Rambles that are fluffy, by fluffy
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote about the state of WebSub support in feed readers. I’ve noticed a few incoming mentions from folks citing it as definitive (when that was never my intention), and so I decided to check to see if things have changed. I’m happy to say that it has!
In reply to: Re: Intelligent webmention sending
FWIW, Pushl also handles incremental webmention updates, including support for removals of targets and deletions of articles. Right now the only thing I feel like it’s missing for most IndieWeb folks is h-feed support, which should be fairly easy to add (I just need to get around to it).
It also could do with some better retry logic (namely saving failures in a queue for next time), which is also On The List.
I feel like it’s been a little while since my last checkin post so let’s do one now, I guess.
.org non-profit!
Yes, it sucks that the registry behind the .org gTLD has been sold to a for-profit corporation. But this article, and many others like it, keep on propagating a really messy misconception which I feel has done active harm:
The decision shocked the internet industry, not least because the .org registry has always been operated on a non-profit basis and has actively marketed itself as such. The suffix “org” on an internet address – and there are over 10 million of them – has become synonymous with non-profit organizations.
The Register is at least being careful to be technically correct1 here, in that the registrar is non-profit and has “become synonymous” with non-profit organizations. But the .org gTLD was never intended to be for non-profit organizations. In the original RFC, the intention was that the gTLDs were:
.gov: for government institutions.edu: for educational institutions.com: for commercial enterprises.mil: for military use.org: for everything else; the “org” was short for “organizational” as in “we don’t know where else to put it for now”This was also when .net was created (despite not being in the RFC), referring to network services and infrastructure providers.
I finally got around to doing the on-site store page like I said I should do. For now I’m using ecwid which was easy enough to integrate, although longer-term I’m going to probably switch to Snipcart or maybe try rolling my own thing with the Square cart API.
For now I only have the books and pins listed but tonight I’ll work on listing my art prints as well.
Update: Ugh ecdwid limits you to only 10 products without having to pay a monthly fee. Wellp, guess I’m going to be switching to something else sooner rather than later. 😐
Update 2: Okay now I’m on Storenvy, whose hobbyist tier seems to actually be useful for hobbyists.
So, I don’t know if something changed in iOS or in iTunes Cloud Library or what, but now the cloud smart playlist thing is working a lot better now; at the very least, my cloud-synchronized smart playlist is at least doing the proper album shuffle on my phone.
It still doesn’t seem to be updating what’s in the playlist based on what’s been played/skipped recently, though. But it’s hard to tell if that just takes a while for the play stats to get updated and propagated or what. To be fair this is a hard problem.
Meanwhile, I also finally upgraded my laptop to Catalina. The new Music app is taking for-freaking-ever to sync over my library. But at least it claims to support it, after clicking “Please don’t sign me up for Apple Music” about a dozen times, and then once again saying “yes I’m sure” when I tell it to turn on syncing my actual library. But this also gave me an opportunity to see how much of my stuff is broken; the Native Instruments installer is working now, and while NI still doesn’t recommend upgrading, all of their software that I use seems to be supported.
Unfortunately, my desktop’s audio interface isn’t currently supported on Catalina, so I won’t be upgrading that any time soon. Presonus have said that they will be releasing a Catalina update for it after all (after years of saying they wouldn’t release any more updates) but there’s no timetable for it. If there’s no update in, say, 3 months, I might have to start looking into new audio hardware, and that’s expensive and I’ve yet to see another audio interface which supports (or at least advertises) the hardware submix functionality that I use on the FireStudio. I got used to that when I set up my Twitch setup but have found it to be genuinely useful for keeping my headphone and speaker mix separate regardless. It’s nice not having to deal with muting my connected microphones every time I switch to my speakers.
In reply to: Re: Hello, Indieweb!
Hey there Matt, welcome aboard.
I also manually send webmentions for each link in an article, but it would be nice to make a script to do that hard work for me. Additionally, I should make accounts on more sites (like Twitter) and join a service like brid.gy to sync my content between them. I would also like to experiment with owning my issues and pull requests, but that’s a thought for another day.
In addition to webmention.js which Jamie already, uh, mentioned, I’ve also written a tool called Pushl which automates the sending of webmentions. I have it set to run as part of my post-publish git hook on my site’s repository, as well as in a cron job that runs every 15 minutes. It requires an RSS or Atom feed at present (adding h-feed support is on my TODO list) but it only uses the feed for post discovery, rather than for target discovery, so it doesn’t need to be a full-content feed or whatever. It also maintains state so it can handle deletes and edits and so on.
There’s a few other automated Webmention sending things out there, like a lot of IndieWeb folks use webmention.app which can be used in combination with IFTTT, although I can’t speak to the reliability of that solution.
So, GeekGirlCon was yesterday and today, and for once I vended at it, having been put on the waitlist every time I’d applied for the last few years.
I already have quite a few thoughts about how things went and how they could have gone better for me, and my thoughts about my future as a potential convention vendor. Which is to say, I probably won’t be doing this again – but not because of anything wrong with GeekGirlCon. (Just to get that out of the way.)
Note that this isn’t my first time tabling at GGC, as I had previously done so with the Seattle Indies in 2017. But that was a completely different setup for a completely different intention – promoting games and the Indies organization.