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Pretty Good Hat

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A cappuccino with a flowery pour of milk on top, in a saucer with some spilled coffee. It’s on a sunny, light-colored speckled counter, next to a jacket and bike helmet.

Coffeeneuring is a community event of taking to the bike to celebrate fall’s moods, angled sunlight, colors, breezes — and tastes of autumny drinks. I came across it for the first time last year just before the end of the month-or-so time span that it’s run by Chasing Mailboxes. It was too late to participate, so I looked forward to it all year.

I was ready when the official rules dropped and then, disaster, or near disaster: I badly hurt my shoulder and couldn’t get on the bike the first couple of weeks. After a lot (seriously, lots) of ibuprofen over about ten days, and eventual confirmation that I hadn’t torn my rotator cuff, I got to go for a first gentle ride of Coffeeneuring Month today: Over to Olympia Coffee on a perfect fall day. This first ride was just about five miles round trip, mostly through a set of greenways that wind around the nearby neighborhoods. What a good start to this fun community event.

Boring website administrivia

It’s been a couple of nice hobby web site weekends here are Pretty Good Hat PNW. Reading Adam’s great writeup of setting up an IRC server put me in the mood to play around with servers, and with the price of my shared hosting having gone up last year, I thought I’d experiment with setting up some servers at Hetzner.

Well, one good thing led to another, and curling was on TV so I had a lot of good laptop time, and so I’m finishing out this weekend having completely migrated from my prior host after more than ten years there. I learned a bunch about setting up new servers! I can’t say enough good things about Adam’s guide and the encouragement to be found hanging around the omg.lol community.1

Before cancelling my old service, I made an exhaustive scroll through all the content in that home directory, downloading and archiving a lot. Over the years I’ve had everything from twenty years of web sites2, to old versions of my CV, to little R experiments, ruby projects, and other things that kind of scaffolded a lot of my history. It really is true that a good chunk of the story of my life is the story of all the things I’ve done with web sites in that time. It’s a very specific kind of time capsule, those directories full of web projects, jpegs, and datestamps.

misc tools & process notes

  • I used Zed for a lot of my migration work. Its remote editing via an ssh connection works beautifully (and in fact is how I’m writing this post).
  • Caddy is great! The way it enables automatic certificate installation is so seamless.
  • I post with a Drafts action and a cross-platform shortcut for uploading images, both of which hit a little PHP micropub endpoint. It’s really pretty cool that with updates of authentication, I could move my posting tools over to a new host and just … keep using them.
  • web sites and servers are cool and fun to play with

  1. If you happen to want to plink around with some new servers of your own, follow the Hetzner signup link in Adam’s IRC guide; you’ll get a credit and he’ll get one, too, if you stick around! ↩︎

  2. That’s “live” web site time; I just realized that if I go back to college archives, I’m at more than thirty years. Which. Well. ↩︎

Closing Tabs, part 4 – The final chapter (for now): Here ends my selective curation from among the four hundred tabs that have lived in Safari on my phone for the past two to three years. I skipped legions of old GitHub pages; and I closed without close review a pretty good-sized catalog of then-cutting-edge Covid resources, the re-scanning of which gave me a weird sense of unresolved trauma and a pit in my stomach.

For my troubles, here’s the last half dozen or so links that, for one reason or another, I thought I’d share.

Time for Closing Tabs, vol. 2, in which I once again dive deep into the hundreds of open Safari tabs on my phone and unceremoniously close them. Today’s offerings to the cache gods:

One of the other options Omniverse suggests for moving off of its service is self-hosting, which is akin to telling me to go fuck myself. Self-hosting is great if your hobby is self-hosting things. Mine is not.

  • ggview, which helps generate canvases of the right size for ggplot output

Closing Tabs, you don’t have to get read but you can’t … stay … here.

Welcome to Closing tabs, vol 1: In which I cull neglected open tabs from my mobile browser.

I have too many tabs on on my phone. Today I’m rapidly scrolling and closing, but finding some curiosities that might, might be worth noting.

I really like Garrick’s method of adding Bluesky comments to a Quarto-based blog. I’m already wired up to use Bridgy at my personal blog and Quarto datablog, and enabling it to connect to Bluesky was just a matter of adding the connection with an app-specific password. The difference between using webmentions versus the direct point-to-point link that Garrick and others have implemented is something to consider: it looks like the direct feed from Bluesky, at least, preserves a lot more of the continuity of a thread, while the webmentions approach (especially using Bridgy) potentially makes gathering comments a little more seamless in the POSSE sense by not requiring the link back to the original post.

At prettygoodhat, I needed one template change to insert the bluesky syndication link if specified in the post’s front matter. In single.html:

{{ if (isset .Params "blueskylink") }}
<a class="u-syndication" style="display: none" href="{{ .Params.blueskylink}}">{{ .Params.blueskylink}}</a>
{{ end }}

This adds the stub for the syndication link if one is found with the blueskylink id in the post’s header, and that should be all it takes for Bridgy to collect replies associated with the corresponding post.

Garrick’s extension gives me a thought on improving my own hookup of Bridgy to Quarto, too; that may be the right way to go over at the ol’ datablog.

Gosh do I feel it when Jedda says

The thing is, if I get overwhelmed sorting through photos and don’t post them in a “timely” manner, I end up never posting them. 07/17/2024

Whether it’s photos, quick posts or more lengthy things I think of writing and sharing, the overwhelm -> just-not-doing-it loop is so powerful. In my case it’s not just the sorting/editing of photos; it’s also the constant self-questioning of “is this the right thing to post?” or “is this the right place?” or “should fix the design first?” that get in my way, every time.