A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
Stream
Some other stuff ...
On This Day
Webring
What I’ve watched
I keep a little log.
A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
A little while ago, I decided that I would really like a better webmentions experience on this site. I’m currently indebted to Pelle Wasserman’s app to collect them for me and deliver them here, which I appreciate very much, but my effort to understand how I might improve the presentation, for example by separating and grouping the various kinds of reaction, taught me only that I have far too much to learn about doing that in a browser. So I turned my attention back to a plugin that I last looked at (checks notes) nine years ago.
The plan is to modernise the plugin and make it work on my site. The original author has abandoned it and is happy for someone else to take it on. That someone will probably not be me. But I will give it a good try.
To work efficiently, I need to work with a live site. I’ve been having a lot of trouble using SFTP with the sites I have at Hetzner web hosting, so I thought I would first take a crack at creating a self-managed server, which would allow me full terminal access. In this, I was enormously helped by Adam’s Neatnik Guide to Setting up an IRC server and especially the idea of creating a specific user. It took several attempts to actually get to the point where I can log in to the server from the terminal, helped by my own previous experience and sudo userdel -r username, both of which I had to use more than once.
From there, installing Apache2 and PHP were straightforward, if scary, as things whizzed past on the screen. Grav itself was next, made much easier by the ability to use rsync and, again, the ability to reasonably easily fix all the upsets along the way, like when a stray / just kept adding directory after directory after directory that in my frustration I completely failed to notice. As ever, there were errors that needed to be corrected, but Grav’s instructions, carefully obeyed, fixed all of them and in the end I have a working mirror of a cut down version of my site, ready to play.
Next up, I will upload the plugin in question and go to work, almost certainly with some assistance from ChatGPT. I have a plan of attack more or less worked out, but one question remains. I have a fork of the original plugin. What should I do to manage that? Copy the repo to my desktop and ensure changes I make on the live site come back there to be committed? That sounds more complicated than it would be worth. Or try and clone my fork directly to my server and work there? More to learn, for sure, but perhaps simpler in the end. Or is there some better way?
Webmentions
Webmentions allow conversations across the web, based on a web standard. They are a powerful building block for the decentralized social web.
If you write something on your own site that links to this post, you can send me a Webmention by putting your post's URL in here:
Comments
I very much regret that Russian spammers have made my comment system unusable. If you want to email me a comment, it is easy enough to find the address and I will be happy to do the needful behind the scenes. Webmentions remain available (for now).