busybee fluffy rambles

It’s been nearly two years since I decided to quit my job and go full-time indie. Now I’m thinking of just going back into the world of gainful full-time employment.

I’ve been pretty busy with Publ and Pushl lately, mostly doing stuff to get Webmention support to a place where I’m happy with it (most of Publ’s recent improvements have been with the goal of making Pushl work better with it, although the side effect has been to also improve its cacheability which is a win for everyone).

Anyway, what’s cool about this is I’m already receiving a handful of natural webmentions, in particular on the ActivityPub rant which tells me that a lot of people are looking into ActivityPub for various reasons. (All of the webmentions thus far have been indications of folks “favoriting” it, which I choose to interpret as people agreeing with it.)

While getting this support in (and using IndieWebify.Me to verify my h-card/h-entry markup among other things) I learned about fed.brid.gy, which is a service that will convert webmentions into ActivityPub activity, for sites which configure a couple of request routes. Obviously I’m going to add direct support for that (in a way which will apparently be compatible, conveniently enough).

Anyway, this blog entry is mostly a test of that, because adding the redirection rule was pretty simple.

Week 3’s curriculum covered the Moving Easy Program (a simple but effective stretching and minor strength training regimen), pacing and planning, treatment evaluation, and decision making strategies (both for treatment seeking and for other aspects of life).

Last week’s action plan was to do 10 minutes of yoga in the morning, 4 times. I was mostly successful, but only did it 3 times, as today I slept in from having to work late last night (doing a final build of the iOS app for Borealis).

Throughout today’s session we also got some useful affirmations that I can put onto my affirmation board:

• Practice makes progress
• You choose
• Are you choosing pain?

This week was a lot more comprehensive than the first week, and it feels like a lot more happened in about the same amount of time.

The major areas of focus were: problem-solving, dealing with difficult emotions (especially useful for me right now), physical activity, relaxation techniques, and dealing with fatigue.

I’ve been building Publ with IndieWeb principles in mind. One of the things I’m playing with right now is adding in very basic support for WebMention.

A few months ago I signed up for the “Living Well with Chronic Pain” workshop that’s put on a few times a year by my HMO. It’s a six-week course that meets once a week. I figure it would be helpful to share the key insights from each session here, since I know a lot of my followers have similar issues and would like to benefit as well.

The textbook for the workshop is Living a Healthy Life with Chronic Pain (affiliate link). It also comes with a pain-management exercise audiobook on CD.

So, my trusty Presonus Firestudio Project is starting to give up the ghost, and it looks like the new macOS Mojave won’t support it anyway. And it’s my last bit of Firewire hardware so I’d might as well come limping along into the USB era, right?

UPDATE: It looks like I still have some time with this 10-year-old interface. Phew.

Inspired by a conversation I had last night, and not all of these are covered by the more well-known lists.

Hey guess what!

I added a new feature to Publ! It lets you wrap text closely around images that are floated, via a CSS attribute which is pretty widely-supported but kind of annoying to deal with. Which is to say that Publ itself isn’t really doing all that much work here but it was easy to add some plumbing into it to make the browser able to do all the work for you. (So far the only entries on my site using this function are this one and the GRS article which I updated to use it a little bit.)

It’s kind of neat, so please check it out.