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.

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. 🙃

RSS: there’s nothing better

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David Yates wrote a great defense of RSS which I completely agree with. To summarize the salient points:

  • RSS is open
  • RSS works
  • RSS is very well-supported by a lot of things
  • RSS is a suitable name as shorthand for “RSS/Atom” because the name “Atom” is overloaded and basically anything that supports Atom also supports RSS and vice-versa

(Note that there’s one inaccuracy in that since that article was written, Twitter has moved over to algorithmic manipulation of the timeline. This can currently be disabled but who knows how long that’ll last?)

Most IndieWeb folks are also really gung-ho about mf2 and h-feed, and while I don’t see any reason not to support it (and it certainly does have some advantages in terms of it being easier to integrate into a system that isn’t feed-aware or convenient to set up multiple templates), I’ve run into plenty of pitfalls when it comes to actually adding mf2 markup to my own site (for example, having to deal with ambiguities with nesting stuff and dealing with below-the-fold content, not to mention a lot of confusion over things like p-summary vs. e-content), and so far there doesn’t seem to be any real advantage to doing so since everything that supports h-feed also supports RSS/Atom, as far as I’m aware.

For me the only obvious advantage to h-feed is that you can add it to one-size-fits-none templating systems like Tumblr where you don’t have any control over the provided RSS feed, but in those situations there’s not really a lot more added flexibility you’re going to get by adding h-feed markup anyway. I guess it also makes sense if you’re hand-authoring your static site, but that just means it becomes even easier to get things catastrophically wrong.

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Keeping it personal

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I just read this great essay by Matthias Ott. It does a great job of summarizing the state of affairs of blogging and social media, and how we can try to escape the current orbit to get back to where the web was meant to be.

I especially like the bit about “Don’t do it like me. Do it like you.” Because that is exactly why I’ve been building Publ the way I have; I have specific goals in mind for how I manage, maintain, and organize my site, and these goals are very different than what other existing blogging and site-management software has in mind. The fact that I post so many different kinds of content and that they need different organizational structures to make sense makes this a somewhat unique problem. I’d like to think that Publ is a very general piece of web-publishing software, but it’s probably so general because I have such specific needs. Which makes for an interesting paradox, I suppose.

I guess what I’m saying is that I want to see more types of web-based publishing where the schema and layout fit the content, not the other way around. But it also needs to be able to interoperate with other stuff, while still making sense from a producer-consumer UX perspective.

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