.
On the legal pads today I write down unfamiliar words or interesting phrases. For example, this spring I was interested in collecting descriptions of sunsets, mostly inspired by my evening walks in the city before it started getting too hot. I also like jotting down authors I want to come back to or references that I don’t understand so I can research them later when I’m at the computer and that way I don’t break away from reading mid-chapter.
I like bringing legal pads for client meetings too, as it’s very easy to sketch out diagrams and hand it over if they want to add notes or comments. Most of my meetings are one-on-one, so it’s a good way to create a collaborative space that can change as the conversation evolves.
Digital Notes
Every day for the past six years I’ve kept a digital journal too. In it I save good quotes or code snippets and even write guides for myself so I can repeat a process when I’m working on a project.
It started off as a series of plaintext notes that slowly evolved into a Jekyll site and now it’s a dedicated Org mode file for every year once I began using Emacs. This has been the method that’s worked best for me. I don’t use any features from Org mode, it’s just paragraph after paragraph with top-level headings for every day. I don’t have categories or folders or tags or anything like that because it becomes extra work to make sure things are filed correctly, so I rely on M-x occur to find whatever I’m looking for.
The one variable in this method is the font! This week I’ve been testing out Maple Mono after learning about it from Anh’s weeknotes. Sometimes I switch to Helvetica Neue if my eyes are tired but more often than not I enjoy drafting in a monospaced font because it gives me that sense of malleability.
I like how Nicolas phrased it at The Jolly Teapot:
A draft set in a monospaced font feels like it can be further edited and chewed on furthermore, like a raw material, like code. It feels like a work in progress.
To me a serif or sans-serif font indicates final draft. And I need a visual signal for writing being “done” otherwise I’d keep editing it…
Mon 21 Sep 2026
Kev Quirk, Do you use :visited on links?:
I’ve always made the :visited attribute for hyperlinks look the same as links that haven’t been visited, and it seems that it’s the default behaviour across the web.
I was getting ready to draft a response saying how I do… but it looks like I don’t! A few weeks ago I redesigned my blog to use the green sidebar as the main navigation point and on every new design I scrap my old CSS file and start a new one from scratch. And it looks like I missed the visited links color…
So now as I write this I’m thinking what color to make the visited links. I’m a big fan of the default purple value most web browsers use, but dark mode is where I have to really think about it. I’m not a dark mode user at all, I can’t focus at all and I even find dark modes claustrophobic. I’d rather adjust my ambient lighting if I’m going to continue working when it’s dark. But let’s add some color to the visited links on this blog.
Let’s C-x p f to jump to style.css. Ahh, now I remember why I didn’t add it! As I look at my stylesheet I notice I’m using a purple color for code blocks in dark mode, and I didn’t want those colors to clash.
A few tweaks… and there it is! Purple for visited links. Some links of course I want them to stay the same color even when visited (like the ones in the navigation bar) so I added some rules for them. And I updated the color of code blocks in dark mode too.
Mon 21 Sep 2026
ldstephens:
I often find a site I want to follow, only to discover that its RSS feed is hard to find. With RSS Lookup, you paste in the site’s URL and it searches for available feeds. There’s also a bookmarklet you can add to your bookmarks bar and use while you’re on a site.
This is a feature I use a lot! On Vivaldi this is a built-in feature and probably the one I miss the most since moving to Firefox, where I use this extension. I like that it finds multiple feeds on a site (e.g. one for posts, another for comments, one for each language, etc).
Fun fact: when I bought the powRSS domain, I used it for an RSS Lookup style app I had built! It was only after discovering Fred Rocha’s post about the small web that I repurposed the domain for what it is today.
