#Blogger Automation Research

This is a source survey for bloggers whose sites behave like personal infrastructure: custom build systems, script libraries, link preservation, publishing checks, AI helpers, and command-line workflows.

#Gwern.net

Sources:

• Local source: /home/krisyotam/src/parsing/gwern.net/build/bash.sh
• Local source: /home/krisyotam/src/parsing/gwern.net/build/sync.sh
• Local source: /home/krisyotam/src/parsing/gwern.net/build/linkArchive.sh
• https://gwern.net/Design
• https://gwern.net/archiving
• https://gwern.net/static/build/

Patterns worth copying:

• A sourced personal shell library for site work, not just a Makefile. Gwern's bash.sh has path conversion, colored check wrappers, Cloudflare cache expiry, PDF surgery, image composition, search helpers, rename helpers, tag helpers, and upload aliases.
• A full sync script that behaves like a release engineer: dependency checks, disk-space checks, cleanup, process collision checks, priority lowering, infrastructure pulls, global text rewrites, compilation, metadata checks, backlink generation, sitemap work, link checking, and upload.
• A rich publishing helper. Gwern's upload.sh lowercases filenames, normalizes extensions, converts media, OCR/compresses PDFs, strips metadata, handles name collisions, rsyncs, previews, adds small files to git, and keeps large files out of git.
• Preemptive link archiving. LinkArchive.hs and linkArchive.sh map URL to stable local path by domain plus SHA1, use SingleFile for HTML, treat PDFs specially, OCR/compress PDFs, preview snapshots, and split huge single-file archives.
• Link extraction as an archiving queue: find . -name "*.md" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 linkExtractor | filter-urls >> ~/.urls.txt.
• Style as code: global rewrites for URLs, spelling, citation conventions, typography, link cruft, and metadata normalization.
• Golden regression pages. Download known stress-test pages, strip cache-busting query strings, and diff rendered HTML against snapshots.
• Time-gated checks. A helper like everyNDays 7 && expensive-audit keeps the default build fast.

Reusable commands:

blog-links content/**/*.md | sort -u > archive-queue.txt
while read -r url; do blog-archive-url "$url"; done < archive-queue.txt
blog-frontmatter
blog-linkrot content/**/*.md
blog-backlinks > backlinks.md

#Simon Willison

Sources:

• https://simonwillison.net/about/
• https://simonwillison.net/series/blogging/
• https://datasette.io/for/websites
• https://github.com/simonw/simonw
• https://github.com/simonw/shot-scraper
• https://github.com/simonw/files-to-prompt
• https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/templates.html
• https://llm.datasette.io/en/latest/usage.html
• https://tools.simonwillison.net/

Patterns worth copying:

• Treat the blog as an application with a database. Simon's site is Django backed by PostgreSQL, exported to JSON backups, then published through Datasette surfaces.
• Publish structured data as a first-class artifact. Datasette can turn SQLite files into searchable, filterable public websites and APIs.
• Keep many feeds: all content, long posts, links, quotations, per-tag feeds, and series feeds.
• Use AI from the command line through reusable templates and fragments, with prompts saved as named tools rather than pasted one-offs.
• Publish small web tools with source links, commit history, and transcripts where useful.
• Generated sections with stable markers. Simon's GitHub profile README bot replaces marked chunks from feeds, GraphQL, and Datasette JSON, then commits only when content changes.
• Screenshot automation. shot-scraper multi shots.yml plus GitHub Actions can archive visual states after deploys.
• Corpus-to-prompt helpers. files-to-prompt bundles selected files into clean model context.

Reusable commands:

llm --system 'Review this draft for weak claims and missing sources' --save blog-review
cat draft.md | llm -t blog-review
files-to-prompt content -e md -e mdx --markdown | llm -s 'Find stale claims and missing sources'
shot-scraper https://example.com/ -o screenshots/home.png
sqlite-utils insert blog.db posts posts.json --pk id
datasette publish cloudrun blog.db -m metadata.json

#Andy Matuschak

Sources:

• https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes
• https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes
• https://github.com/andymatuschak/note-link-janitor
• https://github.com/andymatuschak/orbit

Patterns worth copying:

• Notes as public working memory, not just finished articles.
• Atomic notes, dense links, and repeated revision beat chronological publication alone.
• Treat note status as a first-class field. The 100x scripts should index drafts, flags, and backlinks rather than assuming everything is a finished post.
• Idempotent generated backlinks for [[wiki links]]: note-link-janitor path/to/notes.
• Notes can compile into interactive artifacts. Orbit's note-sync pattern treats Markdown prompts as source material for spaced review.

Reusable commands:

blog-draft-index
blog-backlinks > backlinks.md
blog_find 'evergreen|atomic|status'

#Maggie Appleton

Sources:

• https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
• https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners
• https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/maggieappleton.com-V2
• https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/maggieappleton.com-V3

Patterns worth copying:

• Digital garden maturity states. Drafts can be marked as seed, budding, evergreen, archived, or private instead of a binary published/draft flag.
• Visual and conceptual metadata matter. Garden pages use state, topic, and relationship as interface primitives.
• Keep a public list of other gardens as research fodder.
• Content-derived garden indexes. Maggie's V3 scripts generate links, topics, webmentions, and small "smidgeon" drafts before Astro preview/build.

Reusable commands:

rg -n 'status:|growth:|stage:' content notes garden
blog-frontmatter
blog-draft-index

#Tom MacWright

Sources:

• https://macwright.com/writing
• https://tmcw-ama.val.run/
• https://macwright.com/2023/12/14/blog-about-blog
• https://macwright.com/2020/05/02/linkrot
• https://macwright.com/2025/04/03/personal-tools
• https://github.com/tmcw/notfoundbot

Patterns worth copying:

• Simple, fast, personal site with a clear stance on writing and tooling.
• Public archive pages and "recently" posts as a low-friction cadence.
• Explicit disclosure about AI usage. If AI is part of the writing pipeline, make that policy visible and use scripts for review, not silent authorship.
• Linkrot repair as PRs, not silent rewrites. notfoundbot can upgrade HTTP to HTTPS, find Wayback captures, and propose small diffs.
• Markdown AST plus MagicString minimal URL rewrites is the right shape for future citation/link tools.
• Tiny personal desk tools around existing CLIs, for example gh search prs ... | jq ..., translate well to draft queues and publish checklists.

Reusable commands:

blog-new "Recently"
blog-stats
blog-ai-review draft.md

#Robin Sloan

Sources:

• https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/claude-revision/
• https://gist.github.com/robinsloan/6d5f4247b5f2239872bea8391fd63016

Patterns worth copying:

• AI revision loops should be auditable. Sloan's script preserves the first plan and every revision file, making each model pass inspectable.
• Separate "plan the revision" from "apply the revision" so model edits can be evaluated rather than blindly accepted.

Reusable commands:

blog-ai-review draft.md > review.txt
cp draft.md draft.v1.md

#Derek Sivers

Sources:

• https://code.sivers.org/
• https://data.sivers.org/uses
• https://wiki.sive.rs/plaintext
• https://sive.rs/7
• https://code.sivers.org/ws
• https://github.com/sivers/sivers

Patterns worth copying:

• Plain text as durable source of truth.
• Site as personal database: articles, book notes, translations, now pages, project pages, and direct sales.
• Terminal-first stack: Vim, PostgreSQL, Ruby/Go, Sinatra, OpenBSD, mutt, Beancount, sox, ffmpeg, mpv, mupdf, ssh.
• Public code and public ideas as an operating principle.
• Unusual architecture: Go servers route requests to PostgreSQL functions that generate HTML and headers. scripts/tap wraps pgTAP tests in rollback transactions.
• Clear anti-AI disclosure: "Everything here is written by me, personally, not an AI."

Reusable commands:

blog-new "Now"
blog_words
blog_find 'plain text'

#Brendan Gregg

Sources:

• https://github.com/brendangregg
• https://github.com/brendangregg/FlameGraph
• https://github.com/brendangregg/perf-tools
• https://cacm.acm.org/practice/the-flame-graph/

Patterns worth copying:

• Posts that ship with reusable diagnostic scripts become long-lived references.
• Visualization generators are publishing tools: data in, SVG out, explanation around it.
• Keep a script archive next to explanations so readers can reproduce the picture.
• Keep intermediate folded/text artifacts because they are grep-able and reusable.
• Test visualization scripts with fixture inputs, collapsed expected outputs, and SVG generation.

Reusable commands:

python -m cProfile -o output.prof script.py
flameprof output.prof --format log > output.folded
flamegraph.pl output.folded > profile.svg

#Org Mode Static-Site Builders

Sources:

• https://ogbe.net/blog/emacs_org_static_site
• https://github.com/jethrokuan/braindump
• https://github.com/freetonik/rakhim.org
• https://github.com/freetonik/braindump.rakhim.org
• https://github.com/sachac/.emacs.d

Patterns worth copying:

• A self-contained private source repo with bib, bin, blog, css, cv, html, img, lisp, and pages.
• make plus Emacs batch mode as a static-site compiler.
• Custom export backend, sitemap generator, CSS/JS minification, MathJax hosting, publication lists from BibTeX, and preprocessing/postprocessing passes.
• Jethro Kuan generates build.ninja from build.py, then runs many Emacs batch Org exports in parallel before Hugo builds.
• Rakhim's braindump pipeline is explicit: clean copy heading backlinks wikilinks frontmatter build publish.
• Sacha Chua uses literate Emacs publishing: Make runs Emacs batch to tangle Sacha.org into Sacha.el, export HTML, and create backlinks from generated files to source sections.

Reusable commands:

make
emacs --batch -l lisp/build-site.el -f org-publish-all
blog-rss-check public/feed.xml

#Patrick McKenzie

Sources:

• https://www.kalzumeus.com/
• https://gist.github.com/patio11

Patterns worth copying:

• Publish narrow, production-adjacent gists when the main site code is private.
• Export Markdown versions of posts for readability, LLM context, or archival use, with allowlisted frontmatter and per-post opt-outs.
• Publish hashes for important public claims or documents.

#Dan Luu

Sources:

• https://danluu.com/octopress-speedup/
• https://danluu.com/about/
• https://gist.github.com/danluu

Patterns worth copying:

• Performance posts should be reproducible: WebPageTest runs, screenshots, each intervention, each latency delta.
• Minimal static-site maintenance is a scriptable discipline: remove unused JS, move blocking JS to the footer, combine/minify assets, remove webfonts, consider inline CSS for single-entry visits.
• Maintain lightweight bibliographies as public gists.

#Julia Evans

Sources:

• https://jvns.ca/blog/2016/10/09/switching-to-hugo/
• https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/12/22/how-i-set-up-an-automatic-weekly-blog-digest/
• https://jvns.ca/blog/2021/11/15/esbuild-vue/
• https://github.com/jvns

Patterns worth copying:

• Keep a tiny post generator task, such as a Rake new_post, so filenames and frontmatter are never hand-typed.
• Prefer durable static binaries for authoring tools when language environments become fragile.
• Use single-command small frontend builds: esbuild script.js --bundle --minify --outfile=bundle.js.
• Debug toolchain weirdness with system tools such as strace -e openat -f.

#Xe Iaso

Sources:

• https://github.com/Xe/site
• https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/scripts/validate-blog-dates.js
• https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/scripts/check-mdx-tags.go
• https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/Earthfile

Patterns worth copying:

• Document agent/developer entrypoints in AGENTS.md.
• Future-dated content guard: block future dates unless the PR body contains an explicit "DO NOT MERGE until YYYY-MM-DD UTC" line.
• Validate MDX tags with a small dedicated checker.
• Keep diagrams as source plus output, for example .dot beside .svg.

Reusable commands:

blog-future-dates
BLOG_ALLOW_FUTURE_DATES=1 blog-future-dates

#Eli Bendersky

Sources:

• https://eli.thegreenplace.net/pages/about
• https://github.com/eliben/code-for-blog

Patterns worth copying:

• Keep a separate code-for-blog repo organized by year and article.
• Article directories should include runnable examples, Makefiles, tests, benchmarks, generated plots, and README notes.
• For diagram-heavy or benchmark-heavy posts, publish generation scripts, not only final images.

#Buster Benson

Sources:

• https://github.com/busterbenson/public

Patterns worth copying:

• Treat a personal canon as a repo: beliefs, ideas, changelog, yearly review commits, and public feedback.
• The "public accountable self" idea maps cleanly to versioned beliefs.md, ideas.md, and annual review indexes.

#Nikita Voloboev

Sources:

• https://github.com/nikivdev/go

Patterns worth copying:

• flow.toml as a task-runner control plane with commands for setup, dev, spec printing, deploy, and AI-backed commits.
• Build CLIs to temporary directories, run them, clean up, and install short symlink aliases.
• Generate prompt text from Markdown specs with a command like spec-print note.md --stdout --no-clipboard.

#Phil Eaton

Sources:

• https://github.com/eatonphil/eatonphil.com

Patterns worth copying:

• A one-file Go static-site compiler is enough for many personal sites.
• Emit per-section output, sitemap, and robots files without adopting a large framework.

#Linus Lee

Sources:

• https://github.com/thesephist/stream
• https://github.com/thesephist/sistine

Patterns worth copying:

• JSONL is a good microblog database.
• make watch with entr and a tiny formatter target gives a fast authoring loop.
• A small custom static-site generator can be maintained like any other personal tool.

#Cross-Cutting Ideas

• new: create a dated draft with title, status, tags, canonical slug.
• index: list drafts by age, word count, status, and TODO flags.
• links: extract all external links with source file references.
• archive: save every external link locally before publication.
• title: fetch a page title and normalize it for citation notes.
• frontmatter: fail fast on missing title/date/status/tags.
• rss: validate Atom/RSS as part of the build.
• linkrot: run a polite status checker on changed posts.
• backlinks: generate a reverse-link report for notes.
• stats: count posts, words, links, domains, and TODO flags.
• ai-review: use a CLI LLM as a skeptical editor, never as silent author.
• build-check: run whatever the repo provides: Makefile, npm, Hugo, Jekyll, frontmatter, RSS, stats.
• future-dates: block scheduled posts unless explicitly allowed.
• screenshot: archive visual states after deploys.
• spec-print: turn Markdown notes/specs into reusable AI prompts.
• wikilinks: convert [[Page]] and ![[file.png]] before build.
• tangle-build: tangle literate source and publish generated HTML/PDF.
• db-test: run database-backed site tests inside rollback transactions.