In my testing yesterday to make sure I had outbound webmentions working, I noticed that when they did send, they usually looked bad. Not totally sure why because according to xray.p3k.io, granary.io and sturdy-backbone.glitch.me, I had my HTML coded correctly… but then according to IndieWebify.me (and clearly many websites’ webmention receivers!!) important info like my name was not coming across at all.

Anyway, I redid my post footers and now IndieWebify.me parses my author details correctly and the one site I tested sending webmentions to (Webmention rocks!) displays my comments correctly (with my name, avatar, etc. alongside). I also took the opportunity to add posts’ assigned categories and tags to footers at the same time, and state explicitly that you can interact with posts via webmention (not just via Micro.blog and Mastodon – although of course the reason those work is because of webmentions, lol). Now, if this “IndieWeb” setup I have going could refrain from breaking down again, that’d be GREAT!

After spending pretty much my whole day working on it, I can finally sit back and feel satisfied with things that I’ve accomplished: I have Indiekit  set up (thanks in no small part to helpful people on its Github repository, including the developer 🙏), and probably configured better than my previous install of Indiekit 😅

On top of that, I made some improvements to the way my Hugo theme deals with images included in front matter (it can process them now!), as well as to the shortcodes I use to embed images within posts (to save me having to look up finicky shit to copy-paste from the last time I had a photo post with that many photos in a row, basically). There’s more tinkering I could do, too, but I’ve already been working on it so many hours and I really should leave it alone for the day 🙈

This morning I found out that webmentions.app, the utility I’ve been using to send out webmentions from this site, has been down for the last two weeks thanks to Vercel seemingly overzealously taking down the maintainer’s sites and then being difficult to contact afterwards (see this blog post from the maintainer about his experience ).

For a long time I’d been kinda thinking I should have a webmention-sending setup more robust than an IFTTT applet that runs once an hour anyway, so I decided to take this opportunity to try to switch to the command-line tool, and running that as a command after my main build command. Basically, I changed my build command to:

hugo --gc && npm install @remy/webmention && npx webmention https://www.jayeless.net/index.xml --limit 1 --send

That’ll make it check and send notifications for the most recent post in my RSS feed after ever commit. Or at least, it should. The commit that includes this very post is going to be the first time this build command gets tested 😛 I’ve used the command-line tool on my own computer before though, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. (NB: Turns out that this did not work 😔 Still trying to figure out why…)

Now, if I really want to fix my site’s IndieWebbiness, I just need to recreate my IndieKit server now Heroku’s booted free users off their platform 🙈

Today I added a search feature to this website, following the instructions of this tutorial  then tweaking a bit. Hugo is, of course, a static site generator so any searches have to be done on the client side (that is, dear visitor, in your browser) rather than the server side. So, the way this works is, Hugo is set to generate a JSON of all the site’s content, and then if you do a search, a Java­script script searches that whole JSON. This means that the search function is pretty slow, the “search results” page has a huge (~10MB) filesize, and you have to have Java­script enabled to do it. However, if there’s something specific you know I’ve put up somewhere that you want to find again, this is probably the easiest way to look for it. Plus, I think having an in-built search gives me IndieWeb brownie points  😛

Last night I added a new statuses section to this site, where I’m gonna PESOS my status.lol posts  back to here 🙂 Basically my plan is to compile a post each day with all the statuses, and post ’em as daily posts (rather than making a new post for every status which I think will flood my archives). This does mean not getting webmentions for individual statuses but oh well, lesser evils…

The daily status posts won’t appear on the front page’s recent activity feed, nor will they appear in the master RSS feed (but there is a dedicated “statuses” RSS feed you can subscribe to if you really want to see them in that format). The daily posts will appear in my archives though, under whatever month they were posted in. They won’t syndicate to Micro.blog, which already got all the individual status posts directly; nor will I post them to Mastodon.

Realistically, I’m expecting that the vast majority of people who see these statuses will see them on status.lol, or when they’ve been syndicated directly from there to Micro.blog and Mastodon. Copying them to my own site is more about my own desire for this site to serve as the canonical repository of all my shit – making sure I still have them even if sites shut down, or the statuses recede so far back in the timeline they’re non-findable. I don’t wanna count on any social media site retaining my posts forever, and even if most of these statuses aren’t really of long-term value, I wanna keep an archive 🙂

I just can’t stop tinkering 🙈 It’s been quiet on the blog for a few days, but I’ve added a bunch more wiki pages, including on the collapse of the USSR, the Inca Empire, the Transatlantic accent and Cyrillic. Also made it so that the wiki’s front page no longer lists EVERY wiki page (there are too many now!) and my RSS feeds no longer include wiki pages (except for, obviously, the wiki section feed) because TBH it was making me too self-conscious to publish new pages knowing they would appear in the RSS feed 😅

Over the last couple of days I’ve done a bit more site tinkering, and revamped my tag pages. Basically I wanted to be clearer about what the difference is between a tag and a category: a category is more like a channel, with posts on a similar theme but not all on the same subject, while a tag is more like a topic. So, the tag pages now (mostly) have a tag description at the top of the page (some of them seemed kind of self-explanatory or I couldn’t think of a good description though), and rather than being a paginated stream of all my content mixed together, they have shorter links grouped by content type (wiki pages, then blog posts, then link posts, then interactions). Many of them are like rudimentary wiki pages now 😛 And that’s why I wanted to make the change – to make it easier to link related content, and have kind of “stub wiki pages” for things I haven’t mustered up the energy to write full-length wiki pages for.

Digital gardening is fun 😅

On the off-chance anyone is interested, I just published a big batch of languages-related pages from my Obsidian vault to my personal wiki. Most can be found if you start clicking links from the Romance languages page, but I also published one on the 2020 Scots Wikipedia crisis.

I’m not really sure the best way to bring stuff over from Obsidian to here – it has to be somewhat manual because I have to rewrite the internal links, and I also have a bunch of notes that I’m not really sure are worth making public (and some that I’m certain aren’t). But doing these big batches seems less than ideal, too 😅 I also get concerned that doing them might flood the feed reader of people who subscribe to one of my RSS feeds (the “master feed” or a category-specific feed will include new wiki pages). That’s sorta why I waited until now even though I wrote most of these pages a couple of weeks ago (so only a few will appear in the 20 latest entries of the feed – unless you subscribe to my “Languages” feed in which case you’ll get quite a few, but I figure that’s what you signed up for 😂). I don’t know, would it be better to exclude wiki pages from RSS feeds entirely, and just make a little note post like this when I add something new that might be interesting to others? But then I’d get self-conscious making note posts because I don’t wanna come across like I’m saying, “I GUARANTEE this new wiki page’ll be worth your time!” Something tells me I’m overthinking it, haha.