Welcome to another installment of “things that interested me today but aren’t enough to warrant a blogpost by themselves so I bundled them all together here”—I hope you find something that catches your eye!

Again I don’t really plan to do these every week but it just so happens that I felt like writing about something but didn’t really have a big topic in mind.

Oh well, enjoy the links!

Bubbles, a frontpage for the IndieWeb

Jeremy mentioned a new site that serves as a blog discovery platform: Bubbles!

It looks rather simple, very similar to Reddit, Lemmy, Hacker News or Lobste.rs. However, this is not about tech articles or about whatever drives the most clicks, it’s a platform to surface bloggers, people writing about their lives and whatever they want.

They seem to be really focused on the IndieWeb, and even provide a widget that can be added to your website so the upvotes you get there can be seen on your posts. That’s kind of fun!

You even log-in with your fediverse account, it doesn’t have to be just Mastodon either, so that’s pretty awesome. No extra account setup, no email to give, all good for me.

The way comments work is based on the same principle, leave a comment on a mastodon post generated by Bubbles itself using your Fediverse client, and it will appear in bubbles too—similar to how my comments system works.

Prove You’re Human, from the creators of 1000xRESIST

If you don’t know, 1000xRESIST is the most unique experience I’ve ever had in gaming, and in my top 5 favourite games of all time.

Sunset Visitor is the studio behind this masterpiece, and now they’re working on a new project!

Featuring captcha solving, living in the Windows XP wallpaper, and some strange robot with a face attached to it. This seems to be a very interesting take which will have a couple things to say about AI. Here’s the summary!

Prove You’re Human is a sci-fi narrative adventure in which you play as Santana and split your consciousness in two. The company behind this program has a chance at achieving true AGI — but there’s just one problem.

The company’s AI, Mesa, believes she’s a human being. It’s your job to train her out of these delusions.

Even though AI in real life right is an absolute pain, and I don’t like hearing much about what it, this game, from this studio, gets a pass, and I’m sure it will have a lot to say about things and I am looking forward to it.

I’m in the podium of #100DaysToOffload

I’ve talked about this 100 DaysToOffload challenge before—and Kev, who keeps the website updated with the people participating in it—recently changed the design a bit!

There’s now a button to sort by number of completions, and I am happy to say that I am in the top 3!

Unfortunately for me, Hyde surpasses me by two and Dan Q sits at the throne with a total of 7 completions!

Honestly though I am relieved that Rubenerd—who recently updated his URL btw so update it if you haven’t —has not participated on it. He doesn’t need to anyway… Please, if you read this, please don’t do it I beg you!!

More blogs for my RSS reader…

• The Retro Dad - Brandon mentioned this post while talking about Skilcraft Government Pens—of all things—and the name was eye-catching enough. Even more so when I realized it’s a BlogSpot site! The design is nice enough and the posts seem right up my alley as well, so yeah, check it out!

• Joe Crawford - I met Joe during an IndieWeb online meeting! He organizes them every week—there will be one in the very same day this post is published—and has been around for a long while so, yeah, I just had to have him on my feed.

• Stitching - I found this small bearblog site from one of Robert Birming’s posts, and I enjoyed the posts there are, I am looking forward to seeing more! Some of the posts I’ve seen so far are book reviews, collecting CDs and physical books and stuff about life. I see in their now page that Persona 5 Royal is being played, so that’s cool too.

For now, this is a quick post about what interested me today! I have been thinking about renaming this not-very-official—since it doesn’t even have a tag yet—series, to include what’s actually in it—similar to how my weeknotes are not just titled “Weeknotes”, more like Andreas’ Linkdumps, I guess this is the same thing.

Some blogs I added to my RSS feed

• I have followed and enjoyed Brandon’s Journal for a while, but during a short hiatus where he took it down, I ended up removing it from my FreshRSS feed. I realized when he returned months ago, but I forgot to add him back, that mistake has been corrected. Here’s a short post to get a taste for his writing!

• Chris Smith’s website was not on my radar at all, but I often like to check who links back to me and noticed that he mentioned me on his monthly meanderings, where he appreciated the way I link back to posts I reply to, etc. In any case, I really liked the design and the fact he has a section for all his board games.

• Last but not least! marmar22 was a fun find. I can’t recall where I found their site, I believe I was just looking for some ereader blogposts somewhere because I stumbled upon this review of some no brand ereader. The posts about organising photos felt kind of familiar as well.

So yeah! I won’t say I’ll read everything but it’s always fun to have more variety. As I write this there are 6689 unread articles on my FreshRSS instance…

A dumb web fediverse client

There are a lot of clients for the fediverse, from apps to terminals to web clients. Personally I mostly stick to the default web interface and to Tusky on my phone.

But Adele recently created a minimal web client that doesn’t rely on javascript and can run on ancient browsers and devices! She wrote a blogpost announcing it.

Into The Aether’s latest bonus episode!

I you like the Persona games, you may be up to listening to a 5+ hours long deep dive into Personal 4 Golden, treat yourself and get into my favorite podcast of all time!

Personally, I’m skipping it until I play that series, more than happy to listen to their weekly episode, the latest of which also talks about the rumours around a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo Switch 2. This may make me buy that console at last, no doubt.

Linux user groups and updating my XTEINK X4

I noticed that Crosspoint, the firmware I use on my XTEINK X4 recently had an update to 1.2 which introduced a couple features like a built-in EPUB optimizer, a way to turn text in current page to a QR code, and other goodies.

Last time I mentioned how I had to use my dad’s laptop to flash the firmware due to missing permissions. This time I took the time to figure things out and realized that I simply had to add my user to the uucp linux group. After restarting my user session things went smoothly from there! A shame I need to use Chromium to run the web installer though.

Another TTRPG bundle…

There’s a Pathfinder Humble Bundle going on right now and my TTRPG friends are making me consider it yet again. I haven’t even had a second session of Land of Eem yet, but things happen.

In any case, this bit is just to let you know, and tempt you to get it as well.

Why did you start blogging in the first place

During covid lockdown, I got into too many hobbies at once, game development, coding in general, GNU/Linux and open source software (due to Godot Engine) and also the Fediverse, where I joined Fosstodon—and many other instances at the same time, because that’s what a newbie does when they join fedi. Anyway! From there I found out many blog posts, I somehow stumbled upon the #100DaysToOffload challenge, and started my own blog on a whim using Kev’s guide to start a blog with Jekyll and SimpleCSS

From there, the rest is history! I had lots of time during the pandemic, so I managed to complete the challenge, and I have done so three times by now, it’s great.

What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?

I have stuck with Jekyll since the beginning, and it has worked great for me, I’ve never really bothered with anything else, not Hugo, not Zola, not Pelican, or any other SSG.

The closest has been blop, which I used on a mirror of this blog post for a while that is no longer updated, since I started to use some of Jekyll’s features more extensively, which made mirroring to a different ssg a bit of a pain. As I said though, I have no plans to move to a different platform at the moment.

I use it because it works well, I have developed my own workflow by writing scripts and tools to deal with most of the caveats using Jekyll could have, like adding images or creating a post from scratch, or sharing the link to my social media once I’m done with it. There’s many sections on my blog making use of Liquid syntax or Jekyll includes, and they just work, so why change it?

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I had a couple of Blogger sites back in the day, I used to be a fan of Club Penguin, and also a kid with no money to spare, so I just made a website where I shared all the free stuff one could get playing the game, of course, copy pasted from different sites.

I also had a different site with Origami tutorials and diagrams that I shared for everyone to see. I think most of what I shared there was without permission, but I didn’t really know better at the time.

Both websites are long gone nowadays, only a few posts were shared on each. Blogging itself and actually writing didn’t really click for me yet.

Despite it all, I learned a good bit about HTML and graphic design! Looking things up on my own and the like. Good times, I miss Club Penguin.

How do you write your posts?

At home, Neovim, with the goyo plugin to add margins to the text. At work, Notepad++, since it’s the only decent editor available, I found a styling for Markdown syntax that is decent enough. In my phone, Markor. It’s a pretty great markdown editor for android, does all it needs to do.

Most of the time I do a final edit on my laptop, in case I missed any typos or metadata for the post, since publishing and formatting is easier from there.

When do you feel the most inspired to write?

Lately, during any dead times I have at work, I write. I have a lot of topics in mind at this moment, but I usually check my RSS feeds to find some topic where I I have something to say.

Many times, I fall into a rabbithole, and it takes over my blog. For example, when I bought my Miyoo Mini Plus and did a lots of things with it; a review, game and save file management, my own theme and my own game cover designs. I wrote about all those because I felt passionate about it.

Other times, a particular thought lingers on my mind, some action I did, some experience I had; so I just decide to share it here because I don’t want it to just dissapear. They are more rare and personal, so I think they’re worth sharing.

Do you normally publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer?

I publish as soon as I finish a post, and I almost always finish a post in the same day. I just write quickly I guess, sometimes I have typos or bad grammar that I didn’t notice, but I just edit it later and call it a day. It’s my website, it’s no big deal.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

I have a hard time chooosing like everyone does, but I will just share the first post that came to mind.

My Dune review! I don’t know, it just felt like writing a little journey throughout my experience with that universe before I watched the movies and the book, it was kinda fun.

My actual favorite I’m still undecided, probably one of the many I write describing a random day of my life, like this one or where I recall memories of my past, such as this one, yeah, probably those.

Any future plans for the blog?

I really like my current color scheme, I really like most of my current structure. I’d like to add better statistics for the blog, like words per month and things like that.

I’d also like to unify all of my gaming and manga tracking, maybe parse it from the websites I currently use, or find one with a good API I can use instead.

Oh yeah, and a search bar for my website! One day.

Who will participate next?

Here are my nominations!

• @jp, from moddedbear.com
• @isa, from tahimik.com
• @jefklak, from brainbaking.com
• @garritfra), from garrit.xyz

Go answer now!!

This is day 6 of #100DaysToOffload.

Compared to the last time I did the challenge, I wanted to be more consistent with my writing, not leaving a single month go without a couple posts at least. However, this did not turn out that way, I ended being super inconsistent, not because I couldn’t find the time to write at least 300 or so words per day, but because of being an eternal procrastinator who found a bunch of other things to do instead.

Despite the hundreds of hours spent on YouTube, the Fediverse, social media, my phone, at work or gaming with my psp or nintendo switch, I still managed to rush through in the end. I was meaning to post daily during December but of course I decided to skip some days and post twice in others, such as yesterday.

Sidenote: I’ve done this before and there is no rule about posting only once per day, just doing 100 posts in the span of 365 days! So don’t come at me saying that I cheated! There are definitely timezones in the world where the publication of those posts happened in different days! Everything is relative, my dear reader! 😎

And now, the challenge is finally over, the year has finally ended, and this is quite the way to be done with it. In a few hours I’ll be having dinner with my family, enjoying some time together and reflect on everything that happened this year, both the good and the bad. And tomorrow—or soon after—I’ll write my post Looking back at 2023!

I am hopeful of what’s coming next, many things changed and my life is completely different to last year, but I think I’ll be alright.

God bless y’all, and Happy New Year!

This is day 100 of #100DaysToOffload

New instance incoming

First of all, a friend of mine, Benjamin Hollon has decided to host his own GoToSocial instance in the nearby future. Polymaths Social! He actually has an alpha instance running right now. At the moment submissions are closed but you can join the waitlist, check it out!. I actually have a secondary account there if you wanna see some extra me, by following from your Fediverse account.

GoToSocial is still pretty bare bones, and there are many features missing, the goals of GtS aren’t exactly the same as Mastodon, its just another product that uses ActivityPub, so not everything will be implemented exactly as Mastodon users may expect, but the basics are being worked on and the speed and responsiveness is actually quite great.

New blogs to follow!

I’ve also been discovering quite a few new blogs in town that are currently participating in #100DaysToOffload, such as Noisy Deadlines, Dustin and 82mhz.

I have enjoyed many of their recent blogposts and have also exchanged some emails with some of them, a few nice interactions on the Fediverse has shown me these guys may be pretty fun to have in my feed and maybe get inspiration from, as I also try to complete the challenge again.

I welcome them all with open arms and I hope they manage to complete the challenge, just like a few have done so before. May they succeed on their journey!

New responsabilites to fulfill

Last but not least, I got promoted to the Moderator role at my main instance, Fosstodon, I am even in the team page! now, which makes it official. I shall rule with kindness and honor, and finally be able to show NO MERCY TOWARDS ANYONE WHO DARES DEFY MY AUTHORITY. 😈

Don’t worry guys, I’m kidding, its quite a bit of responsability, and I’ll try to fulfill my role to the best of my abilities. So basically, as long as you wear a Casio watch you are safe. What I really want to show, is that Fosstodon, despite its ups and downs, is still an instance worth being a part of (just ask me for an invite!). 😉

This is day 60 of #100DaysToOffload

I know the Fediverse will probably collapse once so many millions of new users clash with the existing ones, we will suddenly be the minority, and its only natural for rejection to be the common sentiment. But I can’t help but feel that it just does not matter and we must be ready to take the hit.

The truth is, Facebook was my most used social media last month. This is mostly because I have to use it for work, but I have to admit I ended up personally using it quite a bunch. Mostly, its really annoying, because a lot of the posts I see are ads and worthless suggestions that I just don’t care about. However, every now and then I get to see what this social media could be. Posts and pictures from people I actually know, updates on what they’re up to, and fun memes with inside jokes among friends and family. I actually really like that part of it, its just so chill and cozy, even if its not the main focus, but a rather weird event.

The Trash Taste podcast talked about this as well, Garnt mentioned how he just likes to see what their high school friends and old buddies are up to, some got married, some accomplished their goals, a few share pictures of their children, its actually nice. Maybe I am just becoming a boomer and I just want to interact with people I know in real life rather than with random strangers of the internet (I am kidding, for the most part).

There are a lot of politics, opinions, privacy concerns, security flaws and other controversial matters that involve Meta and their platforms, but it still is the most used social media in the world, and while the opinion of most people in the Fediverse and internet culture in general, is that only old people and fascists use the platform, the reality is that here in Mexico and many parts of the world, Facebook is still King, even among the young people. This is undeniable and those within this bubble of bloggers, geeks and fedizens need to realize that, its reality.

Real people don’t actually care about their privacy, about the politics and behaviours encouraged there, about accessibility, minorities and similar concerns, they just like to scroll, see memes, be entertained. Its sad, but I have to say sometimes I also want to turn off my brain and be fed such random things.

So yeah, with Threads, a new era is upon us. An era where the people I actually know, and the internet strangers I interact with will finally meet, and I kind of can’t wait to see what’s going to evolve out of all this.

This is day 50 of #100DaysToOffload

It was never a competition or anything, so I don’t really feel upset or disappointed, even if it would have been fun to keep going.

Anyways, this blog was born on February 5, 2021 with my first proper blog being about Android launchers. Since then, Android has been one of the most prolific topics in my blog, and I was actually planning on talking about launchers again today, after a blog by Brian on returning to Nova Launcher, until I saw the date and thought maybe I should do a retrospective or something along those lines, and then, I decided to check my RSS feed and realized that moddedBear just did that too.

Quite a small world we live in right? Its quite funny because they’ll probably end up reading this too, since Mastodon is the place we all hangout on quite often. So, I decided to just catch up a little bit and just write things as they come to my mind.

I recently had a loss in the family, my grandmother passed away, it was a hard time, despite my effort to be like a certain Albert Camus character, I could not pull it off. Still, I am thankful for the times I spent with her and I know she is in a better place. Its been a few days already since all this happened. I am thankful to those who wished us well.

I’ve been recently trying out Nostr, its quite an interesting protocol that some are using as a fully decentralized and anti-censorship social media platform, and other things. Right now it feels really cryptobro-ish though. Full of spam, of people excited for “Web3” shenanigans. I am not that kind of person, and I have a feeling that some of those crypto shills are there just because they think its related to blockchain and the like, even if it really isn’t that way, mostly. It is quite an interesting community, to be honest. I will be testing it out and waiting for more regular people to join in the fun. So in case you want to follow me there, here is my public key:

npub1dlnncxcq4c470aspajnx0usdv6hg6wjyg9pdkdt7psnwryjpn42s4rmm93

Personally I use iris.to as a client but I still don’t know how to feel about a single private key being enough to authenticate myself and pasting it into web clients left and right.

Honestly, I would kinda prefer it if something like twtxt made a comeback, and a good one. I actually have a twtxt file which you can follow here. As long as you can host a plain text file in some server, you have a twtxt! So maybe give it a try? There are not many people I know using either of these. So let me know if you use them.

So, yeah, 2 years blogging. A lot has happened since I started. One of these days I will go back and read some of my old blogs and try to see how opinions and thoughts have changed, but right now its a little late for that, and I got a few actual books I want to read instead. I recently got into the Warhammere 40k lore and I think I’ll give a series of that universe a try soon enough.

For now, this has been rambley enough I would say. Maybe I’ll expand on some of the paragraphs I shared today in further blogposts.

This is day 33 of #100DaysToOffload

Basically, what I mean with this title is that you will be able to look me up as @joel@joelchrono12.xyz in my domain. This setup actually makes it so you can type whatever@joelchrono12.xyz and it will still just show up my actual Fosstodon account. Regardless, I am a single person, so I don’t mind.

This quick tutorial is focused on Jekyll, but you should be able to figure it out using this guide too.

Pretty much paste this into a file in the root of your website and call it a day. Mastodon will do the rest.

---
layout: none
permalink: .well-known/webfinger
---
{
    "subject":"acct:joel@fosstodon.org",
    "aliases":
    [
        "https://fosstodon.org/@joel",
        "https://fosstodon.org/users/joel"
    ],
    "links":
    [
        {
            "rel":"http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
            "type":"text/html",
            "href":"https://fosstodon.org/@joel"
        },
        {
            "rel":"self",
            "type":"application/activity+json",
            "href":"https://fosstodon.org/users/joel"
        },
        {
            "rel":"http://ostatus.org/schema/1.0/subscribe",
            "template":"https://fosstodon.org/authorize_interaction?uri={uri}"
        }
    ]
}

Pretty easy right? Now after pushing that to your server you should be able to find yourself with ease, at least within Mastodon. I am not sure how it would work on Pleroma or other Fediverse tools. Still, it is quite cool.

This won’t change your username handle per se, it will just make it so you can search me by my domain. Which would also make it easier to switch instance without having to alter mentioning my username and stuff.

The Fediverse is growing, but it has a long way to go

Fosstodon now has more than 40K users, that alone is insane, since I remember being impressed back in April at the amount of growth seen during that first wave of Twitter users migrated.

I think its important to bring up that the amount of users is still insignificant, Twitter is already the smallest of the big social network, even though it feels like a lot is shared and talked about on it, the reality is different.

My country, Mexico, is still big on Facebook and Instagram (lately, TikTok too) by an order of magnitude, that’s just how it is.

If you recently joined Mastodon or any node of the Fediverse, please do it for the right reason. I don’t like politics, I joined Fosstodon because I like software, coding, technology and the like, and I wanted to meet some like-minded people in that regard. I am not there to read about politics of foreign countries. Thankfully Mastodon is pretty useful at filtering stuff out, and I myself don’t care if I end up reading it, since I just forget about it.

I have hopes that Fosstodon will stay afloat and won’t lose its focus, some people are worried that the Twitter culture may stain the status quo of the overall community, but I think this is just momentary. And contrary to popular belief, trends and behaviour is not the same everywhere in the Fediverse, its tons of different communities interacting with each other, but there is still some independence, which makes this place more resilient than some may assume.

Besides, even though its userbase is not as big, I honestly prefer it that way.

Some Science Fair shenanigans

For my Fuzzy Control class, the teacher challenged us to design a Fuzzy controller for our science fair project. I have to say, I am quite a fan of how fuzzy logic works. Being able to understand the magic behind it all was quite interesting.

We decided to use Matlab to design our system using the Fuzzy Logic Toolbox, and we also found a program online that would allow us to export that directly to code for Arduino.

We built a Temperature and Humidity controller system, be it for a room or maybe an incubator. I actually spent more time building the hardware to house our circuits and sensors when compared to the code itself.

I feel like we kinda cheated the system, but the teacher allowed us to use Matlab in the first place rather than coding from scratch, so we only expanded our toolset a bit and did it all in like, a couple hours.

When the event started we had to sit around in a place assigned to us for around 10 hours, explaining our project to whoever passed by, it was quite entertaining for me, but I couldn’t help but notice how everyone around it was tired already, I guess I like talking about stuff I like with strangers a little too much.

In the end the winners were some girls that attracted everyone’s attention, they combined extracts and chemicals to make colored markers to draw and stuff. Our place was right beside them and everyone went and drew stuff in pieces of paper that got given away by the end of the event. Some of those drawings were actually awesome, not gonna lie.

Google is on my Android again

I unexpectedly started to use Discord more often, I joined a couple of interesting servers and I wanted to talk there a little more. However, notifications don’t work on a degoogled phone and I decided to try installing the Google Apps again on my device. I got told that it would work fine despite already having a ROM and apps installed. It was a lie.

I got stuck in a bootloop, thankfully a simple Factory Reset kept my internal storage intact (thanks to latest versions of TWRP being able to decrypt storage on Android 12) although I lost my app data.

Recovering from data loss

Thanks to the power of being kinda careful, the biggest loss of mine was a dozen of Newpipe subscriptions and my list of read books and bookmarks (which I had already forgotten until I recalled them while writing this blogpost)

• My manga progress is kept on Anilist, and I had backups enabled anyway on the Tachiyomi reader, so I didn’t have to build my library from scratch, I just imported it and logged in to my trackers.

• WhatsApp Backups were enabled and since internal storage didn’t get wiped, reinstalling the app recognized the backup immediately, which was a couple hours old.

• Signal Backups were enabled and no data was lost.

• Passwords and 2FA were perfectly safe on a folder synced with Syncthing, but again, no data was lost anyway.

• Pretty much all other apps required me to log in and stuff. I had a backup of my email accounts of K9 Mail, so readding them was not hard at all.

The saddest and biggest failure, is that I lost all my Wi-Fi passwords. Can someone tell me why is there no way to back them up already?

Google being annoying

I decided to log in to my Google Account since I wanted to access some paid apps that I quite like. Sadly this also synced my contacts, which I had on my Nextcloud DAV already, and were annoyingly duplicating my list. Thankfully, @konstantin helped out and I quickly removed the dulplicates from my phone.

I am now waiting for Android 13 roms to become more stable, so I can degoogle my life again. Or maybe not, notifications are quite nice to be honest.

So, when my post of my analog watch got so many replies and boosts from people across the fediverse, I got quite excited, among the many photos sharing their watches and collections, a reply with a picture showcasing the classic Casio F-91W showed up, and then another, and another, and another, until even Kev (and probably some others) ended up getting one, and now I am tempted myself. Its super cheap, so I’ll probably get it soon enough, or maybe you can buy me one you know? (I have to give this a shot 🤣).

The way it works is funny, sometimes you just happened to get boosted by the right people at the right time, other times you are just famous enough by yourself, I have close to 800 people who follow me after all for some reason, I guess I am a bit of a Mastodon influencer 😎. You never really know to be honest, this blogpost may not get much interaction despite it all.

Regardless, every now and then I see more and more posts of people who got their Casio watch, or already had it collecting dust and decided to use it again, its kinda fun. Kev made a post about his recent purchase (and I think he got another Casio watch now lol), some other poeple interacted there, a couple other blogposts showed up as well,and now I felt like writing all of this.

At this point the trend took a life of its own and most people don’t know where it comes from, and that’s perfectly fine. It was about time Casio watches had some love around this place. I don’t know how long will it last, maybe a “Casiodon” instance is in the horizon, or maybe next week nobody will post their watches anymore. Such is the nature of the Fediverse, and I am happy to be part of this little corner of the Internet.

Sidenote, I’ve been quite busy on school, there were not a lot of posts this month so I hope I can make up for it in October, or maybe not, lets see how it goes…

This happened during the Twitter exodus after it was announced Musk would buy Twitter and turn it into a free-speech platform. During the hype I accepted an invitation from Josias to be part of a new instance since I wanted to feel what it was like.

In the end however it was a little too late, not a lot of people joined and I started to miss the community aspect of Fosstodon’s local timeline.

There was no real problem with staying in Benign.town, let it be clear, and even if there was troublesome people I could have just banned them y’know? I was an admin! I had unlimited power!

So anyways I am back on Fosstodon for the time being, and I won’t be hopping instances for the time being.

I’ve also been thinking about downloading the comments that have been done in my blog. In case any of the instances or posts that I use get lost at some point. So I will try to code something to have static comments, I guess.

So I decided to keep both webp and jpg files available. I am not sure of what makes a browser choose one over the other. For now, I pretty much copy pasted the solution used by Simone on his blog, I only added some code to support .gif files, since WebP supports animation too.

Implementing this was not difficult at all. I created a file inside of my _includes folder containing the following template:

<figure class="{{ include.class | default: 'img' }}">
  <picture>
    <source srcset="{{ include.image | replace:'.png','.webp' | replace:'.jpg','.webp' | replace:'.jpeg','.webp' | replace: '.gif','.webp' }}" type="image/webp">
    <source srcset="{{ include.image }}" {% if include.image contains '.jpg' or include.image contains '.jpeg' %}type="image/jpeg"{% elsif include.image contains '.png' %}type="image/png" {%elsif include.image contains '.gif'%}type="image/gif"{% endif %}>
    <img class="mx-auto" src="{{ include.image }}" alt="{{ include.alt | default: include.caption }}" {{ include.width ? include.width | prepend: 'width="' | append: '"' }} {{ include.height ? include.height | prepend: 'height="' | append: '"' }}>
  </picture>
  {% if include.caption %}<figcaption class="caption">{{ include.caption }}</figcaption>{% endif -%}
</figure>

Now all I have to do when using an image in a blogpost is provide both a webp and a jpg/png/gif file with the same filename, and use the following template:

{% include img.html image="/path/to/assets/image.jpg" width="512px" alt="Alternate text" caption="A caption" %}

I was already using Jekyll’s includes for a lot of things, such as the comments system, the articles of blogs I follow and other things. Its a really powerful tool that I quite like. However, editing each existing file could take me a long time. I actually did a poll on mastodon to see what people would do. As of the writing of this post, most people say they would handle this by hand. And, to be honest, that’s kinda what I did, but I had some tricks up my sleve.

Vim macros to the rescue

Using macros with Vim is simply fantastic, I took a while to mention them, for some reason, all I had to do was implement 2 macros for the different kinds of markup I’ve used. Be it plain markdown (![title](source)) or plain html (<figure><img></img><figcaption></figcaption></figure>). There were a couple of edge cases, like when I included links inside of the captions and such.

There are many examples and videos that talk about doign Vim macros, so I will just share some videos of how they worked out.

For Markdown, I pretty much look for ![ and then used Vim keybindings to go word for word w, to the end of the line $ and such, rinse and repeat.

The steps to make a macro for HTML were a bit more complicated, but doable nonetheless.

My macro had some problems, since I was doing dt" to delete the contents of something until a quote showed up, along other similar things, adding a link to a figcaption broke my macro in a couple cases. But other than that, it worked alright. I also had to run my macro from a certain position relative to the HTML, or else other things would not work properly.

I guess doing macros is pretty much its own artform, I’ve seen some uses for them that blew me away. If you have not used them for anything before, you might want to give them a try next time you script something!

Finishing thoughts

If I am honest, I still don’t know how I feel about it making use of includes in this way, since making the changes here was kinda annoying. But, thinking about it, it only took me like half an hour to do. I don’t know, maybe simply using something like xclip or xdotool to quickly access the plain HTML template would be a lot better to keep my markdown platform agnostic. I will think about it, but for now Jekyll is still my platform of choice.

Now I want to be honest here, after investigating a little more, due to some information that Kev let me know in the previous blog’s mastodon post, it looks like free *.ml domains can be renewed for free, they will just send me an email two weeks before the expiration date, and I should be able to keep using the domain that way basically forever.

However, the domain itself is not really mine, its just that they let me use it. So I have quite a lot of things I could do, and I still don’t know which path to follow.

I will probably pay to keep this domain properly for myself. I already have a bit of history with it, so, for the sake of keeping it alive, I will own it properly and pay for it, which comes with some more advantages than just renewing it for free each year.

Now, with the amount of money I got I can keep paying for it a few years, but I also plan on getting some other domains for myself, be it for projects I wanna build, maybe a Spanish only website, or a more professional website to show during job interviews, who knows.

I think I can even get a cheap VPS for a couple of years, which would actually be pretty cool, something I never thought I could afford by myself during these times.

Thank you all guys, seriously. Knowing that my website will probably be up for decades fills me with quite a lot of joy, my own little corner in the internet, alive and well for years to come.

Also, while writing this, I realized that there are some old snapshots of the begginings of my website, stored in the Internet Archive, so in case you want to see how it started, the oldest backup is from less than one month after I got started, feel free to take a look!.

I have done blogs before, but nothing like this, I hope this remains for the next decades, I am still young, to think I will be able to see how this evolves over time, it will be simply awesome, I can’t thank you enough for what you all inspired me to do, and all that has happened since I joined Fosstodon, this challenge, and the FOSS movement in general.

This almost feels like the end of the challenge, but it is not, there are still 10 more days to go!

This has been day 90 of the #100DaysToOffload challenge. Thank you for reading, and thank you for helping me out.

First, I am going to credit every source of inspiration I got this from. The original form of my commenting system was based on GitHub, I got it from an amazing post by Aristath. This is where most of my current code is based on. In this case, however, I am using Mastodon’s API instead of GitHub’s since I think that most of my readers use Mastodon or are part of the Fediverse.

Secondly, is the first iteration of Mastodon’s code system I used, which I read in Carl Schwan’s post about it, this is what I used for a while, with GitHub in the mix too.

After a while, Mastodon comments proved to be a lot more common and easy to set up, and I eventually stopped using GitHub, because it also required quite a lot of steps to set it up, compared to just posting in Mastodon.

At some point, I decided to rewrite Mastodon’s commenting code with a structure similar to GitHub’s, and I landed on this.

Jekyll set up

To get started, I created a comments.html file inside the _includes directory which is part of Jekyll’s structure. This way, you could add it to your _layoutsfolder, or any section of your blog, and just add {% include comments.html %}, to tell Jekyll to insert that bit of code in there.

In order for said code to work, we are also going to need some metadata located inside of the front matter of each markdown file, in this case, we add the this:

host: fosstodon.org
username: joel
com_id: 107526114775171486

Finally, we are going to start writing the HTML file that is going to be called by every post we make!

Front end

Edit comments.html and place the following lines:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/css/comments.css">
<div class="article-content">
<div id="comments-list"></div>
<noscript><p>You need JavaScript to view comments here.</p></noscript>
<a id="load-comment">Load comments</a> 
<a href="https://fosstodon.org/interact/107531143511314399?=type=reply">Reply via Mastodon</a><br>
<script src="/assets/js/purify.js"></script>
<script>
    //Here will be the rest of the code
</script>
</div>

The first line will call some specific styling that you should add if you would like to style or make it fit better. You could use mine, but I can’t promise it will work properly on your site.

Secondly, we have some div elements that are not really that important, it is up to your CSS too.

Last, we call a couple of script elements that will contain the main JavaScript code we’ll use.

The good stuff

Next we are going to add the main code will need to make all of this work as we expect. This bit is going to print the comments by calling a different function that will give format to each element.

Main function

document.getElementById('load-comment').addEventListener("click", async () => {
    document.getElementById('load-comment').remove();
    const response = await fetch('https://fosstodon.org/api/v1/statuses/107531143511314399/context');
    const data = await response.json();
    if (data.descendants && data.descendants.length > 0) {
        document.getElementById('comments-list').innerHTML += "<h3>Mastodon Comments</h3>";
        let descendants = data.descendants;
        for (let i = 0; i < descendants.length; i++) {
            document.getElementById('comments-list').appendChild(DOMPurify.sanitize(createCommentEl(descendants[i]), {'RETURN_DOM_FRAGMENT': true}));
        }
    }
    else {
        document.getElementById('comments-list').innerHTML += "<p>⚠️ No Mastodon comments yet ⚠️</p>";
    }
});

As you can see, once the “Load comments” button is pressed, we’re going to call the main function, which will fetch data by calling Mastodon’s API and return a JSON, then we are going to access the descendants object, which should have an array of comments and its properties, which will be processed with the function createCommentEl().

Comment formatting

This function will get the data from the JSON and create HTML elements based on that data. Here is the function:

function createCommentEl(response){
    let user = document.createElement('div');
    user.classList.add('mastodon-comment');
    let userAvatar = document.createElement('img');
    userAvatar.classList.add('avatar');
    userAvatar.setAttribute('height', 60 ); 
    userAvatar.setAttribute('width', 60 ); 
    userAvatar.setAttribute('src',response.account.avatar_static);
    user.appendChild(userAvatar);
    let userLink = document.createElement('a');
    userLink.setAttribute('href',response.account.url);
    userLink.classList.add('comment-author');
    for (let j = 0; j < response.account.emojis.length;j++){
        let emoji = response.account.emojis[j];
        response.account.display_name = response.account.display_name.replace(`:${emoji.shortcode}:`, `<img src="${emoji.static_url}" alt="Emoji ${emoji.shortcode}" height="16px" width="16px" />`);
    }
    userLink.innerHTML = response.account.display_name + ' @' + response.account.username;

    let commentDate = document.createElement('a');
    commentDate.classList.add('comment-date'); commentDate.setAttribute('href',response.url); commentDate.innerHTML = response.created_at.substr(0,10);

    let commentContents = document.createElement('div');
    commentContents.classList.add('mastodon-comment-content'); commentContents.innerHTML = response.content;

    let comment = document.createElement('div');
    comment.classList.add( 'comment-content' );

    user.appendChild( comment );
    comment.appendChild( userLink );
    comment.appendChild(commentDate);
    comment.appendChild( commentContents );
    return user;
}

As you can see, we are creating a bunch of HTML elements that will have content from the JSON, we assign classes, child elements, and such.

In fact, the only thing I kept from Schwan’s version is the way to call the API and the basic structure, which I turned into Aristath’s syntax.

I am no expert when it comes to JavaScript, but I think this is pretty readable overall. At least a bit more than the code I based this from, or maybe I am now used to this code since I’ve worked on it for a while.

I think this combines the best of the comment systems I have found online, so I think I will stick to this method for quite a while, since I have been using it for months, I just never took the time to explain it properly until now.

You can always check my website’s source code to see how all of this is being applied. And don’t be afraid to leave any question you might have by contacting me in any way you prefer below.

This has been day 69 of #100DaysToOffload

Mentioned sources and posts

• A new comment system for my static Jekyll site (Aristath)
• Adding comments to your static blog with Mastodon (Carl Schwan)
• Previous posts by me talking about GitHub’s and Mastodon’s comment systems.