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A short list of things cooler than Clubhouse
by JamesInspired by Seth's Chasing the cool kids, I've made a short list of things that are cooler than Clubhouse.
- Not caring what the "cool" kids are doing and doing your own thing.
- Building and learning about the systems that make the world go around.
- Not uploading your entire contact list to some random company so you can eavesdrop on the "cool" kids.
- Fighting for an open web so that you and future generations can access the world without gatekeepers.
- Owning your content.
The urgent advice usually ends with “blogs are dead"If you always have to mention that "blogs are dead", perhaps they aren't actually dead. They never were dead. They're just not "cool" anymore. The people who made blogging cool and fun? They're mostly still blogging.
Publish. Consistently. With patience. Own your assets. Don’t let a middleman be your landlord. Yell at Google for blocking your emails and hope it’ll work eventually. Continually push for RSS and an open web. With patience.Yes.
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by JamesYesterday when I shipped sending webmentions I ran into an error that didn't occur in development. Posting the webmention would work, but my response would timeout when trying to save content.
When updating a post you're supposed to send webmentions, update your content, then send webmentions again. As I'm trying to keep server requirements as simple as possible I'm doing all of the sending inline.
Looking at my logs what appeared to be happening was everything would just lock, then once my timeout occurred, I'd see my initial post request to Tanzawa come through, the timeout, and then Wordpress making a request to Tanzawa to retrieve it's mention.
This was happening because gunicorn only has 2 workers by default, which wasn't enough to handle processing a long request simultaneously with an incoming request. Increasing the workers from 2 to 4 solved the issue. -
by JamesToday marks 1 month since I got the first instance of Tanzawa live. 🎉
Today I shipped support for sending webmentions. So now when I link to a post, Tanzawa will send webmentions. It's all done inline, so there's now a slow-down when saving. I should do it in the background, but I'm not sure I want to introduce redis/celery and all that complexity quite yet (or ever?).A webmention from Tanzawa
I have a table you can view in the admin where you can see which posts sent which webmentions and if they were successful or not.
I also shipped a small update to webmention receiving. When an existing webmention is updated, I now also update how the webmention is displayed. In the case of an update, the comment must be re-moderated.
The final small "quality-of-life" update is when I save a post I now show a link in the success message to view the post.Small quality of life update -
by JamesI fixed my webmention receive implementation - I forgot to include the <link> tag in the head of my base template. With this fix in place comments on my Tanzawa micro.blog posts should be start to be sent here as well.
I also started on the other half of the webmentions: sending. Thus far I'm just trying to keep it simple and am using webmention-tools. I may switch over to ronkyuu as it seems better maintained, but it's good enough for now.
I successfully sent my first webmention from my local environment to my blog. Yay! I think I still need another day or so before I can call it ready for the web.Incoming webmention sent from Tanzawa to my blog -
The Week #30
by James- Despite people are moving around more than the state of emergency last year, it appears to be working. Covid numbers continue to drop in Japan. It seems like they're going to extend it until March 7th. They can always decide to end it early, but I hope they don't.
- Tanzawa has been online for almost a month. And looking back at that month it's really improved. Automatic efficient image loading, RSS, and webmentions... and my computer was even out for repair for one of those weeks. There's still a lot yet on the road map, so I need to just take it a day at a time.
- Leo's taken to my old dslr and we went out of shot photos of the Odakyu line for a bit over the weekend. I always forget how much fun it is to shoot with my dslr. The images are so crisp and the depth of field. Portrait mode on my phone is good - but the real deal is soo much better and soo much more satisfying.
- We started a new experiment at work. One day a month we stop client work and fully focus on things that are "important but not an emergency" – as those things tend to never become priority and hence never get done. We're split into different teams. Some are re-working our company Slackbot, others are getting better with frontend tech and so forth. I picked team UX, where we're trying to figure out how, as a company, we can also "do UX". This is perfect for me. I've been wanting to spread the passion for well designed software and forms within the company for years now, but I've never had the time to dedicate to it. This collaboration day finally gives me the opportunity.
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by JamesMostly bug fixes today. Colin let me know about a bug how Tanzawa was interpreting webmentions from his blog. The basic issues was that Colin keeps all posts for the day on a single page and uses an anchor tag to link to the different posts e.g. blog.php?date=2021-01-28#p4 . So a single webmention request will include all posts for that day.
The mf2py-utils library I'm using to classify the microformated data as a comment works under the assumption that each post will have its own webmention. So when he linked to Tanzawa as post number two, Tanzawa showed the comment for post number one. It was an easy fix to make sure that the comment interpreting function filters by the target url as well.
The other minor change is I've added the interaction count to the status list page as well. I haven't styled it yet, but I imagine it will become a brown circle. This makes it easier for me to see which posts have comments/likes and so forth. -
🔗 Cook: Companies like Facebook don’t deserve praise, “they deserve reform”
by JamesTechnology does not need vast troves of personal data, stitched together across dozens of websites and apps, in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades without it.
From Tim Cook’s remarks last week at Computers, Privacy & Data Protection 2021 conference. All I can say is: A-fucking-men. macOS may annoy me sometimes, but there’s no other company I’d trust with my location and health data.- Tagged with
- social media
- privacy apple
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by JamesSlept on the bug and yes appears that django-webmention is not decoding the response body before saving it to the database. I opened issue #23 to fix the issue.
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by JamesI'm on a roll with webmentions today. While I initially planned to hold off on displaying them publicly until a while later, since I figured out a good design, I decided to ship them in detail pages as well. They're hidden by default with a badge indicating the number of interactions. All mentions must be 👍ed before they appear. Pages without interactions do not show anything.
Webmentions show inline with their content.
One thing I'm not entirely happy about is that by using the object tag to allow me to detect broken images is I lose the ability to lazy load them. i.e. img supports loading="lazy" and object does not. A waste of bandwidth and resources.
It's not a huge issue as icons are small. Once I start integrating turbo I plan to to lazy load the webmentions as a whole, so no content is event sent until requested.
I've also found a bug (or what I consider a bug) somewhere in the webmention stack (either in mf2py or in the webmention test tool, I think). The basic issue is emoji and other unicode characters come across as escaped unicode like \xf0\x9f\x98\xa2, Cleaning it the response body with the excellent ftfy (fixes text for you) takes care of the issue for now, but it feels like that should be unnecessary. -
by James
Leo’s taken to my old dslr. We took photos for a couple minutes of his favorite subject: trains. 🚅
