There’s a certain frustrating joy in fiddling with the details of a thing so as to improve the formatting of the new thing you’ve just added to your site, and discovering that a side effect of the change is that a couple of niggles that you’d not quite got to the bottom of on the site itself are fixed in passing.

I think I’ve got the crossposting to Mastodon looking less awful, and I know I’ve got my front page looking better. Isn’t that lovely?

Twitter, eh? Elon bloody Musk!

In the happier timeline, Elton John bought Twitter and it became even more fabulous with every passing day. In the far more depressing timeline we find ourselves living in, Elon seems to be determined to tank the company and fuck the community.

So I’ve buggered off to Mastodon. At the time of writing, you’ll find me at @pdcawley@mendeddrum.org and, you might even be reading a version of this via Mastodon rather than directly on the site.

Once I’d added the Mac Mini to the rack, there was a space in the bracket it was mounted on that was designed to hold one or two Raspberry Pis. I had a Pi sitting about, so of course I added it to the rig thinking “I’ll work out what to do with that later.”

It’s proved invaluable…

Back when I first started streaming on the internet, I used a Logitech webcam and some lights I had picked up for doing product photography and such for the Loafery and some audio gear I had because, well, recording stuff is just fascinating. It was okay, but even with decent lighting and audio, the webcam was frustrating to control (basically, there was no control), so I picked up a cheap capture card from Amazon and drafted my Nikon D810 as my webcam and the appearance of my streams improved enormously. This worked fine with my slightly aging PC and Twitch Sings.

I’ll get back to the gory details of my webmention catcher later, but I’ve been doing a bit of site gardening. Hopefully this means that our index page is looking much nicer, and things are a bit more parseable by IndieWeb tools.

The beauty of using a static site generator to build your website is supposed to be that it’s all delightfully simple. Simple markdown formatted files go in at one end and a slim, fast and easy to serve website comes out the other end. All that remains is to upload those files to the appropriate directory on your server and all is well.

But never underestimate the ability of a long time Emacs user to complicate things.

Taking one more step on the road to full IndieWeb citizenship or whatever it’s called, Just A Summary now displays webmentions.

In which Piers attempts to explain why he’s not been blogging in years, and makes vague noises about getting back to it again, in the hope that this time his IndieWeb inspired enthusiasm will last longer than a couple of weeks.

If you’re at all like me, you have content on a bunch of different sites (Instagram, Youtube, Flickr, Soundcloud, Bandcamp…) and, especially for multimedia content, it’s great to be able to link to ’live’ versions of that content. Of course, all those sites will let you ‘share’ content and usually have an ’embed’ option that hands you a bunch of HTML that you can paste into your blog entry. But screw that! I’m a programmer for whom laziness is one of the cardinal virtues – if it’s at all possible, I prefer to let the computer do the work for me. Hugo¹ sort of supports this out of the box with its youtube, instagram, vimeo etc. built in shortcodes. The thing is, they’re not lazy enough – you have to dig into each URL to extract a content ID and pass that in to {{% youtube kb-Aq6S4QZQ %}} or whatever. Which would be kind of fine, if you weren’t used to the way sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and so on work. With those sites, you enter a URL and they disappear off behind the scenes and fill in a fancy preview of the page you linked to. Why can’t Hugo do that?

On Thursday the 9th of April at 7pm UK time, I’m streaming my first attempt at a full folk club style gig from my study to my Twitch stream and I would love for you to be there.

In the last post I handwaved the way I represented bakery formulae in the bakery database, so here’s a little more detail. It helps to think of a bakery formula as a node on a directed acyclic graph with weighted edges, where the weights are literally weights. Here’s the graph a for a couple of products

Just over a year ago now, I finally opened the bakery I’d been dreaming of for years. It’s been a big change in my life, from spending all my time sat in front of a computer, to spending most of it making actual stuff. And stuff that makes people happy, at that. It’s been a huge change, but I can’t think of a single job change that’s ever made me as happy as this one.

So, you want to play Devil’s Advocate, but you’re afraid you might come across as a bit (or a lot) of an asshole? Here’s some suggestions for how to avoid that.

Back to the bakehouse