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Organizing my visual book notes by topic

| blogging, 11ty

I want to start building up more thoughts as chunks and relating them more logically instead of just chronologically. I've been using categories to organize my posts into buckets, but within a category, it's still chronological. I also have a large outline that includes posts from 2017 to 2024. I'd like to break it up into smaller topic pages so that they're easier to link to, although it's a little more challenging to search.

Now that I have a nice gallery view for my visual book notes, I wanted to organize the book notes by topic. I made an async Eleventy paired shortcode called gallerylist that lets me turn a list of links into into thumbnails and links.

I also modified org-html-toc to not include the Table of Contents header and to tweak the HTML attributes assigned to it.

New table of contents code 
(defun my-org-html-toc (depth info &optional scope)
  "Build a table of contents.
DEPTH is an integer specifying the depth of the table.  INFO is
a plist used as a communication channel.  Optional argument SCOPE
is an element defining the scope of the table.  Return the table
of contents as a string, or nil if it is empty."
  (let ((toc-entries
   (mapcar (lambda (headline)
       (cons (org-html--format-toc-headline headline info)
       (org-export-get-relative-level headline info)))
     (org-export-collect-headlines info depth scope))))
    (when toc-entries
      (let* ((toc-id-counter (plist-get info :org-html--toc-counter))
             (toc (concat (format "<div class=\"text-table-of-contents toc-id%s\" role=\"doc-toc\">"
                                  (if toc-id-counter (format "-%d" toc-id-counter) ""))
        (org-html--toc-text toc-entries)
        "</div>\n")))
        (plist-put info :org-html--toc-counter (1+ (or toc-id-counter 0)))
  (if scope toc
    (let ((outer-tag (if (org-html--html5-fancy-p info)
             "nav"
           "div")))
      (concat (format "<%s class=\"table-of-contents toc-id%s\" role=\"doc-toc\">\n"
                            outer-tag
                            (if toc-id-counter (format "-%d" toc-id-counter) ""))
              ;; (let ((top-level (plist-get info :html-toplevel-hlevel)))
              ;; (format "<h%d>%s</h%d>\n"
              ;;   top-level
              ;;   (org-html--translate "Table of Contents" info)
              ;;   top-level))
        toc
        (format "</%s>\n" outer-tag))))))))

(with-eval-after-load 'org
  (defalias 'org-html-toc #'my-org-html-toc))

This is what my visual book notes topic page looks like now:

2024-10-25_09-23-26.png
Figure 1: Screenshot of visual book notes

I can improve on this by using the topic maps to determine next/previous links for the posts. Someday!

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Added a gallery and slideshow view for my visual book notes

| 11ty, blogging

I customized my visual book notes - all view to show the thumbnails of the images, and I added You can get to it by going to the visual-book-notes category from a post and then choosing "All". I like the new "View slideshow" and "Shuffle slideshow" buttons I added.

2024-10-23_14-09-26.png
Figure 1: Screenshot of my visual book notes gallery

I also fixed some of the broken images in older posts, so there should be 43 posts with images now.

Someday I want to add a way to go from the sketch in the slideshow to the post, but it might require upgrading the version of Photoswipe I have. I'm currently on 4.x, which hasn't been updated in years.

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Adding an XSL stylesheet for my RSS and Atom feeds

| 11ty, geek, blogging

Inspired by the styling on Susam's blog feed, I followed this tutorial on using XML stylesheets and added XSL stylesheets for my RSS and Atom feeds. I have RSS and Atom feeds for all my posts as well as for each category or tag (ex: emacs).

2024-01-13_19-06-02.png
Figure 1: RSS feed after styling

To make that happen, I added a line like this to my RSS template: 

<?xml-stylesheet href="/assets/rss.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>

and for my Atom template: 

<?xml-stylesheet href="/assets/atom.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>

and those refer to:

rss.xsl 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="3.0"
                xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
                xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"        xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <xsl:output method="html" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
  <xsl:template match="/">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
    <head>
      <title>
        RSS Feed | <xsl:value-of select="/rss/channel/title"/>
      </title>
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/style.css"/>
    </head>
    <body>
      <h1 style="margin-bottom:0">Recent posts: <xsl:value-of select="/rss/channel/title"/></h1>
      <p>
        This is an RSS feed. You can subscribe to <a href=" {/rss/channel/link}"><xsl:value-of select="/rss/channel/link"/></a> in a feed reader such as <a href="https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed">Elfeed</a> for Emacs, <a href="https://www.inoreader.com/">Inoreader</a>, or <a href="https://newsblur.com/">NewsBlur</a>, or you can use tools like <a href="https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email">rss2email</a>. The feed includes the full blog posts.
You can also view the posts on the website at
<a href="{/rss/channel/atom:link[contains(@rel,'alternate')]/@href}"><xsl:value-of select="/rss/channel/atom:link[contains(@rel,'alternate')]/@href" /></a> .
      </p>
      <xsl:for-each select="/rss/channel/item">
        <div style="margin-bottom:20px">
        <div>
          <xsl:value-of select="pubDate" />
        </div>
        <div>
          <a>
            <xsl:attribute name="href">
              <xsl:value-of select="link/@href"/>
            </xsl:attribute>
            <xsl:value-of select="title"/>
          </a></div></div>
      </xsl:for-each>
    </body>
    </html>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
atom.xsl 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="3.0"
                xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
                xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <xsl:output method="html" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
  <xsl:template match="/">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
    <head>
      <title>
        Atom Feed | <xsl:value-of select="/atom:feed/atom:title"/>
      </title>
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/style.css"/>
    </head>
    <body>
      <h1 style="margin-bottom:0">Recent posts: <xsl:value-of select="/atom:feed/atom:title"/></h1>
      <p>
        This is an Atom feed. You can subscribe to <a href=" {/atom:feed/atom:link/@href}"><xsl:value-of select="/atom:feed/atom:link/@href"/></a> in a feed reader such as <a href="https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed">Elfeed</a> for Emacs, <a href="https://www.inoreader.com/">Inoreader</a>, or <a href="https://newsblur.com/">NewsBlur</a>, or you can use tools like <a href="https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email">rss2email</a>. The feed includes the full blog posts.
You can also view the posts on the website at
<a href="{/atom:feed/atom:link[contains(@rel,'alternate')]/@href}"><xsl:value-of select="/atom:feed/atom:link[contains(@rel,'alternate')]/@href" /></a> .
      </p>
      <xsl:for-each select="/atom:feed/atom:entry">
        <div style="margin-bottom:20px">
          <div>
          <xsl:value-of select="substring(atom:updated, 0, 11)" /></div>
          <div><a>
            <xsl:attribute name="href">
              <xsl:value-of select="atom:link/@href"/>
            </xsl:attribute>
            <xsl:value-of select="atom:title"/>
          </a></div></div>
      </xsl:for-each>
    </body>
    </html>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
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Fixing my old ambiguous sketch references

| blogging, 11ty, emacs

At some point during the conversion of my blog from Wordpress to 11ty, I wanted to change my sketch links to use a custom shortcode instead of referring to the sketch in my old wp-uploads directory. Because Wordpress changed the filenames a little, I used the ID at the start of the filename. I forgot that many of my filenames from 2013 to 2015 just had the date without a uniquely identifying letter or number suffix, so many old references were ambiguous and my static site generator just linked to the first matching file. When I was listening to my old monthly reviews as part of my upcoming 10-year review, I noticed the repeated links. So I wrote these functions to help me find and replace markup of the form sketchLink "2013-10-06" with sketchLink "2013-10-06 Daily drawing - thinking on paper #drawing", replacing references to the same date with the next sketch in the list. I figured that would be enough to get the basic use case sorted out (usually a list of sketches in my monthly/weekly reviews), taking advantage of the my-list-sketches function I defined in my Emacs config. 

(defun my-replace-duplicate-sketch-list-references ()
  (interactive)
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (let (seen)
    (while (re-search-forward "sketchLink \\\"\\([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]\\)\\\""
                              nil t)
      (if (assoc (match-string 1) seen)
          (setcdr (assoc (match-string 1) seen) (1+ (assoc-default (match-string 1) seen)))
        (setq seen (cons (cons (match-string 1) 1) seen))))
    (mapc (lambda (entry)
            (goto-char (point-min))
            (mapc (lambda (sketch)
                    (if (re-search-forward (format "sketchLink \\\"\\(%s\\)\\\""
                                                   (regexp-quote (car entry))) nil t)
                        (replace-match (save-match-data (file-name-sans-extension sketch))
                                       nil t nil 1)
                      (message "Skipping %s possible ref to %s"
                               (buffer-file-name)
                               sketch)))
                  (my-list-sketches (concat "^" (regexp-quote (car entry))) nil '("~/sync/sketches"))))
          seen)))

Sometimes I needed to delete the whole list and start again: 

(defun my-insert-sketch-list-between (start-date end-date)
  (insert
   (mapconcat
    (lambda (f)
      (format "<li>%s sketchLink \"%s\" %s</li>\n"
              (concat "{" "%")  ; avoid confusing 11ty when I export this
              (file-name-sans-extension f)
              (concat "%" "}")))
    (sort (seq-filter
           (lambda (f) (and (string< f end-date) (not (string< f start-date))))
           (my-list-sketches nil nil '("~/sync/sketches")))
          'string<)
    "")))

I used find-grep-dired to search for sketchLink \"[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]\" and then I just used a keyboard macro to process each file.

Anyway, really old monthly reviews like this one for October 2013 should mostly make sense again. I could probably pull out the correct references from the Wordpress database backup, but what I've got is probably okay. I would probably have gotten much grumpier trying to do this without Emacs Lisp. Yay Emacs!

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Moving my Org post subtree to the 11ty directory

| 11ty, org, emacs, blogging

I sometimes want to move the Org source for my blog posts to the same directory as the 11ty-exported HTML. This should make it easier to update and reexport blog posts in the future. The following code copies or moves the subtree to the 11ty export directory. 

(defun my-org-11ty-copy-subtree (&optional do-cut)
  "Copy the subtree for the current post to the 11ty export directory.
With prefix arg, move the subtree."
  (interactive (list current-prefix-arg))
  (let* ((file-properties
          (org-element-map
              (org-element-parse-buffer)
              'keyword
            (lambda (el)
              (when (string-match "ELEVENTY" (org-element-property :key el))
                (list
                 (org-element-property :key el)
                 (org-element-property :value el)
                 (buffer-substring-no-properties
                  (org-element-property :begin el)
                  (org-element-property :end el)))))))
         (entry-properties (org-entry-properties))
         (filename (expand-file-name
                    "index.org"
                    (expand-file-name
                     (assoc-default "EXPORT_ELEVENTY_FILE_NAME" entry-properties)
                     (car (assoc-default "ELEVENTY_BASE_DIR" file-properties))))))
    (unless (file-directory-p (file-name-directory filename))
      (make-directory (file-name-directory filename) t))
    ;; find the heading that sets the current EXPORT_ELEVENTY_FILE_NAME
    (goto-char
     (org-find-property "EXPORT_ELEVENTY_FILE_NAME" (org-entry-get-with-inheritance "EXPORT_ELEVENTY_FILE_NAME")))
    (org-copy-subtree 1 (if do-cut 'cut))
    (with-temp-file filename
      (org-mode)
      (insert (or
               (mapconcat (lambda (file-prop) (elt file-prop 2))
                          file-properties
                          "")
               "")
              "\n")
      (org-yank))
    (find-file filename)
    (goto-char (point-min))))

Then this adds a link to it: 

(defun my-org-export-filter-body-add-index-link (string backend info)
  (if (and
       (member backend '(11ty html))
       (plist-get info :file-name)
       (plist-get info :base-dir)
       (file-exists-p (expand-file-name
                       "index.org"
                       (expand-file-name
                        (plist-get info :file-name)
                        (plist-get info :base-dir)))))
      (concat string
              (format "<div><a href=\"%sindex.org\">View org source for this post</a></div>"
                      (plist-get info :permalink)))
    string))

(with-eval-after-load 'ox
  (add-to-list 'org-export-filter-body-functions #'my-org-export-filter-body-add-index-link))

Then I want to wrap the whole thing up in an export function: 

(defun my-org-11ty-export (&optional async subtreep visible-only body-only ext-plist)
  (let* ((info (org-11ty--get-info subtreep visible-only))
         (file (org-11ty--base-file-name subtreep visible-only)))
    (unless (string= (plist-get info :input-file)
                     (expand-file-name
                      "index.org"
                      (expand-file-name
                       (plist-get info :file-name)
                       (plist-get info :base-dir))))
      (save-window-excursion
        (my-org-11ty-copy-subtree)))
    (org-11ty-export-to-11tydata-and-html async subtreep visible-only body-only ext-plist)
    (my-org-11ty-find-file)))

Now to figure out how to override the export menu. Totally messy hack! 

(with-eval-after-load 'ox-11ty
  (map-put (caddr (org-export-backend-menu (org-export-get-backend '11ty)))
           ?o (list "To Org, 11tydata.json, HTML" 'my-org-11ty-export)))
View org source for this post
This is part of my Emacs configuration.
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Compiling selected blog posts into HTML and EPUB so I can annotate them

| blogging, 11ty, nodejs, supernote

[2023-01-04 Wed] Added a screenshot showing annotation.

I was thinking about how to prepare for my next 10-year review, since I'll turn 40 this year. I've been writing yearly reviews with some regularity and monthly reviews sporadically, and I figured it would be nice to have those posts in an EPUB so that I can read them on my e-reader and annotate them as I do my review.

I use the 11ty static site generator to publish my blog as HTML files, since I currently can't keep more than Emacs Lisp, Javascript, and Python in my brain. (No Hugo or Jekyll for me at the moment.) I briefly thought about getting 11ty to create that archive for me, but I realized it might be easier to just write it as an external script instead of trying to figure out how to get 11ty to export one thing conditionally.

One of the things I've configured 11ty to make is a JSON file that includes all of my posts with dates, titles, permalinks, and categories. It was easy to then parse this list and filter it to get the posts I wanted. I parsed the HTML out of the _site directory that 11ty produces instead of fetching the pages from my webserver. I got the images from my webserver, though, and I made a local cache and rewrote the URLs. That way, the EPUB conversion could include the images.

Download blog.js

blog.js 
const blog = require('/home/sacha/proj/static-blog/_site/blog/all/index.json');
const cheerio = require('cheerio');
const base = '/home/sacha/proj/static-blog/_site';
const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');

function slugify(p) {
  return p.permalink.replace('/blog', 'post-').replace(/\//g, '-');
}

async function processPost(p) {
  console.log('Processing '+ p.permalink);
  let $ = cheerio.load(fs.readFileSync(base + p.permalink + 'index.html'));
  $('#comment').remove();
  let images = $('article img');
  await Promise.all(images.map((i, e) => {
    let url = $(e).attr('src');
    const outputFileName = 'images/' + path.basename(url).replace(/ |%20|%23/g, '-');
    $(e).attr('src', outputFileName);
    $(e).attr('style', 'max-height: 100%; max-width: 100%; ' + ($(e).attr('style') || ''));
    $(e).attr('srcset', null);
    $(e).attr('sizes', null);
    $(e).attr('width', null);
    $(e).attr('height', null);
    if (!fs.existsSync(outputFileName)) {
      console.log('fetch', outputFileName);
      return fetch(url).then(res => res.arrayBuffer()).then(data => {
        const buffer = Buffer.from(data);
        return fs.createWriteStream(outputFileName).write(buffer);
      });
    } else {
      console.log(outputFileName, 'exists');
      return null;
    }
  }));
  console.log('Done ' + p.permalink);
  let slug = slugify(p);
  $('article h2').attr('id', slug);
  let header = $('article header').html();
  let entry = $('article .entry').html();
  return `<article>${header}${entry}</article>`;
}

let last10 = blog.filter((p) => p.date >= '2013-08-01');
let posts = last10.filter((p) => p.categories.indexOf('yearly') >= 0)
    .concat(blog.filter((p) => p.title == 'Turning 30: A review of the last decade'))
    .concat(last10.filter((p) => p.categories.indexOf('monthly') >= 0));

let toc = '<h1>Table of Contents</h1><ul>' + posts.map((p) => {
  return `<li><a href="#${slugify(p)}">${p.title}</a></li>\n`;
}).join('') + '</ul>';

let content = posts.reduce(async (prev, val) => {
    return await prev + await processPost(val);
  }, '');
content.then((data) => {
  fs.writeFileSync('archive.html',
                   `<html><body>${toc}${data}</body></html>`);

});

This created an archive.html with my posts, using the images/ directory for the images. Then I used my shell script for converting and copying files to convert it to EPUB and copy it over.

On the SuperNote, I can highlight text by drawing square brackets around it. If I tap that text, I can write or draw underneath it. Here's what that looks like:

20230104_090739.png
Figure 1: Writing an annotation

These notes are collected into a "Digest" view, and I can export things from there. (Example: archive.pdf)

2023-01-04_09-23-57.png
Figure 2: Here's what that digest is like when exported.

(Hmm, maybe I should ask them about hiding the pencil icon…)

Anyway, I think that might be a good starting point for my review.

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Using the wgrep package in Emacs to rewrite grep results from lots of files

| 11ty, emacs

acdw let me know that my Emacs News links to https://reddit.com didn't work for him in Firefox on Linux, but that changing the links to https://www.reddit.com would make them work. I was glad that I had migrated my blog from Wordpress to the 11ty static site generator. All my blog posts were HTML files, and I could just whiz through them all.

In the past, I might have used find-dired or find-grep-dired to get a list of files. Then I would record a keyboard macro to open a file, search and replace the text, save the buffer, and then kill the buffer, and I would just repeat this macro until an error occurred.

Some time ago, I learned about using Q (dired-do-find-regexp-and-replace) in Dired to replace regular expressions in marked files, using Y to accept all the replacements. That would then let me use C-x s (save-some-buffers) to save all the modified buffers with !. The bufler package is handy for closing a whole bunch of buffers of a certain type, although ibuffer or helm can handle that too.

Emacs being Emacs, there's an even better way to do it. I used M-x grep to find the lines to change, the wgrep package to make the results editable, and M-x replace-string to change things. A quick C-c C-e (wgrep-finish-edit) later, and I was able to change 5485 matching lines in 302 files.

It's so nice being able to deal with things in plain text. Yay for Emacs! There's always something more to learn.

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