Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Navel-Gazing

WordPress and Migrations, Oh My

October 7, 2024
2 Comments

I really intended to spend the rest of my blogging life, such as it is, on self-hosted WordPress. It satisfies my basic needs: I control my own data and I can type words into it from pretty much anywhere. (I’m using Obsidian right now, in fact.) It is not a perfectly resilient platform in that it’s dynamically served, so I need the developers to continue to patch and update it or it’ll wind up as a security flaw, but WordPress.org always looked pretty stable and has been fine for a long, long time.

Welp.

I’m not convinced that current events require me to move from a practical standpoint. There are enough websites using WordPress so that there’s strong motivation for someone to continue maintaining the open source version or a fork of said version. For a while, at least, but that removes the immediate urgency.

However, I think practically speaking I should understand how I’d move.

There is no dynamic blogging platform, self-hosted or not, that fits my needs. Basically that’s a longevity issue; every migration means I’m losing a bit of fidelity. Redirects I didn’t handle right, weird custom WordPress shortcodes, all that jazz. If you look you can see the places where my migrations between MovableType and Tumblr and WordPress screwed up small details. Nobody notices but me, I know.

Still, if I’m gonna migrate yet again, I’d like to wind up with something as simple as possible on the back end. This probably means a static site generator. That’s cool, there are plenty of those.
(Image embeds on old posts are gonna look bad but that’s OK, the information doesn’t tend to rely on exact image positioning.)

The big problem is of course comments. Self-hosted comment systems for static site generators exist. Hashover is interesting but fairly unmaintained (2 years since last commit). Staticman is likewise pretty fallow. I imagine I can figure out a way to pull over comments as part of the static files, I’m just worried about allowing ongoing commentary.

So what if I don’t? I’ve gotten a handful of comments which were really cool over many years of blogging. I mirror this blog to Dreamwidth anyhow, and my friends tend to comment there.

Avoiding the problem entirely seems like one good answer.

Another neat answer would be pushing all my posts to Mastodon and Bluesky, which would be a trivial exercise, and letting people comment there if they wanted. Not really user friendly and many of those cool comments were from non-tech savvy people; I think I’d lose some functionality. Still rather attractive from a distributed Web standpoint.

What if I also wrote some code to pull back replies to those posts and show them on the blog page? Substantial loss of control over spam, is what. Might be fun anyhow.

Notes: 2022-11-23

November 23, 2022
Leave a Comment

Recovery from covid continues. Allow me to express the sentiment that wearing a mask is a very small price to pay for avoiding literally three weeks of reduced capacity, one week of which was complete downtime.

I installed an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, so if you’re a Mastodon person you can effectively follow this blog at @Bryant. This works very well for me, because it means I can easily put my longer-form permanent thoughts here and everything I post on my main Mastodon account (@BryantD@dice.camp) can be transient.

Tim Bray has an excellent article on practical uses of the blockchain. While he was at AWS, he was tasked with being part of a group that looked into whether or not AWS should provide blockchain services. Spoiler: they found no use cases that require a blockchain over a database. Distributed ledgers (which do not require blockchains) are handy.

The Man of the Hole is an absolutely wild story. He was an indigenous native of the Amazon rainforest whose tribe was wiped out by Brazilian settlers sometime after 1970 or so. We don’t know what his name was, because Brazil successfully avoided disturbing his solitary existence for over two decades. He died this August. I can’t imagine how lonely his life must have been, but apparently he knew there were people keeping an eye out for him and I guess he never showed signs of wanting contact. Read the article. The Wikipedia page also seems pretty good.

Interesting Rian Johnson interview (by Walter Chaw, who is great). I liked what he had to say about the meta-textual layer of an all star cast: what expectations does that create in the audience?

I want to invent a tabletop RPG mechanic around the Go First Dice. Follow the link for a deep dive, but the summary is that it’s possible to number four 12 sided dice such that when four people roll them, there will never be a tie and every possible ordering of the results is equally possible. In other words, everyone has an equal chance to roll highest, second highest, third highest, and fourth highest. (Second place is a set of steak knives, of course.)

Phew. Lots of backlog today.

I knew that Lagos was one of the biggest cities in the world, and growing fast. I did not realize that it’s the east end of a 600 mile stretch of coast that’s quickly turning into a megapolis.

Command Line!

October 30, 2022
Leave a Comment 
awk '/in_reply_to_screen_name/ { print $3 }' tweets.json | sed 's/[","]//g' | sort | uniq -c | sort | grep -v BryantD | tail -20
  56 graphxgrrl
  57 patrickoduffy
  58 jessnevins
  59 othergretchen
  60 GlobeChadFinn
  61 ryantomorrow
  65 smakofsky
  66 seclectech
  69 multiplexer
  73 gentlyepigrams
  75 rmd1023
  76 mgrasso
  79 JimHenleyMusic
  79 Wolf_six
  89 carlrigney
 102 _r_o_n_e_
 107 rone_____1
 129 emilytheslayer
 306 rdonoghue
 341 ce_murphy

Exiting Twitter

October 28, 2022
Leave a Comment

[Reproduced from Twitter, slightly edited. I’m fiddling around in a lightweight way with a tool to turn Twitter archives into HTML pages and/or WordPress posts, while I’m at it. Who knows if I’ll get anywhere with it.]

If you have any qualms about a Musk-managed Twitter, now is a decent time to think about whether or not you want to hang around. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer. Here’s my plan. I think there’s a decent chance Musk will turn around and off-load Twitter within the next six months, thanks to the amount of debt that banks are taking on as part of this, so I’m not going to do anything drastic; no hurry for me.

I’m gonna leave my bots turned off. I don’t think they were serving any super-important purpose, except maybe the startsmall bot, but life goes on.

I am going read-only. Twitter’s a useful information site for me so I’m not going to stop reading it, but I don’t need to post there. I’ve been building some workflows to make it easier to collect random thoughts; I can do semi-daily posts to https://popone.innocence.com.

I downloaded all my Twitter data. You should too if you’re thinking about leaving, even if you don’t know what to do with it. There might be tools for the less technical someday.

My key links now live at https://innocence.com/~durrell/linktree/ — I own that domain name, so that’s a persistent place to find me. I’m on Cohost and Mastodon, although I’m not putting a huge amount of effort into either of those.

I’ll reevaluate in six months or so. Earlier if it makes sense, but I’ve got a reminder set for May.

The best social media advice I have right now is to spin up a Discord for your buddies. I have one centered around movies. It’s easy and free and you don’t need hundreds of members — just invite your pals and let them invite a few of people and you can get a nice space. Why Discord? It’s popular, many people already have a login, and they don’t need to make a new one to join your Discord. As boring as it is to go with the market leader, it’s sometimes smart. Also, assuming Slack is the alternative, I prefer being in the target audience — Slack is in the corporate market.

If you like a social media service which is more in your control,Darius Kazemi’s https://runyourown.social is a very good approach.

Finally, I continue to be deeply grateful that my random Tweets about Eric Hargan went mildly viral. There are quite a few people I Twitter-met that way who are insanely cool; I’ve been glad to get little windows into your worlds and have occasional conversations. Thank you.

Letterboxd Feed Update

June 15, 2022
Leave a Comment

I love copying my Letterboxd reviews over here, but I hate how much they dominate my feed. This week I started rewriting my script so that it’ll batch reviews up a week at a time. Gonna take a little more thought about formatting and such, but I’ve got the basic aggregation working and the output looks like this:

Year: 2022
    Week: 9
        Polytechnique, 2009 - ★★★★★ (contains spoilers)
    Week: 10
        Forbidden City, U.S.A., 1989 - ★★★½
        The Last Days of Disco, 1998 - ★★½
        A Bay of Blood, 1971 - ★★★

So that’s cool. This’ll also let me comfortably grab the whole backlog from Letterboxd via their export feature, which I didn’t want to do because a lot of my older reviews (from, say, Fantasia) are one-liners.

Letterboxd Movie Reviews, Part 2

May 3, 2022
Leave a Comment

My code is basically working, including spoiler protection and some other fun stuff. It’s more complex than it needs to be since I’m also saving entries to a database, plus it includes a lot of Letterboxd specific processing. Oh, and I’m using basic auth because I’m lazy. Possibly I’ll clean it up and release it soon; I’d just want to make it more of a generic RSS feed to WordPress engine.

Letterboxd Movie Reviews

April 30, 2022
Leave a Comment

I’m experimenting with posting my Letterboxd reviews here, since eventually you have to learn your lesson about hosting your own content. We’ll see how it goes. I’d prefer to filter out the ratings without reviews.

Tech Note: JournalPress Plugin

November 8, 2020
Leave a Comment

This is very obvious in retrospect: the reason my WordPress to Dreamwidth crossposting stopped working is because Dreamwidth made security changes and as a result you don’t get to use your password for the API any more. Good change! If you cluelessly don’t pay attention, though, your WordPress plugin will stop working.

Solution: go to the Mobile Post Settings page and generate yourself a new API key. Easy.

This is a very light excuse for a weekly post but man, this week was kind of disfocused for various reasons.