Template refactoring

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I’ve done a bunch of refactoring/simplification on my website templates. I think everything still works but if you see something funky, please let me know.

There’s also a lot more I need to fix, especially redoing the CSS to be cleaner and on the comics subsection (which has an entirely different set of templates that aren’t built on HTML5 semantic containers at all), but that can definitely wait.

(I also really want to redo novembeat at some point since I have a better idea of how to structure it now, but that also will wait.)

Server rebuild status

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So the nice thing about cleansing fire is it makes me realize that I had a lot of websites that I didn’t really need to keep going, just because I, like, never touch any of them or they’re just for fun.

For example, I was the only user of Reminder Me, and I’ve been moving all of my chore reminders over to the iOS Reminders app anyway, now that it does a better job of it than my crappy little RSS “app.” Given that it was one of the first Python things I wrote (and was a Python CGI, no less) and I’d been planning on rewriting it entirely if I decided I needed it anymore anyway, it doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort of getting it working with nginx. Plus, it was on Python 2, which is a major pain to even deploy anymore.

It was fun having a “band” website but I hadn’t substantially updated it since the release of Refactor back in 2015. So, I’ll just make it redirect to my bandcamp. I’ll probably want to get my static large-file storage bit up separately though.

Similarly, I don’t really see any point in putting my professional audio portfolio back online at this time; it was woefully outdated and never got a lot of traffic from people looking for what I was offering anyway. So, meh to that one.

I was hosting a couple of small websites for my parents and another for a friend, and I unfortunately didn’t think to back them up in advance. It would have made my life a lot easier if I’d not been going so impulsively. Impulse control, what even is it? Anyway, hopefully all that content still exists elsewhere.

Mostly I’m just noticing just how many heckin' domains I have and how pointless most of them are. Especially now that most browsers don’t allow emoji domains anymore.

Whoops

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The plus side of using sqlite for everything: all my site data is just stored in files that are easy to recover!

The minus side of using sqlite for everything: way too easy to clobber newer content while incrementally restoring backups.

Well that blew up…

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So, I found out that my wildcard SSL certificates weren’t being renewed, which in turn was because certbot needed to be able to edit DNS records in order to do so. In investigating that I found that I couldn’t install the latest version of certbot and its Linode plugin, which led me to discover that my server was actually running the i386 ubuntu core with amd64 grafted onto it, instead of being actual amd64, which was in turn because this server had been provisioned years ago and i386 was the supported configuration.

So I went through the exercise of trying to switch over to amd64, found that the best path forward was to back up all my data (which was already done since I keep incremental backups every night) and just reimage. Which seemed like a pain. But the alternative for a more graceful transition was to set up a new VPS, migrate stuff across, and then decommission the old VPS, which would have also been a pain.

So anyway I decided that since my server was still basically running 32-bit and would be stuck there forever if I didn’t rip off the band-aid, I’d rip off the band-aid.

While I was at it, I’d been meaning to switch to nginx for years, and this was a good enough excuse as any.

Read more…

Disabled dark mode for now

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Ugh, I really want to support dark mode (it’s a big accessibility win!) but right now my stylesheets are such a mess and Isso does a couple of aggravating things that makes it hard to correctly do dark mode themes. Namely that it provides its own inline stylesheet that is difficult to override correctly (without just throwing the whole thing out and remaking it from the ground up).

I wish more things used CSS variables by default – they’re very well-supported now and make it a lot easier to reason around themes. One of these days I’m going to get around to redoing all my stylesheets and use them for all colors and probably for most of my sizing.

New store page

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I finally got around to making a better store page. It’s still not great but it’s better than just linking to either my Threadless or Storenvy or whatever, and I’ll be able to backfill a bunch more of my items into it eventually.

There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to change of course, but this at least gives me a hook to setting up my own PayPal/Stripe/etc. cart as well.

Anyway I’m glad that Publ is in a state where it’s gotten easier and easier for me to make new sites from scratch with it. And I also released a new version of Publ with some shiny new features.

Gah

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Why didn’t anyone tell me that the previous blog post was posted as a very-broken comics post

Some template changes

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I’ve changed my site templates a bit more, to make CWs work a bit better. In particular, now entries which have a CW will also hide the text behind a <details> on the page (for example), and similarly I’ve hidden CWed images on individual comic pages (for example). Comic images will also (finally!) be blurred in the OpenGraph tags, as well, after one too many “oops"es when posting links to Slack demonstrating how my CWs work.

I’ve also improved compatibility with Bridgy Fed and with the way that webmention microformats are supposed to work in the first place, per a conversation in which I learned that I wasn’t actually using reply types correctly. (You may have noticed a bunch more micro-posts on the chatter section as a result of me fixing this as well. I also need to finally implement a thing so I can properly filter that stuff out of the little "latest posts” box on the main page!)

The sample templates repository has been updated, accordingly.

As always, thanks to the various IndieWeb folks, especially Ryan and Kevin for setting me straight on this issue.

Edit: It didn’t take me very long to implement the Publ feature change. I went ahead and cleaned up a bunch of query generator code while I was at it. Also I think I found a bug in PonyORM. Nope, I think I was just being hopelessly optimistic about a thing.

Auth security tweak

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I’m working on improving some of the https-related security in Authl, in particular making it so that if a site is configured with https, then it’ll only send the security cookie over https. This reduces the chances of a certain kind of possible security issue, but it also means that if you normally access the site with http://beesbuzz.biz instead of https://beesbuzz.biz it’ll show you as being signed out, and if you click the “log in” link it’ll ask you to sign in again even if you were already signed in.

I have a fix for that in mind, but it might cause a potential redirection loop problem in some cases so I’m not going to implement it until I’ve determined the scope of the problem and figured out if I need further workarounds.

Update: Fix is implemented and being tested on this site. Authl and Publ updates pending other folks trying it out.