Blog & IndieWeb

I’ve been putting off upgrading from Jekyll 3.10. Partly late-adopter habit, partly because my setup worked fine, and a version bump seemed simple enough. I should know better by now. It mostly was.

I keep finding new gaps in my webmention implementation. Mentions coming in from Bluesky, Lemmy and Lobsters were showing up with no author at all, just a blank avatar and an empty name. Reddit and Hacker News bookmarks fared a bit better, with a username attached, but got flattened into a generic “bookmarked” icon with no indication of where the post had actually been shared. Lobsters mentions also carried the wrong published date. None of these felt like they were pulling their weight compared to a proper webmention from a blog or Mastodon.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time on the receiving end of webmentions, from adding support for them in the first place through to fetching them at build time and rendering them server-side so the discussion section doesn’t flicker in over JS. What I’d never actually done was send the other half. Every link I’ve ever made out to another IndieWeb site has just sat there, silently not telling anyone I’d linked to them.

My daily reading is deliberate at this point. I’ve settled on a small set of tools that surface the kind of internet I actually want, rather than whatever’s performing well today.

Back in 2022 I added webmention support to this blog. The implementation worked but it was entirely client-side, so the page would load, JS would fire, fetch from webmention.io, and render the results into the DOM. With JS disabled or on a slow connection, the discussion section was just empty. It worked well enough that I didn’t touch it for three years, but the rate-limit situation had been silently catching visitors out and eventually I started pulling at the thread.

I have a “now playing” widget on my /now page that shows the last track scrobbled to Last.fm. It’s powered by a GitHub Actions workflow that polls the Last.fm API every hour and commits the result to the repo. It worked fine, but quietly polluted my commit history.

I was talking to someone about foobar2000 and how prolific I’d been in the customisation scene back in the day. I knew I’d written up a detailed config somewhere, with screenshots and everything, but the domain was long gone and I hadn’t thought about it in years. On a whim I punched moglenstar.net into the Wayback Machine and there it was, cached HTML from a site I’d let lapse almost two decades ago. That led to more searching.

I’ve been running Known as my social posting hub for a while now. It’s a solid IndieWeb-friendly CMS that handles status updates, photos, and syndication to various silos. Recently I upgraded my instance for the first time in about four years, which meant dealing with all the little tweaks I’d made to core templates over that time. Previously I’d just edited core files directly, which meant upgrades would wipe my changes. After four years I had no idea what I’d even modified (I’ll go into the archaeology of that in another post). This time I decided to do it properly, and ended up writing four plugins.

This year I moved the blog from GitHub Pages’ built-in Jekyll to a GitHub Actions workflow, then added .txt URL support for posts. Inspired by Terence Eden’s blog post about text-only websites.

I’ve been fiddling with an instance of Known over on social.omgmog.net. As part of my fiddling I’ve been trying out some of the plugins for Known. I came across the “Render Emoji Unicode” plugin but it was using an old library, and referencing an old version of Twemoji, so I updated it to use the latest Twemoji library.

I’ve added Webmention support to the posts on this blog. Webmentions are a method for websites to know that they’ve been linked to (or mentioned) from elsewhere on the web.

If you’ve used any framework or language for long enough, you might find that you’ve got parts of your code that are not using the language in it’s current state to it’s full potential.

I decided that I want to show an image next to posts in my “article list” type pages in Jekyll. It would be tedious to go through each post and add a piece of Yaml frontmatter to indicate a “post image” (even though I had this at one point in the past!), so how could I automate this?

Last week GitHub finally added support for some useful plugins to their implementation of Jekyll used for GitHub Pages. The most notable of these is the support for the jekyll-redirect-from plugin.

2014 has been heralded as “the year of flat-file websites”. This blog in fact uses Jekyll to generate the very blog post you are reading. I’ve been using Jekyll in some form since early 2012, and for me it works perfectly as a means to publish content.

Here’s a quick tip for an approach I’ve started using to split post content at a given point for displaying in an archive page, without using a plugin.

If you’re a returning visitor to blomg you might notice some changes to the design.

Adding some functionality to Jekyll to allow integration of YouTube videos is a pretty easy task. First we need a couple of things: A nice video hosted on YouTube The embed code for the video A Jekyll theme that supports video embedding

I decided it was time that I gave some attention to the design of my Jekyll-powered blog. I’ve been using a slightly modified version of the default Twitter Bootstrap theme since I moved to Jekyll, and that’s just not good enough. I’ve created the new theme from scratch, and I’ve thrown in some PJAX wizardry to make page-loading fancier. Gone are the old post-banners, and thumbnails (which to be honest I was adding just to make things look a bit less-boring), say hello to the new, larger hero banner for the latest post! You might notice some fancy effects on the homepage when you scroll, this is accomplished with a bit of jQuery and css3 to scale the title while parallaxing the hero banner. I’ve also made a forray in to a responsive layout, so if you’re viewing this on a screen smaller than 960px wide you will see some slight differences. But it’s not that different. Obviously the fancy stuff is dependant on your browser, but it should atleast look nice for anybody using Internet Explorer.

NB: This flurry of content might be shortlived, but for now I’m excited to be posting again so shush! Jekyll, as it turns out, is a really nice blogging platform static site generator. One of the nice things about it is the flexibility. In my current Jekyll set up I’ve added metadata to the YAML for posts, so that I can optionally define a post cover (or image, if you’d prefer) and a width for the cover.

I’ve been toying with the idea of moving away from Tumblr for a long time now, having had my own share of problems with Tumblr downtime.

Changed the design of the site a little today, wasn’t happy with the old top navigation.

Safer than running with scissors, go and check out the Potatochop Battle section now!

Bear with me while i port it over to wordpress. Update: the design is pretty much done now, after much reiteration.

Today i decided to make some changes/updates to the site.. tweaked k2 a bit, the graphics you see (with exception of the silk icons) are all pixelled by me, and yes it’s very mario inspired :) i added a few pages, and a new small icon set - you can check that out on the free icons page

yes, i’ve installed wordpress, and i’m using a template.. so shoot me. for the mean time, until cmogs is finished this is what i’m going to use

so, moglenstar.net is back.. downtime recently (if anybody noticed, or cares) was because the domain expired.. well, it’s all back now thanks to neom i’m still working on the new design, and in the midst of writing a php based cms (which this entry is actually being posted from). the rest of the site should be online soon enough!

so the design is looking very different from when i put this up.. .. well, i decided to keep the roots of the old moglenstar.net, keeping with an old image and all.. i recycled the header! and now its all dark and stuff, looks good in IE too.

So i’ve been working on the new redesign, not much, but i’ve been working on it. using blogger to power the site now, i might chuck one of those neat “blogger powered” buttons on here somwhere, soon enough, perhaps on the about page, when i get around to re-writing it. the pixel art page is about 40% complete, i’ve re-done all of the descriptions for each piece, but i am yet to torture myself by making thumbnails for each and every piece of pixel art.. regardless of how few there are, its still a tedious task. i dont plan to enable commenting on my blog, on account of how much spam/crap posts i got before, when i was using wordpress, so if you read anything here, and you wish to talk to me about it, i’ll put an e-mail link on the about page, when i get around to writing it. that said, anyone watching this, expect some magic soon enough!

the only problem i find with providing the ability to comment on posts, on my site, is that “online poker” spam gets posted all over the comments fucking idiots spam and abuse the comments i’ve deleted said comments, and now comment moderation is on, so if youre comment doesnt show, its waiting for me to check and allow it to be posted

so i’ve been ill for the last week and a half, missed a bit of college last week because of it, unfortunately… i haven’t done much work with the new design, aside from re-writing the css so as to make the design more centered, it didnt look so good down the left hand side - i also re-worked the graphics, and the menu presentation. i’ve decided to make a few changes to this design as it is, so if you’re viewing this and it looks a bit odd, i’m either working on it, or i made something look completely stupid. I ditched the “sperm” like header in favour for this.. green.. light.. thing. yeh.

ok.. just finished getting the pixel art section, and about page up, thank God i had already been working on the pixel art page… it’s not even complete, and i’m fed up with adding the rest of my pixel art to it.. oh well, all that isn’t on there is some random pixel things, and some emoticon type things - i’m sure it’ll survive without it :p the about page is some hella creative writing. just set up an audioscrobbler account, so we’ll see how that goes.. my user page if you’re at all interested in what im listening to..

finally, after a long break, i decided to work on my site again, i’ve been working on the design for a few weeks on and off, and now im having to change it to fit around WordPress .. not too much of a problem, its a nice engine to work with, and you dont have to go through any of that Site rebuilding crap, as with MovableType. getting content on a website is a painful task.. well, i’ve pretty much done all of the pixel art, just need to get that up here now with this part of the site. time to get something to eat, however, then i can really start to work!

the new design is up, still doing parts of it.. like color schemes and there is some text formatting to finish still, but the design is up.. not so drab, eh? the archives/comments pages look a bi- no.. VERY shit at the moment.. bah i’ll fix them soon enough.. the main thing is the new design is up so dont complain

Eugh! it’s so bland.. i think i’m going to- insert puking noise here

well, its sunday night.. kinda pissed off that i lost an hours sleep last night.. (who’s idea to put clocks an hour forward?) this site doesnt seem to be doing anything at the moment, and equally i dont seem to be doing anything. this weekend, i was Supposed to do maths coursework for my lesson tomorrow (2:20pm) – but its sunday night, i got as far as reading over the sheet, deciding it was stupid, working out some kind of thesis for what it was that it’s about, and then writing the title in Word… and even now, Word sits minimized on my desktop, i haven’t even bothered to save the non-evident document… I suppose this is what Phill considers procrastination – i mean, i know I have to do this work, and i try to tell myself i want to, but i just CAN’T oh well, i have the whole morning free tomorrow, i suppose i can get a justifiable amount of it done then, in time for the lesson.. – heres hoping i’m not the only one who hasn’t done it.. although, i know Scott hasn’t done it yet either ;) —— i would be a liar if i said i have done absolutely nothing.. but what i have done is far from useful.

… i intend to get the site going properly, that means finishing the design and pages … – i’ll have to talk to phill about him writing some content – i got to sort any downloads out, this being anything from modded system files to desktop icons and wallpapers (i have a few treats lined up) – i suppose i could talk scott into saying hi, and introducing himself.. perhaps… the site is going to be a mess, and will have a nice facelift.. im hoping it wont go pear shaped like cher and her facelift, but you never know! we’ll see anyways, inbetween sleeping, eating, the occasional math or computing lesson, and some coursework.. i suppose i could get a lot done…

it looks like i’ve deserted the site.. well, no. i havent.. working on a “refresh” to the site.. i’ve just been unusually busy this past week or two.. .. it will be done soon enough though :)