You can now use IndieAuth to login to this site

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I’ve released a new version of Authl that has direct login support for IndieAuth. Also as of v0.1.6 it supports discovery via WebFinger, which should at least have Ryan a lot happier.

If you don’t know what any of the above means, this update probably doesn’t matter to you. 🙃

Random updates

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Just some miscellaneous things that I don’t feel are worth getting their own entries.

  • For the last few weeks I’ve been trying only using shampoo on occasion when I feel that my hair is truly dirty, on the theory that hair does a good job of self-regulating its moisture when it’s not being disrupted constantly. I’m finding that my hair is, as such, much more lustrous and also doesn’t tangle as easily. But it still feels greasy all the time.
  • Today (Saturday) I finally had the courage to go into Patchwerks and I managed to not completely destroy my wallet or make any regrettable space-chewing purchases. It’s a fun shop, and I played with a bunch of neat things including some modular and semi-modular gear, and I got to nerd out about my SIDstation with the folks who were working there (and one of the other customers talked about his MonoMachine as well). I ended up buying a couple of Pocket Operators, specifically the PO-20 Arcade and the PO-35 Speak. They’re both fun to play with.
  • The new Rocko’s Modern Life special (Netflix) was just as frenetic and dissociative as the original show was, but it also had a really good message. Also, yay, positive non-metaphorical trans representation in cartoons!
  • She-Ra season 3 (Netflix) was amazing and intense and I watched it all in one sitting. Hopefully Netflix lets this show keep going.
  • So is Infinity Train (Cartoon Network), which I watched the first half of. The Cartoon Network app for Apple TV is complete garbage though, especially for serialized content. It’s as if they never even test the thing at all.
  • I wonder if HBO Max will be worth it just to get a better CN viewing experience.
  • I keep forgetting how badly bulleted lists work for blog posts.
  • Huh, HBO Max is going to have a Dune prequel series called “Dune: The Sisterhood,” about the Bene Gesserit presumably in the years leading up to Paul’s birth. Interesting.
  • I should have been in bed two hours ago. I wonder if this is why I’m always having fibro flareups these days.
  • Oh and I’m back to using my CPAP again. It seems to be helping for now.

Comments more or less restored

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As far as I know, all of the comments have been restored and mechanically updated to work correctly. It’s pretty neat that I actually have comments dating back to 2003, that have survived four separate comment systems! (Movable Type, phpBB, Disqus, and now Isso.) And some of the oldest ones hadn’t been visible for years, since I never got around to migrating them over to my comics section before.

I also now have a script to automatically rehash the thread IDs in case the HMAC key leaks, as it did yesterday when I accidentally forgot to redact it from the sample templates repository, oops. I doubt anyone saw that but now it doesn’t matter if they did.

I do want to make a final migration script to try adding thread nesting to comments which quote other comments. I have a good idea of how to do it but it’s gonna be tricky and since Isso apparently uses oldest-to-newest sort on comments I don’t know how useful it’ll be, anyway. But I like doing that sort of thing.

I also have automated backups of my comment database, as well as having it checked into a git repository so I can do simple checkpointing whenever I do something funky with a migration (and it means I can also run the migration on my local machine instead of having to worry about hecking something up in production). And of course since Isso runs as its own systemd unit I can easily take it down while I’m doing a thing. (If you ever notice my comments completely vanishing for a while, that’s probably what happened. Unfortunately there isn’t any easy way to show a reasonable message when that’s what’s going on.)

So, now I feel a lot more confident in the privacy and longevity of my comments. Which is good because I have a lot more private stuff to talk about. 😛

More comment migration stuff

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Because my original import from phpBB to Disqus got botched, and the Disqus to Isso import lost a bunch of useful information, I ended up just going back to my old phpBB database and reimporting it directly into Isso. It mostly went well but there’s a few things that I need to go back and fix. This is my TODO list:

  • Unescape <a href> stuff that got converted to &lt;a href&gt; (example) DONE
  • Defunge the weirder bits of BBCode where e.g. [quote] turned into [quote:abcde] so it didn’t get converted to HTML (example) DONE
  • Clean up some older comments where I was a lot more accepting of Problematic Things (not gonna link to any but yeah they’re there) done, I think
  • If possible, reparent comments based on [quote]s (way easier said than done, I’ll probably have to do that manually)
  • Update: generate a new comment secret key and fix the thread IDs, because I made an oops DONE
  • Looks like when I did the reimport of phpBB stuff I accidentally removed some of the earliest Disqus-based comments (example, also) so I’ll have to do a bunch of reconciliation for that, fun fun… DONE

Also some of my earliest journal comics had comments posted via Movable Type’s comment system rather than phpBB, so I’ll want to also migrate those over (which I never got around to doing back when I was still using Movable Type to run my website); back then I just had “native” MT comments rendered in the MT template, which was Good Enough and I figured I’d get around to fixing it later. Well, it’s later. And that’s done. Even though I’m up way later than I meant to be. Oops.

Oh, and since I set up monsterid for the default avatars I feel like I should try to track down the email addresses of the folks who were posting to Disqus and fill that stuff in wherever possible.

I promise at some point I’ll get back to blogging about stuff other than the website itself.

Proper comment privacy! Yay!

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Okay, instead of trying to modify Isso to support thread IDs that are separate from page URIs, I ended up leveraging the way that Publ request routing works and just made all thread IDs consist of a /<signature>/<entry_id> path, where <signature> is computed from an HMAC signature on the entry ID and a secret key. So, now the thread ID is only visible to people who have access to the entry in the first place (as long as my signing key never leaks), and the fact that Isso only uses the thread ID when generating a reply email link isn’t a problem.

So, for example, this entry has an entry ID of 4678, and the generated thread ID is (for example) /890824f4d450d4ac/4678, so when someone gets a reply notification the email will say something like:

such-and-such <foo@bar.baz> wrote:

Good point!

Link to comment: http://beesbuzz.biz/890824f4d450d4ac/4678

which will then redirect back here.

It’s not ideal, of course, but it works well enough.

Of course, to do this I had to migrate all of my thread IDs again, but hopefully this is the last time I’ll have to do that, and it also takes care of all my legacy Movable Type-era thread IDs. It does set a bad precedent that I’ll have to migrate thread IDs more in the future if I ever change my publishing system but the fact I was able to get away with not doing that for so long is a pretty good testament to my laziness, which I ended up having to pay interest on in the future anyway. So, lesson learned.

Also, this approach is even better privacy than what I was hoping to get out of the Disqus method; as it stood before, someone on my friends list (or who saw an Auth: * entry) could have theoretically figured out the way I was determining private thread IDs and used that to explore comments on entries they don’t have access to, and also there was an issue that if I ever took a public entry private, its thread ID would remain the same as when it was public. But this way, it’s unguessable as long as my HMAC key never leaks, and if my HMAC key does leak I can just reset it and regenerate the thread IDs. (Edit from the future: Ha. Haha. Ha hahaha ha haha. Ha.)

This approach is also useful for things other than Publ; my advice to anyone who’s using Isso for comments is that instead of using the actual entry URI as the thread ID, they should have some sort of stable mechanism for forwarding an opaque thread ID to the actual entry, and use that. This just happened to be really easy to implement for Publ since Publ already supports opaque ID chasing.

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Comment integration blues

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So, there’s an issue with Isso which will require a bit of refactoring/feature work on Isso, which I’d might as well try to do since I can’t be the only one who needs to decouple their thread IDs from their URLs.

Anyway, this’ll probably mean that I’ll have to redo the comment import at some point, so don’t get too attached to anything you’ve posted so far.

Update: Rather than doing the right thing for now I’ve opted to just use the shortlink as the identifier. This means that future site migrations will be more painful, and also I need to do some more work to migrate in the old comments from older entries, but I guess the idea of a single universal migration path is a bit silly anyway.

Moving away from Disqus

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So, Disqus has served me pretty well for quickly embedding comments into my website, but there are a few pretty big downsides to it:

  • No support for private/hidden threads
  • No way to disable random discovery of hidden threads, by design
  • They’re trying to make the whole Internet into their own forum rather than providing “just” a comment system (not that anyone even uses it the way they intend)
  • Their UX keeps getting more and more cumbersome and annoying

I’m going to look into alternative comment systems, ideally ones I can self-host. Isso looks promising, if a bit sparse. So does Schnack. (I’m going to try Isso first because its setup/requirements are far less onerous.)

Anyway, thanks Passerine for bringing the privacy leak issue to my attention. I figured there was probably something like that lurking in the shadows, but I didn’t think it was quite so close to the surface…

Long transitions

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Tonight, my set at Song Fight! Live went really well. There were some rough patches due to the usual nature of the beast but we managed to hold it together and afterwards everyone told me how great it sounded. I’m overall happy with that.

An “interesting” thing has been happening regarding how people deal with my gender stuff lately though.

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Song Fight! Live 2019

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I forgot to mention it here, but I’m going to be in Madison, WI for Song Fight! Live this weekend! I’ll be performing my set sometime Friday night, and will also (probably) be playing drums for one or two other acts throughout the weekend, and (hopefully) debuting a new song (yet to be written, as I do not yet know the title) on Saturday!

Anyway if you’re in or near Madison and can make it to The Rigby and want to watch me flail in front of a crowd, now’s your chance.

(We’ll also try to have a live stream although right now there’s some logistics to work out on that front, so no guarantees.)

Anyway I’ll also be in Madison until Tuesday and don’t currently have plans for Sunday or Monday, so if I know anyone in the area it’d be fun to meet up and do something I guess? I mean, assuming I don’t get murdered for my anti-Trump song.

Birdsite

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So, my Mastodon instance of choice is having notification/sending/receiving issues again, and rather than doing what I usually do in this circumstance (temporarily switch back to mastodon.social or see what other instances I’ve been on are still around – spoiler: very few of them) I decided to just go without instant-update social networking for most of the day.

But then I still needed that little dopamine rush, and so I decided to try Twitter again (at least, more than my usual “post some stuff and maybe check my notifications” tendencies), and friends, let me tell you… Twitter is awful.

I’d forgotten just how much of a hellhole of advertising, “engagement”-optimizing, outrage-inducing chatter it is.

On the plus side, a lot of people seem to really enjoy the anti-ads I’ve been running for a few weeks (for $1 a day). I think I’ll expand that out into other subject areas.

But what’s even better is just getting unaddicted to commercial social media. Yikes.