Off the grid

As much as your readers might like to read a blog online, from time to time it is also nice to be able to read it… off-line. The Blogophon now features support for Progressive Web Apps, which allows all articles visited before to be read even while being off-line.

As a side effect of enabling PWAs some mobile browsers might display a button to add your blog to the home screen of the visiting mobile phone.

Enable this feature by starting the configuration of your blog again and tick "Progressive Web Apps" when the selection is offered to you.

For editors the Blogophon now features conversations. With some rather unspectacular Markdown you can build articles which look like chat histories.

And if you do not have a clue on how to configure your web server: The Blogophon now generates web server configuration for Apache (including .htaccess files) & nginx.

King Kong

With this version the Blogophon got a truck-load of new features. To reflect the amount of changes, this update is a major update and elevates the version number to v2.

There is a very long list of changes to be found in the Blogophon's change log, so let's sum up the major ones:

The file structure of the user/posts directory has been changed to better match the file structure used for HTML files. This helps text editors like Microsoft's Visual Code or Github's Atom to better show previews of your articles, allowing for proper display of images and links. The good thing is: Yo do not have to change your old files, as they will be generated like they used to. If you are really into cleaning up, there is a small set of instructions on how to migrate your Markdown files.

If you like writing blog posts about SQL, Bash, Exapunk's AXIOM language, or like to share musical scores written in abc notation, the Blogophon comes with all new (and for some languages rather unique) syntax highlighting.

There is also a new way for designing your templates. New templating helpers have been added for displaying dates, shortening text, having proper conditions with ifEquals and tons of other useful helpers for outputting your data in every way you see fit. This comes on the expense of the article's date data, as they will not be converted before you output them. If you are relying on the former Javascript variables for dates please check your templates.

Regarding analytics there is now a simple way to add analytics to templates and newsfeeds. Just restart the configuration process, where you will be asked for analytics scripts. And if you are into Google Tag Manager: The new Mustache helper for generating the dataLayer for GTM adds tons of structural data for your analytics.

Last but not least: The Blogophon is now capable of sending Webmentions. This very clever mechanism makes the Blogophon notify other websites in case the were mentioned by some of your articles. Just start the configuration process, you will be asked if you would like to activate this feature. Because of its static nature, the Blogophon is not yet able to receive Webmentions.

Under the hood there is an all new Mocha testing, lots of improvements regarding creating, renaming and deleting of articles, and tons of small fixes.

v2.0.0

See v2.0.1

Go for the Handlebars

The Blogophon has taken a huge step by replacing the Mustache template engine with the Handlebars template engine. This will break old templates, but gives a more meaningful syntax for creating new templates, and should help template authors.

This minor release also features tons of small fixes to its basic theme HTML, improving output for the Indieweb, as well as improving output for RSS and recipes (sic!).

There is also some love for adding SVG images, WebP images, audio and video files to your articles.

v1.4.4

• 🎁 Added colspan for tables
• 🎁 Added issue template for filing Github issues and improved development documentation
• 🎁 Added configuration field for copyright notice which will show up on all pages and feeds
• 🎁 Changed Expires headers to have HTML snippets perform better
• 🎁 Added mechanism to switch between AJAX snippets and Server Side Includes
• 🎁 Markdown now supports links without extra link syntax
• 🎁 Adding MIME type to favicons, supporting SVG favicons
• 🎁 Adding wordcount for articles via meta.Wordcount
• 🎁 Support for podcasts / RSS enclosures
• 💊 Fixed <caption> for tables
• 💊 Fixed broken NPM dependencies
• 💊 Converting relative links to absolute links in syndication files
• 💊 XHTML fixes
• 💊 Fixed Markdown examples for tables
• 💊 General fix to meta files like GEO-JSON, Apple News Format, KML etc.
• 💊 Fixed audio and video file types and adding more file types
• 💊 Better schema.org HTML for recipes

v1.4.3

• 💊 Fixed broken page generator

v1.4.2

• 💊 Fixed broken image generator

v1.4.1

• 🎁 Supporting SVG & WebP images
• 🎁 Converting images folder into general attachment files folder
• 🎁 Improved accessibility
• 🎁 Pressing ESC in browser closes image popups
• 💊 Improved heading structure in HTML output

Tags and tables

More love for editors! The interface of the Blogophon command menu has been overhauled, vastly improving the editing of dates and tags. You may enter some tags into your config.json to be checkable while creating a new article.

There is also now a way to add table headers (<caption />) and there will be a wrapper <div /> around each table, allowing for some neat styling stunts.

You will also find new documentation on how to update your Blogophon installation (which is rather simple: npm update -g blogophon).

Under the hood the Blogophon has some security updates and an overhaul of its file system structure, making it more compliant with Node.js best practices. The Blogophon now requires Node 6. If you do not have Node version 6 but at least Node version 4, install an older version of the Blogophon by calling npm install -g [email protected].

Nerdy paradise

We have come a long way since Blogophon 1.2.0: The biggest change concerns the addition of categories, which can be used like tags, but can a) alter the URLs of posts and b) show up as breadcrumbs. Categories can also be used for a simple site navigation. Posts can still belong to multiple tags, but only to one category.

There are new post types: Reviews, recipes and micro posts, which let you add even more structured stuff. Head over to the all new section for Blogophon's special post types.

Also editing has improved: Syntax highlighting for INI, YAML and Apache configuration stuff as well as embedding of JSFiddles has been added.

For all you nerds out there: JSON-Feed is available for syndicating your stuff via JSON.

Under the hood the Blogophon has been bumped to ECMA script version 6 and thus requires Node 4. This improves the stability and robustness of the code, but forces you to abandon older Node versions. As the currently active Node Long Term Support Version is Node 6 and maintenance for Node 4 ends in April 2018, you are encouraged to update to the latest Long Term Version.

Oh, and the Blogophon now uses a new Markdown parser. See markedjs/marked#938 for details.