This Week — Terminal Land, Listed, and Blog Fixes

An update on my /uses page, and a few more changes to my blog. Also, Terminal Land!

I'm posting this much later than my scheduled time... because I got lazy. Well, story of my life.

Terminal Land

Last Sunday, @adam opened up Terminal Land to anyone who wanted to create places. In approximately 76 hours, omg.lol members broke Terminal Land several times, as reported on the IRC channels and the Discourse forum. Eventually, Adam had to close Terminal Land down to deal with all the bugs. I guess this is what beta-testing is like.

As for me, I took a wander around Terminal Land and decided to carve out my own space, based on my home in my current off-the-grid tiny house challenge run in Sims 4. Currently, it's just the exteriors, which is a simple garden surrounding the home. When Terminal Land comes back up, you can find it southwest of Lodnon (sic) Second Street. It's called Daryl Sun's Tiny Cottage — you might catch me there when I'm online!

(Side note: Inspired by @taurean using Chat-GPT to generate new spaces, I tried out Bard. Yes, I have a Google account, and I'm aware it's a privacy nightmare. Unfortunately, I need it for Important™ accounts. Anyway, I decided not to use any of the text Bard generated for my tiny cottage, but rely on my own voice to bring my tiny cottage to life. Instead, I began interrogating Bard on whether it was taking content from Archive of Our Own and correcting it on its "facts" about omg.lol. It was fun.)

My /uses page, now on Listed

As I've announced earlier this week on Mastodon, I've transferred my /uses page from this blog to another blog hosted on Listed. Listed is Standard Notes' free blogging service that comes with the notetaking service, but you have to activate it manually before you can start blogging, and only paid accounts can have custom domains. Like I mentioned in my toot, it's much faster updating pages using Listed: all I have to do to publish is click a button in a menu. I change setups frequently, so it's better for me to update my /uses page this way.

My Listed blog called Daryl Sun's Notebook. The only entry so far is my /uses page, which isn't even complete yet. However, I do plan to publish more notes, in the style of Dan Mackinlay's The Living Thing.

More blog fixes

Again, I told myself I won't tinker with my blog anymore. Again, I [CENSORED] lied.

The new blog name

You may have noticed that this blog is named different now. To be honest, "Beyond the Walls" was always intended to be a placeholder name, because I'm not good at naming things. It's a riff off the name of my defunct blog, Beyond the Garden Walls, and referred to my broadcasting of my thoughts beyond the imaginary walls of my headspace. However, I didn't really like the name and wanted something that described the blog better. In the end, I went with something simple and straightforward: Daryl Sun's Journal. It parallels my Listed blog, Daryl Sun's Notebook, and I think it sounds better.

IndieAuth and WebSub

Confession: I forgot that IndieAuth and WebSub are things that exist, so when I implemented Indieweb features last week, I didn't include them. Whoops!

Now, this blog can sign onto websites that use IndieAuth. It also has basic support for WebSub, powered by Switchboard.

Templates

I mentioned last week that I had't figured out how to automate adding Mastodon POSSE links in my post. This past week, I have! Well, sort of: adding the link is manual, but inserting the indicating text is automatic.

You see, I was figuring out how to use Bridgy. For Bridgy to detect and pull Mastodon replies to my previous posts, it needs the corresponding Maston POSSE links. Fortunately for me, weblog.lol has something called advanced variables, which is something I glossed over until now.

First, I needed to set an advanced variable in configuration.txt with a name of the array and a name of the variable, like so:

;; Custom Variables
;; -----

POSSE: <em class="posse">Do you want to comment on this article? You may reply on <a href="$mastodon" class="u-syndication" rel="syndication">Mastodon</a>!</em>

For now, the array POSSE only holds one variable, $mastodon, but I can add other variables in the future like $lemmy, $friendica, or $calckey if I need to.

You'll also notice that the array is a mini-template with the class posse and h-entry markup, specifically the u-syndication class (plus hAtom backwards compatibility). The class posse tells weblog.lol what to insert when you add {\posse} inside a post, while u-syndication is necessary for Bridgy to detect the inserted Mastodon link as the corresponding POSSE post.

Next, I edited my default post template, like so:

Post path format: /Y/m/d/
Default post: <<[
Date: $date
Slug: 
Tags: 

# Your new post

This is a new blog post. You can author it in _Markdown_, which is **awesome**.

---

{\posse:mastodon=}
]>>

Now, every time I start a new post from the web editor, {\posse} is automatically inserted. However, since $mastodon contains no value, the mini-template won't be rendered.

Finally, once I've published my post and cross-posted it to Mastodon (either using Bridgy or manually), I need to edit my post so I can insert the Mastodon link, like so:

{\posse:mastodon=URL}

URL is the Mastodon link.

Like I said earlier, it's not completely automatic, but I don't see a way to automate it unless I write a script, which I don't know how to do. For now, this will do.

My /links page

As promised last week, I put up my /links page! Inspired by Where to Find Me, it tells you the best and worst ways to contact me. It also indicates where not to find me, in case you find an account out in the wild that has the same name or profile picture as my official accounts, but you're not sure if it's me.

Webrings

If you scroll down, you'll see that the footer of this blog got more links. Yup, I decided to join some webrings! Please note that I'm not officially included in Fediring, geekring, and silly city webring yet, as my applications are pending approval. (I also have a pendig application to the Queer Coded webring.) Also, I only joined webrings that don't require use of GitHub because, erm, I don't have a GitHub account.

As for why I joined so many, I got inspired by foreverliketh.is' post:

Join as many of these collectives as you can. Because you should broadcast your voice. Send out signs of life, state your presence. Do not be passive in your site’s discovery. Your personal website… You, are something worth sharing. Worth finding. As long as anyone believes that, projects like these will be worthy of our time.

Personally, I think webrings are a fun way to discover new personal websites and blogs. It's so cool to see other people's websites when you click the arrows!

(Side note: I also applied for inclusion in the 250kb Club and the No JS Club, so I'm now morally obligated to keep this blog small and JavaScript-free. Yay!)

Other fixes

I implemented some minor fixes to improve accessibility for this blog, which includes changing the accent color from my beloved Dracula Purple to a better contrasting Dracula Orange and improving the font stack.

Also, I've changed the license of my blog content to Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. TL;DR: You can copy, adapt, and republish my content as long as you give credit to me and it's not for commercial use.

Oh yeah, I made some HTTP response pages too! So far, there's 404, 410, and... 418. What, you expect me to read about an awesome April Fool's Day joke, and not make a reference to it?

Future plans

Other shenanigans

Okay, that's all for now. See you next week!

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