Notes

15 August 2018 21:24 IST

Did a little update to the site this evening. I have have categories and tags exposed again. I also simplified the link styling and fixed some bits of layout that I’d previously broken. Hooray for iteration!

06 August 2018 16:45 IST

If you’re a person who is on Mastodon, you may be interested to know that we now have our own instances for Ind.ie, and I have my own instance for me.

So you can follow us on Mastodon at:

• Ind.ie: @indie@mastodon.ind.ie
• Better: @better@mastodon.ind.ie
• Aral: @aral@mastodon.ar.al
• Laura: @laura@mastodon.laurakalbag.com
• Oskar: @gigapup@mastodon.laurakalbag.com 🐕

If you’re not on Mastodon, and are wondering what I’m on about, you might find the following link useful!

‘How Does Mastodon Work?’ by Kev Quirk

02 August 2018 17:28 IST

Today I pushed a fairly big update to my site… I’ve now got a photos section, and that section is grouped under the latest section alongside notes.

This comes from me wanting to add more types of content. Photos and notes are both informal, with photos being the most informal, and I don’t want them to each be in the navigation. They’re just not that important.

The RSS feed for Photos isn’t quite up and running yet. I need to work out how to make the template produce the images in the right manner. This requires more digging into Hugo.

But I have got a fancy grid for the Photos list, and pleased with how that’s working out.

25 July 2018 21:06 IST

Somehow I had fudged my site’s RSS feeds. They are now un-fudged (and showing full content as intended!)

• All posts: https://laurakalbag.com/index.xml
• Just blog: https://laurakalbag.com/posts/index.xml
• Just notes: http://laurakalbag.com/notes/index.xml

Thanks to Julian who has sharp eyes and gave me a kind nudge.

25 July 2018 14:04 IST

Angry thoughts while updating the Better Blocker blocklist… (I get them every time!)

If you are providing third party services on a domain that is entirely unrelated to your (or any previously acquired) business name, you look veeeery sketchy…

I’m looking at you, Adobe. 👀

If you do this and you hide your domain ownership in whois, you are extra sketchy.

Nothing makes me angry quite like researching trackers for Better Blocker.

Use Better Blocker? There’s new block rules waiting for you. Open the app to fetch them. A couple of little fixes and a couple of new trackers blocked. I’ll get more sorted over the next week (these were a little tricksy!)

https://better.fyi/news/

Now I am having a large G&T.

20 July 2018 21:28 IST

17 July 2018 18:08 IST

I seem to be doing a lot of cross-posting content in different locations. Not just farming out links all over the place, but cross-posting because the discussions we have in different locations (Twitter vs Mastodon vs here) are all valuable in their own ways.

This is in conjunction with Aral and I focusing more on our personal sites (ar.al and laurakalbag.com. As we’re looking at how what we’re building works in conjunction with/layers on top of personal sites.

Aral has put together a setup where he can blog from a phone. I have added a Notes section on my site where I can post short-form stuff like photos and statuses (anything shorter than a blog post, really.) Though my setup is a little more static than Aral’s, as it is literally a static site built using Hugo and I use an iPhone. So no posting from a phone for me. (Yet.)

The idea is that the Notes section of my site is the canonical location for those bits of content. Then I can cross-post to other locations. (This is similar to IndieWeb concepts.)

However, manual cross posting is a pain. If I post a note to my site (create post, write in markdown, push to Git, deploy), I then have to manually go to wherever I want to cross-post (Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook, here etc) , rewrite the content/link to content in an acceptable format (under 260 chars etc), and post. The whole exercise takes time. It may be a worthwhile endeavour for a blog post about something meaningful. But it’s a lot of faff to share a dog photo or a “subtweet”, let alone a reply or reposting of somebody else’s content.

Which finally brings me to my point… how do I make cross-posting easier?

Right now, I have an IFTTT recipe that takes my RSS feed and publishes new posts to Twitter. Like this on Twitter.

It’s not great. It is only for Twitter (IFTTT doesn’t support Mastodon.)

How do I do this better?

One extreme side is that I could build and maintain my own interface for cross-posting like Jeremy has. There are alternatives to IFTTT like Trigger Happy. Though some social networks (such as Instagram) only let you post from their interface, so this solution will never be entirely compatible with those particular walled gardens. Also, I’m not being defeatist in saying these solutions are somewhat beyond my means.

The other extreme (the low-tech solution) is that I have a to-do list template for every time I post something to make sure I format my posts correctly, and don’t forget a particular social network.

If anyone has any ideas or thoughts on the matter, I’d love to hear them!

05 July 2018 11:12 IST

Given that there’s a couple of women in UK parliament throwing the word “prostitute” around, I found this and it seems to be informative:

Understanding Sex Work in an Open Society

tldr; sex work and human trafficking are different, lumping everything under “prostitution” is unhelpful/harmful.

29 June 2018 09:25 IST

Too many devs in my mentions complaining they have no say about marketing and business depts adding tracking scripts to sites.

I hear that it’s hard, but if it is genuinely impossible, why are you working there? You have no agency and you are complicit in unethical technology.

Some people don’t have the privilege to change jobs (mostly folks from marginalised groups)…

But let’s be honest, many of you actually do have that privilege. I’m not here to take your excuses, I don’t have that power. You‘re responsible to society to not build shitty tech.

14 June 2018 17:12 IST

How could you say no to this face?