Monkinetic Weblog

The site is still a bit of a mess but I've managed to get it up and working. I'm back on Django now, and the home-brew blogging system is multi-tenant through Django's simple but terribly useful Sites framework. I'll be using that to host several of my sites in one place now.

I'm currently using Cloudflare to front the site but as they don't mind hosting Nazis I'll be moving to Fastly as fast as I can (it's more technical and I haven't had time).

I'll post another update soon and hopefully the posts will be flowing again.

updating the site, hope to be done soon #blogging

Guess it's time to revisit the blog engine here. I wrote Goldfrog a few years ago and it's been chugging along on this Digital Ocean instance fairly well, but at the time I had in mind a two-way sync between gitlab, where I maintain a separate repository of my archived content, and the filesystem/db in Goldfrog.

It worked, sort of, for a while, but the deployment on DO is NOT simple to remember, uses Ansible and code from 2 different git repos to set up or update the server, and was just 3 times more clever than it should have been.

I also implemented a flexible/configurable POSSE feature that is supposed to send updates to my mastodon account but ... isn't right now? And the logging setup on the site is abysmal.

I still like parts of my system. If I did it again, I'd still want:

• My custom posting UI that works like the ancient Radio Userland sites did: post form at the top of the home page list of posts:

(SORRY, LOST IMAGE)

And my version in Goldfrog:

(SORRY, LOST IMAGE)

• A small web app - not a static site generator
• Content stored ultimately as markdown files so they can be stored in git or similar
• Content indexed in sqlite for searching. serving various archive pages (tags, etc)

UPDATE: As long as I'm dreaming, I wish it was easier to run a small web app like this off a container. I probably could with Digital Ocean's app platform, I haven't looked into it lately, and I'd still have to solve the "index in a sqlite db file" problem.

Fedi/Mastodon programmers... with the #MastodonAPI, and given a url to a post on any instance (assuming I have access to the toot from my account), how might I get my instance to fetch it and give me a "local" ID that is suitable for passing as the "inReplyToID" in a toot payload?

Wondering if I need to:

• perform a search (https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/search/)
• find the relevant status in the results
• use the ID for the status

Would that be the "local" ID?

#MastodonAPI #fediverse #programming #blogging #indieweb

Dammit I started a branch on Goldfrog to play with the #micropub api, and now that it's in pieces on the editor floor, I have 3 more features I want to add #indieweb #blogging

(One is adding the ability for a note or post here to be a reply to another post on Mastodon.)

Been wanting to re-focus on the ol' blog here, and a friend told me about https://shutupwrite.com/ -- there's a local event tomorrow night so going to go hang out and work on some longer posts with a bunch of other writers #writing #blogging #community

What with Twitter (aka birdsite, hellsite, muskosite) flailing in the clammy hands of Dr. No, and interest in the federated web re-emerging, I figured it was time to review my own web presence and see what was the situation.

(SORRY, LOST IMAGE)

Dear reader, it was Not Good.

Warning one was hitting this site from my work network and getting a BitDefender screen of doom saying the site was serving a keylogger. NOT GOOD.

Then the site - which was hosted on Linode and runs my own homegrown blog software, Goldfrog - went completely down. After some "where did those ssh keys get to, where is this thing anyway" I got logged in and figured out that my server had been hacked in some way, TLS and letsencrypt removed. I haven't had time to troll the logs for evidence as to how the server was accessed, but I downloaded them and have them set aside to look later.

We Can Rebuild It

Thus entered a week of figuring out once again how the heck Monkinetic is built and deployed, migrating the code from Github to Gitlab (which I'm more familiar with due to $dayjob), and refactoring the Ansible code that builds the server and deploys the blog/content.

Finally today I got it 85% done, which is pretty good for a full migration between hosting providers (I also moved from Linode to Digital Ocean where I already have some other services).

Masto-tootly-don

With the insanity on Twitter, I logged back into my Mastodon account on toot.cafe and enjoyed the huge stream of new folks migrating from Twitter to federated platforms (mostly to mastodon.social since that's the first/largest instance, but folks are making their way from there to smaller instances as they get more comfortable).

Apparently Mastodon 4.0 is out (release candidate) and they've changed the annoying-until-it-was-gone "Toot" to "Publish". I'd have preferred "Post" myself, but 🤷‍♀️.

Maybe servers should just change it to suit their audience?

In order to fix my archives and daily digests, I might have to address timezone handling on my blog. Or I might just stop blogging #timezonehell #blogging #programming

Daily Digest subscribers: posts should now appear in the email in the order they were written -- more narrative style -- not in reverse-chronological "blog order #blogging 💌 😁

I have friends and family for whom RSS is not easy to explain or subscribe to, and who don't really follow blogs in general, but who have expressed an interest in my writing here, such as it is.

So I've hacked up an experimental feature, where I am sending out a nightly email (subscribe in the sidebar) that is comprised of all my posts for the day. Right now the blog posts and notes will be intermixed, so there might be some confusion in the content, it's an ongoing experiment.

If this is something you'd like to try, you can subscribe form in the sidebar of the site or use the subscribe page.

(SORRY, LOST IMAGE)

I had no idea that the Apache Foundation had a blog app called Roller (Java, much engineered)

@soapdog @soapdog@toot.cafe yeah the about page is broken because I haven't written it yet ;P want to write a markdown-to-page handler for the site #blogging #diy

The hard part of blogging is not writing, it is sharing your post:

https://andregarzia.com/2020/02/the-hard-part-of-blogging-is-not-writing-it-is-sharing-your-post.html

#blogging #socialmedia

On sharing and owning your content https://zerokspot.com/weblog/2020/02/11/sharing-and-owning-content #indieweb #blogging

Now that I'm blogging more often, I often find myself uploading screenshots. MacOS' capabilities are fine, except that I don't really like uploading files with names like "Screen Shot 2020-02-10 at 10.38.34 PM".

Yesterday I asked:

Are there any #macos screenshot utilities that will simply let me name the file before saving it? (My needs are simple, the OS’ own utility is quite sufficient except for the name thing)

My old Six Apart mate Simon Wistow mentioned Monosnap a free utility that does exactly that - lets me name the file before saving it.

(SORRY, LOST IMAGE)

(Conveniently, it also make recording gif screen captures stupid easy)

I'm sure it didn't happen to everyone, but can you see when my use of Twitter took off?

(SORRY, LOST IMAGE)

I've imported my old tweets as Notes on the site here, which is why I can show those stats. To be fair, my blog had not been very active for a while, but it's interesting to see over 20 years where my posting activity went:

(SORRY, LOST IMAGE)

Yesterday I imported 7800+ tweets into Goldfrog, my blog/cms, as part of owning my own content. Tweets (or Notes) will be published on monkinetic.blog and be syndicated to Twitter. See my archive page (20 years worth), blue are posts and pink are notes

http://monkinetic.blog/archive

If you follow me on social media - Twitter or Mastodon - you may have seen lots of nonsense posts go by recently...

(SORRY, LOST IMAGE)

I've been working on improving my POSSE features here, which meant not only composing my posts and notes locally, and then publishing them to Twitter et al, but also being able to track where they "landed" (ids and links) and make it easy for users to find my content on the syndicated site.

So I dug back into my syndication code, rewrote it several times, learned some things about goroutines, learned how not to do some things with goroutines, and settled on a way that worked. With luck, this post and any other that is also published on Twitter or Mastodon will have links to those sites along with the post, and (at least for Twitter right now) have links to reply, favorite, or retweet the post.

As Dave used to be fond of saying:

Still digging!

Chris Aldrich wrote a blog post about manually adding Webmentions for links to his posts from sites that are not themselves Webmention-enabled.

This reminded me that I'd like to add a "I linked to you" feature for the post detail page in #goldfrog for this site. (Goldfrog does support Webmentions, so Chris should get an automatic link from this post :))

Towards IndieWeb: POSSE and Notes

#posse #blogging #webmention #indieweb

https://t.co/15Q3wsMv9J