Over the past year, my GNU Social timeline has gone almost completely
silent; it seems that many people have moved to Mastodon and maybe those
instances have stopped federating.
Further, GNU Social development has been stalled for a long time.
So this seems like an inevitable decision to give Mastodon a try. I'll
start by following people and will post both on here and GNU Social
initially. See https://social.mikegerwitz.com.
This better describes my experience and responsibilities, though I have
never been particularly comfortable with the term. My manager describes me
as an engineer in my current position anyway.
I do not have time to update the features that do not work without JS,
though admittedly they have done a good job of providing fallbacks to
some of the things that are listed here.
Was finally published. This year they included the slides in the video,
which is perfect, since this was a technical talk that used the slides to
demonstrate the commands, and I actually did some stuff on the computer
during the talk.
Though the PIP did slightly cut off some commands; see the PDF or Org
sources for the full commands.
It had to be shortened to 100 words. This also more accurately reflects what
I will be talking about; it will be a slower pace than I had originally anticipated,
and will focus a bit more on some core philosophical concepts. But it will still
be interesting to both hackers and non-technical users.
I noticed a lot of odd `/rss.xml' requests in my 404 log. As it turns out,
it was my fault. This both fixes it and adds a redirect in case someone
tries to do this manually. I suppose that'd be convenient.
Wow. I had wanted to spend less than an hour on a response, and instead I
wound up writing my largest article since the NSA revelations and
GHS. Hopefully others find this useful.
I've been sitting on this for weeks because I didn't have the time to finish
final proofreading and changes. I need to release this before I sit on it
for another couple; I have to start working on my LP2019 talk soon.
* post/2019-02-18-ghcq-exceptional-access-e2ee-decentralization-reproducible.md:
New post.
* src/papers.rec: Add post to top.
I'm still debating whether to include the full text of the post within the
RSS feed, since some of them may be substantial (like the one I'll be
posting soon that I've been sitting on for a couple weeks because I'm too
busy/lazy to do final editing).
* src/rss.sh: Add "(Read full post)" link.
The inlined CSS intended to make the stylesheet applicaton less jarring on
slow connections was placed _after_ `style.css', which was causing it to
take precedence over the mobile layout. Silly mistake, and not good. And
it went unnoticed for too long; I didn't visit my own website on mobile for
a bit.
Sorry, mobile people!
* src/header.tpl.htm (head): Move style.css link below inline style.
This increases the headings, gives them slightly larger margins, decreases
the font size for footnotes, decreases the line-height, and lightens the
weight of the font. I think this makes it easier to eyeball the different
sections (especially in the article I will be publishing shortly), and
further helps to emphasize that the footnotes are subservient to the text.
The idea here is to provide as little CSS as is sensible for the initial
page load to be styled in a layout similar to the final layout. This
initial styling may be briefly visible on a slow conection.
Slow connections can happen for a variety of reasons. For example, I'm a
Tor user, and connection speeds vary. Mobile connection speeds can also
vary wildly.
This adds a few hundred bytes, but I was able to cut it down quite a bit,
and I don't find this to be unreasonable relative to the other data on
each page.
I only noticed this issue because my work computer has IE11 installed. I will not be
supporting it. Edge works just fine and IE is just about extinct, finally.
Of couse, I recomend using a free/libre browser.
This automates creation of the header and footer. Previously I modified
them manually and they got out-of-sync.
This is deployed to a different location on my webserver, even though the
public route is `/projects'.
Rather than displaying the hash separately, this just makes the date a link
to the source code. Until I display a modification date, this will also
make it easy to see the history of the file.
This website honors the user's default font settings (both to be kind and
for accessibility reasons). Consequently, the responsive layout is based on
character units (ch) rather than pixels.
This goes back to Open Sans, which is what I was using previously.
I really like Source Sans Pro. Unfortunately, the font rendered far too
small relative to other sans-serif fonts, which caused an unpleasent
experience for both slow page loads (e.g. over Tor or slower
connections) and for users with web fonts disabled (e.g. via NoScript).
Further, the font is huge: the WOFF is over 100KiB per font, and I was
using regular and light versions. Open Sans, in contrast, is <20KiB per
font, allowing me to use Regular, Light, and SemiBold and still be about
half the size of the single Source Sans Pro Regular.
As a bonus, users may also already have Open Sans installed on their
system.
I settled with WOFF instead of WOFF2 for browser support.
The site now looks pretty close on fallback, which is good. For
example, I use DejaVu Sans as my default font, and it even has a Light
version that renders correctly.
As with all resources on my site, I host this from my own domain rather
than via Google's servers. That means that the font won't be cached for
users when they first visit the site, but that's okay---privacy is more
important.
I should note that, since I use NoScript, I almost never load web fonts
for other sites. But I still wanted to try to provide a consistent look
across systems for those who do wish to load fonts.
We have two sitautions to account for:
1. Old posts had both uppercase and lowercase letters in slugs; and
2. Some ids changed.
Lighttpd can't convert to lowercase and having a bunch of separate redirects
in my webserver configuration for the id changes is messy. So, this script
is intended to be called only when a post contains an uppercase character in
the path.
I had wanted to avoid _any_ sort of dynamic scripts. Oh well.
All other redirects are handled in the websevrer configuration (which isn't
part of this repo atm).
Rather than having Pandoc generate the id, which has the potential to change
over time and cause 404s, let's just generate the slug from the filename so
that the ids will never change. This also solves the awkward question of
what the filename should be, since it was previously something arbitrary.
This mass rename was accomplished via this simple shell script:
for p in *.meta; do
slug=$( recsel -P slug "$p" | xargs basename )
mv -v "${p/.meta/.md}" "${p:0:10}-$slug.md"
done
with minor manual tweaks where I saw fit. Of course, now I have some pretty
long filenames, which is undesirable.
The next step is to compare it with the slugs currently on mikegerwitz.com
and make them match. That's the next commit, and should be pretty simple.
Mike Gerwitz