For… reasons, I found myself trawling back through the early entries here and found that a bunch of them had been truncated at some point in the blog’s history of migrating from engine to engine. Luckily, the Wayback Machine has a sufficiently complete archive, so I’m slowly working my way through the broken posts, bringing them into the big old Content.org file that the site’s generated from and adding a margin note or two to supply a bit of 2025 context where appropriate. The Fine Art of Complexity Management is the first post to receive such attention. Twenty two years on, I still think it’s good advice.

Further to my last note, I think I might have a working script to send webmentions for any updated pages. Now to plumb it into the rest of the automation!

Now I can display received Webmentions, I need to start working on sending them.

I don’t want to rely on an external service if I can help it, because that’s how my old setup decayed, so don’t hold your breath.

All being well, this note was deployed here by a cron job, and all the webmentions data got updated too.

All being well…

Oh! The reason Hugo didn’t load data/mentions.json was that the directory data/mentions/ exists!

Moved the webmentions data to data/webmentions.json and all is fine.

Progress!

Before:

./data/mentions/3f256ff[...]494.json
./data/mentions/62afe34[...]020.json
...

Hmm, so which file pertains to which post?

{{ $slug := .RelPermalink | sha256 }}
{{ $all_mentions := index site.Data.mentions $slug | default slice }}
{{ $likes := where $all_mentions "wm-property" "like-of" }}

At least the template code to get at it is more or less sane.

The pull of “One Big Text File” is strong

I’m semi-seriously contemplating pulling the Hugo theme that I use to generate this website into a single Org file and using Org’s Literate Programming tooling to spit it out into individual layout files.

Yay! Kicking it old school with a Makefile to automate building and deploying this site. I don’t know if I can entrust it to a cron job yet because the deployment involves ssh, and I’m a bit fuzzy on the workings of key management in such circumstances

I think I have webmentions displaying correctly again. However, we’re updating everything manually again at the moment, at least until I get a webhook up and running again, so it might take a while for your replies, reposts &c. to show up on the site.

This is absolutely what a sane person might write in their blog, isn’t it?

#+begin_example
,#+begin_src emacs-lisp :tangle nil :noweb-ref bibble
#+end_example
#+begin_src emacs-lisp

(setq some-variable 'some-value)

#+end_src
#+begin_example
,#+end_src
#+end_example

And then doing this to their CSS to make it work

I really should get around to replacing bloody GitHub.

God help me if I end up self-hosting my own instance of some code forge, but AI bollocks can fuck right off. I keep hoping that people are going to wake up and realise it’s the very worst kind of emperor’s new clothes bullshit, but they’re taking their own sweet time about it.

I confess that the blog is implying that it works with webmentions, but the infrastructure I used to display them isn’t working at the moment. Fixing it’s on the long TODO list that I might never get around to. However, the service that catches any webmentions is still in operation, so I’m not keen to remove it entirely.

Notes appear to be working. I have the horrible feeling that the CSS I’m using to style things is about as inelegant as it’s possible to be, but things to seem to be looking okay in a decent array of viewport sizes. I’ll call that a win.

I feel like I’m in a maze of twisty SCSS files and am getting very confuzzled. However, the layout’s mostly working except in a narrow viewport, when the timestamp on a note happily fits in the left margin, but the timestamp on a post is truncated to the left because the font size doesn’t seem to reduce as much. As far as I can tell, they’re both the same size according to the stylesheet.

I’m working on adding short notes without titles to the blog.

Basically something that maps neatly to Mastodon toots or Bluesky skeets. The chief difficulty will likely be styling them in a fashion that’s consistent with the rest of the blog, but still compact