Journal Search - rss

A day later and I did the tedious part: converting the big journal page into a series of individual .mdx files in an Astro content collection. That was… fun.

It turns out that Astro slipped an overhaul of their content collection system right under my nose when I wasn’t looking. In their 5.0 update, opens in a new tab they upgraded the system into a full-fledged “content layer” ( heyyyyyy opens in a new tab ) that supports processing all sorts of #content and #data from literally anywhere you want. Part of this update was literally giving you the freedom to process the data however you want, replacing the weird type attribute with a new loader attribute that you can slot either the two built-in functions (representing the two old type’s) ooooooor your own bespoke function for whatever content you want to work with. It’s actually really cool… and slightly breaking compared to the old system. Whoops. So, just to be on the safe side for the future, I migrated from the old system to the new system.

After that, it was pretty simple to get the new journal set up… it was just really tedious to make all the new individual files and copy all of the content over. Honestly, it kinda made me wish I had a generative AI agent handy, but I would rather move slowly and ensure that everything works right than move fast and break everything with AI slop. I also decided to make the now and todo sections of the journal their own files for later use with Micropub opens in a new tab . This way, I can (eventually) not only make new journal entries outside a code editor, but I can also update those journal entries and the now & todo sections outside a code editor!!! How sick would that be???

Now that I’ve done all that, though… look!!! Pages!!!!! It isn’t just one giant page anymore!!!!!! Currently, I’ve got it set to display 10 entries on each page, but I might tweak that later. I’ve also got it set up to only display the now and todo sections on the first page, and only display the really old entries section on the last page. Pretty slick, huh?

My main worry when implementing this was that all of the async stuff I had to add to get this to work would mean excess loading, but I think I can solve that by making this page static instead of server-rendered (the pages are precompiled with all of their content, so when the browser requests the page, all the server needs to do is hand the browser that precompiled page instead of having to go and fetch all of the content it needs first). All of the blog posts are handled this way, so I figured it would be worth it to do it for the journal page as well.

Also, while I haven’t started implementing it yet (I’m waiting for the weekend to do that), I have started looking at the Micropub specification… opens in a new tab and it seems like a really good “baby’s first protocol implementation project”. Everything is very straightforward & well laid-out, and both the h-entry and h-cite microformats seem great for what I am personally looking for. The Micropub protocol itself seems pretty loose when it comes to what you can do through it: as long as the client and the server agree, you can exchange whatever data you want. So, for instance, I can staple a note field to my h-cite entry for use with the sharefeed and hope none of the IndieWeb opens in a new tab people get mad at me for sacrilege. Alternatively, I could make the in-reply-to field in my h-entry its own h-cite object so I use the same base microformat for both journal entires and sharefeed posts, but I think that might be a bit too tryhard… I’ll figure it out once I get a base implementation going for journal entries.

Finally, I made some other miscelaneous changes lately. For example, I got rid of that stupid external link icon and replaced it with a more subtle change: all links (within markdown, at least) now have underlines, and they are dashed if they are internal links and dotted if they are external. Will anyone notice this? Probably not. Do I need a better solution? Yes. But that’s for later me.

also here’s a cool raggae song opens in a new tab kbyyyyeeeeeeee

Today I learned that NetNewsWire opens in a new tab added an extension to Safari that puts a little RSS button to the left of the address bar. When you click it, it auto-magically finds the RSS feed for the website you’re currently on and opens the “New Feed” dialog on NetNewsWire w/ the feed’s URL already copy-pasted into the dialog box. Found a new blog that you think is neat? Two clicks ( philip opens in a new tab ) and that blog can be added to your RSS reader, ready to view on both your laptop and your phone whenever you want (remember, this app has iCloud sync! :3).

I immediately went through my sharefeed and added as many blogs as I could to NetNewsWire. I doubled the amount of blogs in my “Blogs” folder. I feel like a god.

…But I also realized how neglected my sharefeed has become lately. The last entry to it before today was in August. Of last year. Ouch.

Have I just run out of content to regurgitate? Nope. I’m still glued to my Hacker News Telegram bot opens in a new tab , saving articles that look cool. I just haven’t read many of them to the point where I feel comfortable doing my blog equivalent of a retwskeet yet. I save, but I do not engage. I hoard instead of currate.

I’m not sure how to fix this other than… doing the freakin’ thing more often. I’ve thought about automating the process of adding new entries a little more, maybe with a tiny wizard script that asks for each field and then adds that object to the JSON array… but I feel like making that whole thing work would be overengineering, as opening up the JSON array itself and adding the object myself is just as easy.

Hopefully, this little button in Safari will help me keep tabs on sites I like better. I’ve really enjoyed the thought of using RSS readers, but I keep running into little issues with them. NetNewsWire has solved most of them, but even then I get more outside problems like “oh god why did I add this news website, now I get like 100 new articles a day about things I don’t care about and half of them are ads and I can’t keep track of all of these posts aaaaaaaaaaa”. The more I replace these big news sites with a bunch of smaller blogs, the better my RSS experience will be, I think.

Oh, and I’ve decided it would be a cool idea to make a blogroll to more explicitly recommend sites and people I find cool. I’m still wanting to flesh it out a little more before I publish it for real, but I hope it will be a good resource when it is released.

Finally, here’s a song that feels very thematically appropriate regarding current events opens in a new tab . ok bye

You know when I said I should stop working on improving my site and start actually writing stuff? Turns out I forgot to follow my own advice. Whoops.

The sharefeed has been officially implemented again. All the old journal entries I had on the old website are back, and most of the old sharefeed entries have been ported over too. I dropped a couple due to the power of hindsight, but you won’t remember them anyway lol.

I also changed up how the RSS feeds work. Now, when you click on the “rss” link, it will take you to a page listing all the feeds you can subscribe to. I’ve also added a prefix to each post in the main feed so you can tell what type of post it is at a glance. For example, blog posts will be marked [blog], To everyone who already subscribed, I am so greatful for your support and I am so sorry this will probably screw up your feed lol. It won’t be the last time this happens either… I may do a little more trolling over the next couple of weeks, including adding journal entries to the feed.

The last thing I am going to do tonight is attempt to record a narration for my first blog post. Hopefully it goes well. I’m really excited about narrated articles, and I hope I can inspire others to try similar things with their blogs.

Another album recommendation cause I’m awesome. opens in a new tab See y’all soon!