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These cuties showed up randomly in my yard

Webmentions are the way people have conversations on the Indieweb, but integrating them - or, indeed, any kind of dynamic content - into a static site can be a little tricky. Luckily, many people have run into this issue before and so there wasn't much for me to do but steal.

To be clear, I'm talking about receiving and displaying webmentions here, not sending them. How I ended up sending them will be a separate topic, as it is tied into how I manage POSSE and backfeeding on my site.

The previous, pelican-based incarnation of my blog used a homegrown system involving a webmention listener that handed off data to a redis server and ultimately resulted in a new webmention being committed to my site's repo, causing the whole thing to be rebuilt. It certainly worked, but it required a fair bit of maintenance. It also failed to take into account certain edge cases that I hadn't previously considered (like a commentator's avatar image going missing).

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Out and about. Griffintown has changed a lot.

I'm a pretty big fan of TypeScript, probably best described as a statically typed language that transpiles to standard JavaScript. I've written about it before.

People who have worked with me in the past may be surprised at my admiration, given the rancour I occasionally direct at something like the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-to-JavaScript transpiler, which to the casual eye seems to be in a similar vein.

The similarities, however, are superficial; TypeScript and GWT are quite different beasts. Something like GWT is used in web development in order to avoid writing JavaScript. TypeScript, on the other hand, is best viewed as JavaScript extended with an optional static typing system. The optional part is key; in theory, any JavaScript program is also a valid TypeScript program. In other words, TypeScript doesn't try to hide the fact that it's merely an enhanced version of JavaScript.

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I've only started looking into this, but my impression is that a Zettelkastan is both a thing (a big slip box of interconnected notes, either on paper or in digital form) and a methodology (literature notes, fleeting notes, etc).

Something like Roam Research provides the slip box part, and you can therefore use it as a Zettelkastan, but the app also lets you use it as a personal wiki, possibly alongside the Zettelkastan functionality, if one wants to draw a distinction between the two.

I've decided I want to try building up a Zettelkasten (I've settled on org-roam), but I think a personal wiki would be useful too, and I'm unclear if I should be keeping the two things apart.

As a participant in the IndieWeb, I publish my share of likes, replies, reposts, and bookmarks. These posts all have one thing in common - they refer to another, external URL and only make sense in the context of that URL.

This being the case, it's nice to give my readers (and myself) some sense of what I'm referring to when I post that content. The process of scraping metadata from URLs for display purposes is called "URL unfurling" and implementing it efficiently on an Eleventy based website is not entirely trivial, especially when you're trying to save your Netlify build minutes, so it's worth sharing what I've learned.

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I'm not religious, but I occasionally think that for some people, their purpose in life is to be a cautionary tale, and that makes me sad.

Is this a comment about Russia or a comment about drinking in general?

Pagination in Eleventy is bit strange. Out of the box, Eleventy comes with support for something the developers call "pagination", but it might not be the sort of pagination you're used to.

As you probably already know, Eleventy is a static site generator. It generates output HTML files from input template files. In the simplest case, one HTML file is generated for each (non-layout) input template.

The feature known as pagination in Eleventy is basically a way of getting around that limitation, allowing you to generate multiple output files from one template file. If you squint, you can see how this maps to the traditional idea of pagination (i.e. we want to break down a long list of items into smaller sized pages, writing only one template for the page) and although this is, indeed, a common way to use pagination in Eleventy, it turns out that the feature is much more generic than you might think - and, paradoxically, less useful than you might think.

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After some consideration I've decided to remove the articles from my "Posts" feed and rename it to "Notes". It now contains just my notes and photos (and videos if I ever start posting those). As before, my articles are available in my "Blog" feed.

Initially, my reason for mixing articles, notes and photos into one "posts" feed was that I suspected at least some of my readers would want a feed just for "original content", and the "posts" feed provided that. I still think this is true, but some other insights have led me to reconsider the approach.

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Evelyn calls him "Laser Jesus"

Up until around 20 years ago, I had moved about 10 times. But I've only moved twice since then, corresponding to when I left home. I'm pretty lazy but nature.

Recent interactions on Twitter have led me to clarify the purpose of all my feeds with descriptions, so hopefully people will have a better idea of what they are in for :-)

I'm trying something new :-) There's currently no way to see just my notes or photos. You can see my notes+blog+photos (i.e. what I call my "Posts") or just my blog. I may change this if more people complain ;-) Usually the two feeds diverge more because I don't blog so much

In my case, I send the webmention automatically and then immediately parse out the Location header from the response, and commit that as my syndication link, which triggers another recompile.

Right, so you would have to include an empty link to Bridgy's twitter publish URL somewhere in your h-entry. Then you need to send a webmention to that URL (unless it's automatic).

I use Bridgy to syndicate the post after I publish it (by automatically sending a webmention), and then I re-compile the site with the syndicated location embedded in the post.

@nhoizey For more info on why I organize my posts the way I do, see https://desmondrivet.com/2022/02/27/post-type-org

@nhoizey All of my post related templates (for the tag, archive, bookmark, blog pages, etc.) are directly under post/, but the posts themselves are tucked under posts/feed. @eleven_ty can sometimes blur the line between content and presentation.

@nhoizey I was thinking, perhaps naively, that someone who is interested in my notes would also interested in my blog (and my photos), hence the combined feed. The reverse may not be true; someone who is interested in my blog may not want my notes, hence the isolated blog feed.

As mentioned previously, I recently converted my website over to Eleventy. I'm an IndieWeb participant and, moreover, my website is fairly complex so I ended up writing (or, in some cases, pilfering) a fair amount of code to make it all work together in an acceptable manner. I thought I would document the process via a series of blog posts in case anyone else finds it of value.

None of this is intended to be an Eleventy tutorial and you'll get the most from these posts if you already know something about how Eleventy works.

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