Newsletter January 2026: Websites polish

This month I started out continuing work on rlworkbench. However, my focus then shifted to working on my code hosting infrastructure, blog, and websites.

rlworkbench

My main goal right now is that rlworkbench should replace Vim as my default text editor. I implemented a few things towards that goal:

• Ability to increase/decrease font size

• Search function that can jump to the first match

Then, my focus shifted.

Websites polish

Last month, I built support to create a nice looking page for rlworkbench. I wanted to document my other projects in a similar fashion. That is, turn a README.md into a website. However, the tool to do it was tied to rlworkbench. So I created a new project markup2website, that packages that functionality into a separate program that can be used in other projects.

When working on that, I had the need to make releases of it. That made me think about how to version things. I wrote How to assign version numbers to software? to clarify my thinking. It helped in developing changelog2version which is a new tool I wrote to extract version information from a changelog in README.md.

Making all this work also required some changes to my code hosting infrastructure, projects2. In particular it needed to provide the VCS_* variables that changelog2version expects. For making releases, I implemented partial support to make it aware of tags that should be set on commits in the repos.

With the new tool to generate websites, I wanted to use it on my blog as well to have a consistent look for all my websites. So I spent some time working on that. I started programming by making websites. My personal website. Now, 20+ years later, I'm still doing it. And it is still fun.

TODO

Here are the things that I'm currently most interested in working on next month:

• New blog

  • Migrate all my blog posts to it

  • https://indieweb.org/POSSE

    • Also syndicate projects to Github (in my TODO)

  • https://aaronparecki.com/2018/06/30/11/your-first-webmention

  • Mark up posts and start sending webmentions

• rlworkbench

  • Start using rlworkbench instead of Vim as my default text editor

    • Implement the features that I'm missing

      • Search function for quicker navigation

      • Ability to open files

      • w and b to move forwards/backwards a "word"

        • A "word" should be defined by the language?

• Computer, Enhance!

  • Continue course and do more homework

• Blog about C approach to new uniq command (maybe once I get further into Computer, Enhance!)

  • Show Python one-liner ish

  • Show sort | uniq combo

  • Explain why they don't perform well for rlselect

  • Write a standalone C version

  • Reflection

    • Looping over characters is fast in C but slow in Python. Some algorithms are easier when looping over characters. (Nov 17)

  • "What links here" could be provided with webmentions?

• Write blog post about how to parse offside in markup language posts/2026/01/09/how-to-parse-off-side-rule-in-meta/post.md