After several hours of clipping, filing, drilling, and pinning, I’ve finally finished assembling the first of 2 Penitent Engines.
It better be amazing on the tabletop after all that…
Me: “I hate working with metal models, especially old ones.”
Also me:
I have a lot of editing in my future, to get through that “pending” queue…
I need to take a break from the merry-go-round of mf2/parser compatibility. I excitedly thought it was fixed. But it wasn’t. I’ve made some further changes, and it might be fixed, but there’s a good chance it’s still broken in some obscure way… IndieWebify.me refuses to recognise my Like and Bookmark posts properly, even though every other parser I throw at example URLs comes back fine? Last I checked, IndieNews still refuses to return anything but “error: no link found.” Update: something I did today must have fixed this… I fixed a typo in an earlier post, and suddenly it was on IndieNews ?‍♂️
It’s getting a bit stressful, to be honest, and that’s means it’s time to move on to another task before it burns me out on the whole project. I’ll come back to it again in a while, hopefully have a break-through and iron out the kinks.
In better news, I do have some custom gallery markup up and running, and the h-card in the sidebar is now a fully-fledged widget. Baby steps…
““So, what’s the verdict? Heresy or not?… #warmongers””
If you have to ask, then you already know ?
“A platform move for this blog is coming. WordPress is frozen on ver. 4.9.9 which is fine by me, but untenable in the long term because eventually I will start missing needed security upgrades. Also, I’m beginning to suspect that my Indieweb stuff is not working everywhere with everyone and I’m not willing to put the time in tracking down where the problems are on a platform I intend to leave.”
Last time I exported from a WordPress site, pages were included – you can either export them separately, or as part of “all content” – but it’s definitely good to have a manual backup, just in case!
I definitely feel your frustrations with IndieWeb on WordPress. I’ve had so much trouble and spent so much time getting things setup “just so,” and I’m still not quite there. I’m sure it would’ve been fine if I’d stuck to one of the recommended themes and default plugin options… but then I wouldn’t be running my site. Even though a lot of my issues appear to be fixed now, half the time I still don’t trust things not to break seemingly at random.
Add to that small frictions like how hard it is to post a like/reply/bookmark type of post from mobile, and frustrations start to mount up.
Have you decided what you’re moving to yet?
Oh, hey – I just noticed the beta rules for using Forge World’s Adeptus Custodes units in Warhammer 40,000 have been updated to include *all* of the units, not just the 3-4 that were in the first draft: https://www.forgeworld.co.uk/resources/fw_site/fw_pdfs/Warhammer_40000/Forgeworld_Custodes_Datasheets.pdf ?
“Good morning, dear friends, foes, and fellow skeletons vine-wrapped in veins and sheathed in steaks of muscle.
Show me your kill teams? #warmongers #40K”
This is my team… very much still WIP, despite these pictures being a few months old ?‍♂️
While I was picking up my order of Celestine, I made sure to grab The Bloodied Rose, by @Danacea
Shared to IndieWeb.xyz
Time to take a look at my lovely limited edition copy of Andy Clark’s Celestine!
The packaging and presentation of the book is definitely very nice. Hopefully I can get stuck into the story later this evening!
Shared to IndieWeb.xyz
(Skip to the end for the TL;DR summary)
After an evening of debugging and rewriting sections of the HTML in “K”, I think I’ve fixed the markup and parsing issues I mentioned yesterday.
It turns out that X-Ray, the parsing engine used by IndieNews, Aperture, and probably others, was only finding the sidebar h-card in my markup. The rest of the content was being ignored. I’m not entirely sure why this is, to be honest, but it gave me a place to start.
Working from the (admittedly shakey) basis that if the parser was only going to find one mf2 entity on the page, then I’d want it to be the main h-feed or h-entry… so I started moving around some blocks of HTML and a few classes, and stripped out a few likely redundant pieces of HTML.
This… worked! The feed would show up in the X-Ray output instead of the h-card, and wasn’t all that different in the Pin13 parser compared to yesterday’s results. But it was far from ideal. The authorship information on every feed entry was screwed up; I’d made a change yesterday so only one full h-card was on the page (the sidebar) and followed the recommendation to markup the h-entry author details with u-author instead. Now came the conundrum: do I add back in a dedicated h-card to every h-entry, and by doing so re-break some of the other parsers looking for a single “representitive” h-card? I tried out adding them back in, just to see what happened. X-Ray was still fixed, but IndieWebify.me complained about it, and the IndieWeb Webring still couldn’t work out who I was.
I could have left it here. X-Ray was the main target, IndieWebify might not have liked it but could at least still see some details, and IndieWeb Webring was a “nice to have” in a way. But truth be told, it would have nagged at me. What if these “minor” issues were the proverbial canary? I want to achieve the widest possible compatibility now, to reduce potential issues at a later date.
It was around about this point that I remembered that an h-feed itself could have its own embedded h-card, which could potentially solve the issue. After moving my ‘h-feed’ class to the body element, instead of the main I’d been using up to then (so now it would use the sidebar h-card to represent the feed), it more or less did solve the issue.
It threw me at first that X-Ray didn’t list a separate h-card item like Pin13 did, but instead used the feed h-card for the authorship of every nested h-entry. Removing the now redundant author h-card from the entries stopped IndieWebify from grousing about these multiples. Oh, and here’s my new profile page on the IndieWeb Webring. Even my test microformat-based feed in Aperture/Monocle started displaying posts almost immediately after applying the change.
So, TL;DR: I moved my main h-card inside the h-feed, instead of it being a distinct entity on the page. By doing so I fixed pretty much all of the microformat parsing issues I was experiencing, which means “K” has taken a big leap forward… and I can stop pulling my hair out ?
Shared to IndieNews (maybe) and IndieWeb.xyz.
I’ve been chipping away at several things over the last two weeks, mostly focussing on markup, presentation, and theme file organisation. I want to get these finalised before I look at theme customisation options. If you’ve visited the home page, you might have noticed the display of certain post types has been evolving, as I search for a pleasing balance of information, appearance, and not overwhelming a visitor with a wall of text. I don’t think I’m quite there yet, so expect a few more iterations. My current thinking is to treat the home page a bit like an “activity feed,” where action-type posts such as Likes are displayed in summary manner to give more emphasis to the written posts.
Of course, if you’re subscribed to the site RSS or JSON feeds in a reader of some description, you’ve probably not seen any difference!
The most challenging issue I’m facing is the markup of posts and other page elements to be compliant with the specs of h-entry, h-card, and the various post kinds such as: Like, Bookmark, Reply, Repost, and so on.
Everytime I think I have the markup nailed down, something comes along to show me it’s broken in some way. I liked a post on Aaron’s site earlier, and instead of showing as the like I intended it became a regular webmention showing my avatar as a photo, as I’ve clearly messed up the h-card and u-like-of markup in the last round of edits. So sorry to Aaron for mistakenly filling his responses with my face! The Pin13 parser shows the right elements as being present, but IndieWebify.me and Webmention.io both fail to pick them up. I’m guessing it’s an issue with how I’ve nested things, and/or some stray classes from previous experiments that I’ve not tidied up? I’ll try to get some time to look into it more tonight.
For other – minor – examples, IndieWebring also refuses to pick up my representitive h-card, even though IndieWebify.me tells me I have this setup correctly. Aperture doesn’t seem to pick up anything other than my h-card when I use the microformats feed instead of RSS or JSON.
If the markup isn’t right then IndieWeb features are unlikely to work correctly – so fixing this is key for an “IndieWeb integrated” theme.
As an aside, and while I’m on the subject of frustrations, I’m having a hell of a time with the Webmentions plugin. Most of the time it feels like they just don’t get sent, as I frequently have to manually ping sites (such as with the earlier like post). There’s a chance this is related to the above markup issues; if the receiving site can’t parse the post that mentioned it, it might just throw the mention away? That feels like a bit of a stretch though.
I need to come up with a better way of testing these things, rather than “just give it a try on here and see if it’s worked or not…”
But anyway, “K” is progressing, even if it sometimes feels like one step forward/two steps back. I’d hoped to have a proper “release” ready for some time in February, but at the moment I think March or April are more likely. I’m only getting an hour or two a week to tinker at the moment, and I know I’m going to be busier with other things in February.
Syndicated to Indieweb.xyz and IndieNews (hopefully!)
Updated to add – IndieNews still doesn’t like my site. “Error: no_link_found”, every time.