Monkinetic Weblog

Basics of cross-posting links to blog posts automatically are working. Now to clean up the code and the tweet formatting and push it to the site (tomorrow)

@bitprophet Wish I could claim the term - I got it from @rands

@bitprophet It is! Got a nice builders high going for the time being. We'll see how long it lasts :D

@bitprophet That was one of the motivations for #goldfrog - needed a positive direction for my brain to go

Seriously I’m dumb now, help https://t.co/SsTf76gAaY

Next feature: cross-posting to Twitter. Do I need a developer account and registered app to do this, or can I get my own user with tokens to use with the client config?

What is the difference between this:

Posted by Dave Winer with a theverge.com link, and this:

Posted by #goldfrog via the Twitter API with a link to this site?

A late feature I added to #goldfrog that I was really happy about: hashtags! I love them on social media, and since I included a tags fields in the blog schema... so I added some code that parses hashtags when posts are saved, and adds them to the post tags. I also added a tag search to the site, and I have a filter that auto-links hashtags to the tag search.

So be prepared to see lots of #hashtags in my posts now :)

Another aspect to creating my own blogging software: I can finally start implementing some of #indieweb principles I've been watching for a while.

One of those is POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere) - which means everything you write starts on your own site, and content is syndicated to the appropriate kinds of sites as desired. This could include things like:

• Articles are syndicated via RSS (done, no brainer)
• Short posts (notes) are automatically or optionally published whole to Twitter, Mastodon, or the microblog of your choice
• Articles are automatically or optionally shared to a microblog site with a link back to your own site

Goldfrog + Twitter

While I generally find Twitter overwhelming and frustrating (not nearly as much so as the less-privileged do), I just finished adding a Twitter cross-poster to #goldfrog. I'll be implementing a Mastodon cross-poster in the next few days (/me waves @ toot.cafe), now that I've figured out and implemented the pattern.

The Twitter cross poster will send the title, some text, and a link back to the post. So, let's see if deploying the new feature worked. :D

I've been mostly quiet about the presidential race because... to be honest I've been quiet about everything about #politics for a while.

I do want to write a bit about the process, and the President, and I will be posting more as the race goes on, but here are a few opening thoughts:

I'm embarrassed that our nation elected Trump, and I've spent the last 3 years trying to pretend it didn't happen. That I can simply ignore the state of things is a sign of my immense #privilege as a middle-class white dude who is very gainfully employed in tech in America, and I'm looking for more ways to use that privilege to lift others.

I want to vote for a woman (again), so I'm looking for ways to help out.

I will vote Biden if I absolutely must, and Bloomberg was wrong to ride the "white, non-Bernie, non-woman wave" rather than putting his $$$ behind one of the current Democratic candidates.

Right now I like Klobuchar and support Elizabeth Warren. I'm glad Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand ran, but they've dropped from the race due to lack of financial support.

In general, I really like the themes that we see in Klobuchar's and Warren's campaigns: hard work and planning, two things that are the antitheses of Trump's candidacy and presidency.

None#writetheweb 2020

https://t.co/Q8SIOtBxHG

IT'S ALIVE https://t.co/fJby78Jba0

@alfredapp Done. thank you thank you thank you.

@alfredapp Reloaded, no change. Examples:

• Graphic in /Applications, doesn't show

• Grapher, in /Applications/Utilities, does

• Firefix, in /Applications, doesn't show

• Find My, in /Applications, does

I can't even

@alfredapp Hangin need to reload too

@alfredapp FYI, rebuilt the metadata index, spotlight is now finding my apps, still no luck with Alfred 😭

@alfredapp Giving it a shot, thanks!

@alfredapp for example https://t.co/fNnr3IQcS3

Mac OS Catalina has completely an utterly broken @alfredapp for me, and I feel like my fingers are broken.

I'm at 4.07, I've reset the prefs for application location, I've used the "reload" command. Nothing. Apps are all in /Applications

For 2020, I'm writing a new blog app. It's just for myself, a toy to remind me why I love the web. It's called Goldfrog, and it sounds a bit like "Go, blog!"

Why in the hack, in this day and age, would I spend time writing my own #blogging software, when you can't sign up for a VPS anywhere without tripping over offers to help you set up Wordpress, or Ghost, or what have you?

A few reasons.

New Year, New You

2019 was shite-filled, and due to politics, the tech trashfire, and the friction of blogging through several variations of static, git-powered versions of this site, I simply stopped blogging. I've wanted to, but the effort killed the motivation before I could get some words out.

So I finally decided to write something myself, that did just the things I wanted #goldfrog is written in Go, because while I will love Python to my dying day, my brain needed a kick in the pants this year, which relates to my next point.

The Builder's High

Rands writes eloquently on the builder's high. With family engagements and work over the last few years my hobby coding has dropped to almost nil (None if I were writing Python).

I needed something to reboot my creative juices, and trying to write something I really wanted, that thought would be quick, in a new language, seemed like a good way to go (I did want it, it wasn't easy, and Go hates me. But I'm learning and that feels great!)

Goldfrog

A bit more about Goldfrog: the single feature I wanted was a posting form on the home page, right up front. Various Userland products had had this, and it always felt right.

Second to this was an "Edit" link next to every post, wherever it was found on the site.

Finally, my main technical "innovation": My content is still stored on the filesystem as Jekyll-compatible Markdown files. However, build times via Jekyll or Hugo are fairly slow for my 2800+ posts (since 2000, baby) and I hate that. So #goldfrog indexes all posts in a sqlite database on disk. Post creation and edits go to the DB and to the filesystem, so I can still periodically sync the changes to the git repo I have checked out there. But all the list views, archives, tag pages, and search functionality go to the DB, and are really fast.

The Setup

This is really the app I've wanted for a long time.

• It's hosted on a Linode "nano"
• The app builds on CircleCI and the binary is pushed to an S3 bucket.
• I've got ansible playbooks that setup the VPS pretty much from scratch with Nginx fronting Goldfrog.

Next

I really need to get my logging story fixed, and I've got some idea on adding basic metric tracking to the app.