busybee fluffy rambles

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.

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 remember how I was using iTunes Match and a smart shuffle app to manage my music?

Well, that hasn’t ended up working all that well.

The smart shuffle app, in particular, is incredibly unreliable and slow, and also my iTunes Match-backed library has… Issues.

Like, a lot of songs won’t sync over because of an “unspecified error” (I assume label interference, because they’re all songs from a particular label as far as I can tell), and a lot of other songs won’t sync over because they appear as “duplicates” since like… sometimes I have more than one instance of a song across multiple albums. Best-of compilations and singles releases and so on. Sometimes it does legitimately find a duplicate I want to get rid of but most of the time it’s just… not. And even when it does, it’s a crapshoot as to which one it decides is the duplicate and which is the “real” one.

Like. My whole thing is listening to albums, not individual songs, and if a song appears in multiple albums, I want it to be played within all of those albums.

At least they seem to have figured out that there are sometimes multiple versions of a song by the same artist and on different albums (like, it never seems to show the various Past Masters versions of Beatles songs as duplicates of the album versions). (Oh I guess I talked about that last time too. Obviously this is important to me.)

I’ve also noticed that playing songs on the iPhone doesn’t update the play stats in my cloud library, and even with the enormity of my library I’m still hearing albums more frequently than I’d like.

I feel like there has got to be a better way than any of this.

Oh wait, there was one, and Apple stopped bothering to support it.

It looks like there are some percent-20 characters I need to clean up and I should try to show your posts in chronological order—so this has already been great for catching problems.

Yep, I’d noticed you weren’t handling spaces or dt-published. Glad you caught that too. :)

One thing to keep in mind is that your posts will really only show up under the first tag in the list.

Makes sense. What happens if I change what the primary tag is, and then re-ping?

Anyway, great work on Publ. It’s cool to see what you’re doing with logins—love the idea of IndieAuth on tilde.club.

Just to clarify, Publ can’t run on tilde.club as far as I know (it needs the ability to run WSGI apps); my mention of tilde.club was specifically about people having their IndieWeb profile live on there but delegating IndieAuth to an external endpoint (e.g. IndieLogin) – in theory a tilde.club user could delegate to an external endpoint which spoofs a different tilde.club identity (such as AnyAuth), which is an issue with the URL validation step of the IndieAuth spec.

Authl’s URL validation already adopts my proposed change, where the validated URL must be more specific than the requested one (for example, http://tilde.club/~fluffy can become http://tilde.club/~fluffy/ or http://tilde.club/~fluffy/blog/, but it can’t become http://tilde.club/~root or http://tilde.club).