Blog on Noetic Nought

Blog Newsletter Restored

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:42:00 +0530

I had a newsletter for this blog automatically created from the RSS feed and sent by Mailchimp, based on Julia Evans’ setup. I discovered this week, thanks to Ringo, that sign-ups no longer worked. Upon digging further, I found out that my Mailchimp account was deleted over a year ago. I missed a handful of email reminders from them to login to the account to prevent deletion.

I didn’t need to tweak or change anything with the newsletter on Mailchimp once everything was satisfactorily set-up. For a service that provides an automatic service, asking users to login to prove that the account is active is a dark pattern that’s more than just “mildly inconvenient”. Emails are easy to miss or get lost “in transit” given how they work. Relying on users taking action in response to emails before deleting their data is horrid. But I guess I shouldn’t expect much more for a service I wasn’t paying for.

The newsletter had about 25-30 subscribers, if I remember correctly, the last time I checked maybe ~3 years ago. It’s not a lot, but I definitely have had some people writing to me that they enjoyed some editions! I’ve restored the newsletter functionality using a hack-ish setup, now, thanks to Claude Code.

I’ve signed up to Resend for sending out the newsletter. I considered using my own mailserver to send out these emails, but I know email service providers are usually not happy with bulk email coming out from servers/domains without enough “reputation” behind them.

To prevent any future data loss ala Mailchimp, I’ve used “the baali trick” (term coined by Claude Code) for setting up the sign-up form using a Google Form that write responses to a spreadsheet that gets synced to Resend’s subscriber list. Unsubscribe is automatically handled by Resend and the data about who unsubscribed is not synced back to the spreadsheet. This is the only thing I’d be losing if a mailchimp like mishap occured again.

An important difference in how the newsletter gets generated is that the current workflow doesn’t depend on the RSS feed. Instead, I use a custom Hugo template that helps to generate the HTML email containing all the posts written since the last send. The newsletter gets sent out every Thursday, using a GitHub action.

I wonder if I should automatically add the details of those I knew subscribed previously (but may have unsubscribed), or ask them if they’d like to be “re-subscribed”. If you’d like to receive (at the most) weekly emails from me, containing posts from this blog, you can sign up here.

Goodbye Google Analytics

Tue, 06 Nov 2018 21:47:00 +0530

TL; DR: My blog no longer has Google Analytics. And I’m happy about it.

Why I had it?

I’ve been using Google Analytics for many years now - ever since I moved to a static blog, from WordPress. WordPress had built-in analytics, and it seemed natural to me to have analytics on the static site too, after using WP for a couple of years or so.

I checked the analytics only once in a while, But, I did find it encouraging and sometimes amusing to see where and how people ended up on my blog. Especially so, when a post became popular.

Why I removed it?

A few months ago, around the time when we were all bombarded by GDPR related policy change announcements from random services we signed up to and forgot about, I decided to remove Google Analytics on my blog.

I also received an email from Google Analytics, listing a bunch of changes I’d need to make to how I use anlaytics, to be GDPR compliant. That made me reconsider if it was worth having analytics on my site.

I use Ghostery and other such tools to minimize how much people are able to track me. It feels better to not have the same kind of analytics that I’m averse to, on my blog.

Also, about half the people who read my blog likely don’t like analytics, and are probably blocking it. Considering how little I used the analytics, I just didn’t see a point in keeping it running.

But what about the useful stats?

My blog doesn’t get too many visits – only a few dozen people every week – mostly my friends or acquaintances. There’s not as much going on, to find anything super interesting in the stats.

Nevertheless, it is sometimes interesting to see where people end-up coming to my blog from. And on one occasion, I found a broken link to a blog post of mine which was sending a significant number of people to my blog. I fixed that, and also added a 404 page with helpful suggestions.

I have the proxy of interactions on twitter or texts/emails from friends, to gauge how interesting a post was. But, it’s useful to have some kind of analytics to gauge the interest and reading patterns of older posts.

Given this, and the fact that I’ve recently been intrigued by Rust and want to learn it, I’ve started writing a small Apache log analyzer in Rust. It’s just a toy, as of now. goaccess is a nice “real-time” log analyzer that gives some useful stats.

Thanks Shantanu Choudhary for prompting me to write this post, reading a draft of this, and giving helpful suggestions to make it better.

Blog trends from word clouds

Mon, 11 Sep 2017 23:23:00 +0530

I came across a couple of fun word clouds, and felt like generating a word cloud for my blog content to get a sense of the major themes on my blog, over the years.

With some simple Python code, I was able to parse the blog and get the word frequency over the years. I then used a modified version of this d3 example to generate a word cloud.

Using all the words used in each year to generate the word-cloud, made it very noisy. So, I switched to using only the top 50 words for each year.

The word cloud doesn’t seem very useful or insightful, but was fun to generate. Each year’s cloud seems to have some words that gives me a sense of some major events/themes for that year, though it may not be very apparent to anybody other than me.

The years which have a lot of posts have clear winners, but the winning words are quite generic. For example, 2007 has words like “life”, “time”, etc., as winners. To try to get rid of the generic words in the word cloud, I tried a quick and dirty tf-idf based word-cloud, but it didn’t really seem to help.

I might get back to this later, to try and improve the tf=idf word cloud. There are also other problems, like code-blocks in posts contributing variable names, urls contributing domain names, etc.

Also, a simple line chart of the usage of tags vs. year might give a better sense of the themes in the blog by year, even though it may not look as fancy as a word-cloud.

Back, Hopefully

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 22:47:00 +0530

I haven’t written anything here for almost a year. I needed to break the silence. So, here we go with a not-so-useful post showing how frequently I have been posting to this blog, to get a sense of how long this break has been in comparison to other silences in the past.

Neither the code below, nor the plots are very insightful. But, I just hope this will get me started on the path to blogging more regularly. See you around!

Parsed post content

I wrote some code to parse the content of the blog, and each post object looks something like this:

{'date': datetime.datetime(2010, 3, 17, 18, 30, tzinfo=<UTC>),
 'draft': False,
 'tags': ['blab', 'life', 'poem'],
 'title': 'Just another bunch'}
Post count: 190

Post frequency by year

import pandas
posts = pandas.DataFrame(posts)
counts = posts['date'].groupby(posts['date'].dt.year).count()
plot = counts.plot(kind='bar', figsize=(8, 6))
plot.set_xlabel('Years')
plot.set_ylabel('# of posts')

<matplotlib.text.Text at 0x7f7d99ee20f0>

<matplotlib.figure.Figure at 0x7f7d99ea7390>

Post frequency by month

# Add a DatetimeIndex to the Dataframe
posts.index = pandas.DatetimeIndex(posts['date'].values)
counts = posts['date'].groupby(pandas.TimeGrouper('M')).count()
ax = counts.plot(kind='bar', figsize=(12, 8))

n = 5
ticks = ax.xaxis.get_ticklocs()
labels = counts.index.strftime('%Y-%m')
labels = ax.xaxis.set_ticklabels(labels[::n])
ticks = ax.xaxis.set_ticks(ticks[::n])

ax.set_xlabel('year-month')
ax.set_ylabel('# of posts')

<matplotlib.text.Text at 0x7f7d99e2f240>

<matplotlib.figure.Figure at 0x7f7d99e2cf98>

Work-flow

I jumped onto the hugo bandwagon too.

I was totally impressed by how fast it is, and have been meaning to try it out for a while, but wasn’t impressed with the built-in org-mode support it came with. This changed when I finally came across the ox-hugo package that does a wonderful job of exporting blog posts from an org file to hugo’s markdown format. I have contributed a couple of patches to it, to make it work better for myself and hopefully for others too.

Also, for this post, I used ob-ipython with the enhancements from scimax and it has really made the whole experience quite enjoyable.

Among other things, I think one of the reasons for those peaks in the second half of 2010, was having a smooth work-flow. My current work-flow feels pretty nice too, and I hope it’ll reduce some of the friction in writing more posts.

Onwards!

blog-admin and Nikola

Sat, 21 May 2016 00:00:00 +0530

Another post about blogging.

blog-admin now supports Nikola, thanks to yours truly. blog-admin is an Emacs package by CodeFalling that lets you view and manage your (static site generated) blog from within inside Emacs.

Nikola’s command line utility is pretty nifty and does a bunch of useful things. I had a few utility functions to do common tasks like create new post and deploy blog. This worked well, but moment I came across this blog-admin’s tabular view, I was sold!

org2blog (a blogging tool I used previously) had a tracking file that kept track of all the posts I made, and I used it quite a bit for navigation – thanks to org-mode’s search functionality. The tabular view of blog-admin is even better! I really like the fact that the author has tried to keep the package generic enough to support any blog, and adding support for Nikola has been quite easy.

The filtering functionality is crude, but good enough for a start. One thing I want to add is a preview functionality for drafts. Showing some (writing) statistics would also be nice – No. posts in the last month, total published posts, etc. No promises, but you may see some of these things, soon. :)

Org based posts in Nikola

Sun, 20 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0530

Chen Bin asked me to share my Nikola+Org work-flow, and share an example post.

The org source for any post can be found by changing the URL of a post from .html to .org.

I don’t have much of a work-flow, because I don’t post too often, but here is what I typically do, to make a new post.

I start off by creating a new post using

$ nikola new_post

and then give the post a title and start editing the post in Emacs.

I have a simple snippet that lets me insert tags, based on existing tags.

Once I’m happy with the content of a post, I run nikola auto to build the source and serve it locally, and see if the post “looks” reasonable, after being rendered.

Once, I’m happy with it, I commit the post and deploy it using nikola deploy.

I also have a plugin, that posts captured bookmarks and quotes onto the blog, with a single command. I should probably make the sources of my blog open, and push it onto GitHub.

Update [2015-05-13 Wed]

I use my own plugin for Nikola which lets me write posts in org-mode. There is a similar plugin by Chen Bin, that exports posts to intermediate html, that is then used by Nikola.
The source for my blog is now on GitHub
I also have custom elisp to be able to make a new post, and deploy the site from within Emacs.

Bookmarks and Quotes plugin

Sat, 19 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0530

I used to have a separate page for bookmarks and quotes on the old blog. They will now be shared as regular posts with 5 or more bookmarks/quotes. I use a bookmarklet in my browser to capture links to an org-file using org-capture protocol and then I have a small plugin to Nikola, that looks at such captured bookmarks and quotes and makes new posts out of them. This workflow is inspired by Brett Trepestra’s web excursions plugin.

The plugin is currently a part of my blog source, and not published to Nikola’s plugin repository since it is very specific to my setup. But if anybody is interested, I can publish the code somewhere public.

If you are interested to get these links and bookmarks into your feed reader, you can subscribe to their feed: [quotes], bookmarks. These posts will also make it to the main feed, though.

UPDATE [2015-11-15 Sun 20:45]

The quotes feed no longer exists!
The bookmarks feed doesn’t really get too many updates. I use pinboard for my bookmarks, now.

Blogging with Nikola and Org-mode

Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0530

Sigh! I made yet another change to the way this blog gets published. But, I have a feeling this mechanism, is here to stay!

We’ve been using Nikola quite regularly for our Ultimate site, and I quite like it. I’ve also contributed a bunch of features to Nikola to get it to work the way I would like it to. This weekend I ported my blog from o-blog to Nikola. The only thing that was stopping me from doing it, until now is the fact that all my posts are in org markup and porting them over to one of the formats that Nikola supports would be a PITA. So, I wrote a pretty simple plugin to Nikola to support posting from org files. And then with a little Python, I was able to move everything over to use Nikola.

Hopefully, I’ll keep my blog more updated, from here on!

Changes to Blog

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0530

Well, as you can see, I’ve changed my blog a bit. I had been trying to make it gel well with org-mode and looking for ways to allow me to share arbit stuff with separate feeds for tags, separate pages with independent feeds, etc.

I finally got around to tweaking the code of reprise to be able to do this. There are still a few things I would like to change, but I’ll make the changes gradually. The looks are also straight from uddegal’s [[reprise, with a few tiny tweaks. I hope it is alright to be using it. I really liked the theme.

Every tag now has a separate feed. /tags/emacs.atom will give you the feed of emacs for instance. Also, I plan to have a couple of more pages, one for all the interesting links I come across and another for interesting quotes. Both of these pages, have their own feeds too (quotes.atom and links.atom).

In the spirit of minimalism, I got rid of comments. I’ve been looking for ways of having comments without all the javascript cruft from disqus, but I didn’t find any satisfactory way to do this. So, the site will have no comments. You can write to me, in case you’ve something to say to me.

Adios.

Bloggerstock: Do-over

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 19:22:00 +0530

This post is by Dominick Mills, coming to us, thanks to Bloggerstock. Dominick aka Lije blogs at Lije’s Mindstate. My post on this month’s Bloggerstock topic will appear at That Ain’t Kosher.

And here is Dominick’s post for you

Hello world..today I’ll be talking about a period in time I would like to do-over, however I couldn’t think of anything so I went in another direction….I’d like to thank Bloggerstock and punchagan for the opportunity leak my thoughts on this page….

I hope the readers understand that my views does not reflect those of the host’s page..before I get started though Let me take the time out to explain what Bloggerstock is all about. Bloggerstock is the brainchild of a small group of bloggers who connected on 20SB. The idea comes from the concept of a blog-swap in that maybe we could create our own kind of event where we all wrote posts to be posted on the next person’s blog. Essentially forming a blog-ring.

There’s a lot of things in life everyone would like to relive and do differently..I’ve been giving it some thought and it’s been racking my brain for the whole month now…I came to the conclusion that I have nothing I’d like to really do-over…

My reason for this is that I wouldn’t be this person I am…and I wouldn’t alter it in anyway…I love what I’ve become…if it weren’t for all the good and bad that occurred during my life time..I wouldn’t even be here writing this….or I wouldn’t even have the same goals and all my aspirations would be small…I know this all sounds weird but giving the fact that I am a weird person, those who know me, this is expected…I believe in things happening for a reason and without these occurrences we’d be something totally different, and

maybe not becoming what we’re suppose to be in life…sometimes we look at situations and think, " Just maybe if I had done this… or maybe if I hadn’t…" even if my decisions had made into a bum on the streets I think I would feel the same way…truth is we all have regrets..learning to live with them is the hardest thing to do..we tend to get caught up in the moment and want to relive those things..either for the good or the bad…but we fail to realize that it is those things that build character not for today but for our tomorrows.

Whether it’s falling for the wrong person, being back stabbed from a friend, getting hoodwinked from a stranger, or missing out on an opportunity….all of these are just life’s lessons being taught..with that being said you should never sulk over a decision we’ve made…in the end we’re our own cause of grief or happiness so don’t whine about it stuff that’s happened….accept what has happened and move forward…don’t hold on to them, but don’t forget them either…these are turning points in our lives so appreciate them..

Well that’s all I have to conjure up on the matter..though it kind of went against the topic a bit but hey am stubborn lol.. once again I’d like to thank punchagan for allowing me to feature on Rustic Reverie and also Bloggerstock for providing me with the opportunity to express myself on a fellow blogger’s page.. here’s a link to my page to view my featured blog post

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0530

A couple of days back.. one guy called green_mamba asked me.. “Why do you use Linux (GNU/Linux) and not Windows? What is it that makes LinuxGNU/Linux] so special for you?” I avoided that question then.. {I was in no mood of answering questions… Exams had finished just the day before!!} I am trying to answer it now… green_mamba also told me that Roopesh said, “I use it because I can look at the source code. I am allowed to look at how things work and fiddle with the way they work!”… I knew it immediately that this was not the reason for me.[I rarely looked at source code… and making changes to it.. haha..] So what is it? I think I can answer this question if I get back to the time when I started using Linux…[hehe.. not too long ago!! :P]

So how did I start using GNU/Linux? How did “we” first meet? It was during last summer holidays.. that Voods sent me this link … [I had definitely used GNU/Linux on a few occasions before… but.. this was when I really began using it…] and within hours I was a fan of GNU/Linux!\![and Richard M Stallman (RMS)]

So its the “philosophy”… The philosophy of Free Software… [Free as in Freedom, not as in Free Beer…(English is a wierd wierd Language…)]… The philosophy of Open Source… that brought me to it… This song says it the best…

Free Software Song –RMS

Join us now and share the software;
You’ll be free, hackers, you’ll be free.

Join us now and share the software;
You’ll be free, hackers, you’ll be free.

Hoarders may get piles of money,
That is true, hackers, that is true.
But they cannot help their neighbors;
That’s not good, hackers, that’s not good.

When we have enough free software
At our call, hackers, at our call,
We’ll throw out those dirty licenses
Ever more, hackers, ever more.

Join us now and share the software;
You’ll be free, hackers, you’ll be free.

Join us now and share the software;
You’ll be free, hackers, you’ll be free.

now I continue to use it.. for a variety of reasons..[they are NOT in the order of their priority/importance]

Firstly, using Linux gives me a sense of community… a sense of oneness [this can’t happen with Windows.. because you can’t share stuff… :-(]
I have begun to hate the concept of Proprietary Software… can you believe that.. “Sharing stuff.. makes us PIRATES!!”
I am a growing fan of the Command Line… It simply rocks!!
There’s almost no problem of Viruses/Malware.. You simply don’t need an Anti-Virus..(that needs to be updated every night.. or u’ll have nightmares…)
Then there’s this wonderful concept of Live-CDs.. {specially Knoppix.. Its absolutely awesome!} It put me(us?) out of soup… a lotta times…
The fiddle factor… I have just started to fiddle with things(…source codes… I added a small feature to my dc-client Microdc2].. the feature of away messages.. it feels gr8! :P)
One of my best friend is using it too! [you know who…]
The Mascot looks cool!! ;) [I liked the GNU mascot too! (It’s on my side-bar) ]
The name “LINUX”!! [There’s so many flavors(Distros) of Linux.. that I can keep trying different ones.. all my life :P.. presently with Slackware!]
Its Fun!! and I want to use it…
and finally… Windows sucks! [I don’t have to use it… :P]!!

Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. “Don’t bother us with politics,” respond those who don’t want to learn. –Richard Stallman

When you say, “I wrote a program that crashed Windows”, people just stare at you blankly and say, “Hey, I got those with the system, for free”. –Linus Torvalds

“What happens when you read some doc and either it doesn’t answer your question or is demonstrably wrong? In Linux, you say “Linux sucks” and go read the code. In Windows/Oracle/etc you say “Windows sucks” and start banging your head against the wall.” — Denis Vlasenko on linux kernel mailing list

“The box said that I needed to have Windows 98 or better… so I installed Linux.” – LinuxNewbie.org