Kind: Notes

It is Pi Day again, March 14th or 03-14. While arbitrary, I’d like to take a moment to appreciate the Raspberry Pi, the small single board computer that launched a lot of great hobbyist projects. While it running off a microSD is incredibly frustrating at times, it is really easy way to play with small dedicated computing.

Haven’t posted on Facebook since June 10, 2018 because it doesn’t allow me to link back to my own site. Someone created a tool that might allow that again, so testing it with this post to see if I can pull back responses.

As I’ve been backfilling weather on old posts on my site, I’ve also been fixing photo markup so that old photos will show up in the photo grid I added not long ago at /kind/photo. You can also look by year by adding the year to the end of the URL(/2020 or such). May add some links.

WordPress allows for custom archive templates. For the longest time, I’ve wanted to change the archive for my photo posts to show them in a photo grid. So, I’ve now done that at /kind/photo. You have to click the photo to see the full context, but I like the presentation of all photos I’ve posted. This does not include photos in other types of posts, but it’s probably the most visual item I’ve put out in a while. I hope it causes me to post more photos.

Coming up on the 25th is the IndieWebCamp Create Day. This is an online event where people will work on projects while sharing in a common Zoom room, so they can collaborate with others, or just bounce ideas and feel togetherness. People are invited to demo to others what they worked on.  If you have no other plans that day, why not join us for a little while, or  a long while.

Continuing my periodic chore of uploading all Indiewebcamp videos to archive.org, just uploaded all of the videos I could find from IWC Nuremberg 2018. Because…why not?

Watching Class Action Park, a documentary about Action Park in Vernon NJ. Makes me feel good I survived it, as some of these things were much scarier than I remember as a child. Of course, I avoided the really scary rides.

Just released another minor bugfix for Post Kinds. This is the 7th in the last few weeks. The recent update, version 3.4, created a few issues, but also revealed some that were already there as I started actually checking more of the data I’ve been storing for a rainy day.

For example, I’m no longer doing backward compatibility retrieval on posts using the older storage formats, which, looking at older posts, means that some things are not displaying. I have been restoring the information to the posts by manually reparsing it, but I may have to release a version to do so automatically, as no one wants to go through old posts.

Fortunately, I don’t have that many, but I do need to make sure those who posted more aren’t subject to the same problem.

Tonight begins Yom Kippur, and for the first time in my life, I will not be at services. There was no option, due to lack of committed individuals and rain, for an outdoor service, and I’m still uncomfortable with the way they are not distancing inside. So I will be fasting and praying at home. There is a very different feel to solo prayer than group prayer and Yom Kippur feels different than praying at home alone on Passover, which I also did. I am pleased that we were able to get services outside available for Rosh Hashanah. If Rosh Hashanah is, akin to a trial, the verdict, Yom Kippur is the final appeal before the sentence is carried out for the next year. In a year that included so many difficult things, and the challenges of the current situation the world finds itself in…most of us cannot imagine this continuing till next Yom Kippur. Here is hoping things will look better soon.

I bumped up a little plugin for my site that generates rewrite URLs for avatar images. So if you visit /avatar/username you get redirected to the avatar for that username. You can add ?s=250 to pass the size to the other side. This is the same query used by Gravatar. Right now, this calls the gravatar URL and does a temporary redirect to it, setting cache control headers to save the redirect. This means that there could be up to two http queries per avatar image. In a future version, I might actually serve the avatar locally. I got tired of broken URLs for my image. Now, the same link will always produce my image.

Micropub 2.2.3 for WordPress has been released. It fixes a variety of warning notices.  Published, updated, name, and summary properties are no longer stored in post meta. When queried, they will be pulled from the equivalent WordPress properties. Content should be as well, however as content in the post includes rendered microformats we need to store the pure version. Might address this in a future version. As timezone is not stored in the WordPress timestamp, store the timezone offset for the post in meta instead of the full published and updated date. It will also sideload and set featured images if featured property is set. Note: Version 8.9 of JetPack apparently breaks this plugin. This is under investigation.

Took a drive on Friday down to Callicoon, New York, walked around a bit, then down the Delaware to Narrowsburg, and back up in a loop to head back through Bethel, site of the Woodstock Festival. Eventually I’ll be able to display this trip using my own mapping system, instead of this screenshot.