Navel Gazing

So here we are! As threatened/promised over a year ago, I’m moving off WordPress. Matt Mullenweg has not gotten particularly more relaxed about anything; last week he decided to tell a CSS framework to change names because their current name is similar to his company name. Given that the CSS framework is named Automatic, similar to Mullenweg’s company name, you can sort of see it, but really? No. They already added a disclaimer on their Web site, and “automatic” is a very generic term. I have still had enough of Mullenweg. Time to move.

It’s with some sadness that I decided it was time to turn off comments on this blog. I’ve enjoyed many of them over the years, even the guy who implied I was jury tampering. However, two changes have affected my desire to keep running them: First, I want to get off WordPress thanks to the dubious lawsuits and Internet fights that have been churning along for months now. This is not a stable platform any more. That’ll be easier if I just have to preserve old comments and I don’t try and add a comment section to a static page blog. ...

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. ...

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@popone.innocence.com. 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. ...

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

[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. ...

Got a wild hair, updated my ten-years-fallow technical operations blog with a reading list I wrote up for my last job. This inexorably led to changing themes and doing some maintenance. This sort of industriousness will never last.

Finished up the work discussed previously; I’m now planning on running an update weekly on Monday, which will aggregate the previous week’s reviews. There are working spoiler blocks. An example post: Movie Reviews: 6/27/2022 to 7/3/2022. The code for all this is now public at https://github.com/BryantD/letterboxd-feed-wp.

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.

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.