Mandaris Moore

Two puzzle pieces coming together via pexels.com

The more that I dive into the quest of having my own spot on the internet, the more that I find that I have things that I want to do with it. Which means more research, experiments and late nights.

Currently, I'm on a mission to get webmentions and pingback working on my site. It's been pretty slow going because I want to incorporate it into my current blogging workflow. A workflow that is currently not flowing at all1.

Anyway, I thought I'd focus on making some changes so that I can make it fit better with all the new stuff that is coming out for the indieweb.

Setting up sign in

The first thing to do is make some changes to my template to allow for sign up according to the web directions

I thought the easiest ways of doing this was to use github2 or twitter3. I pushed the github login near the top of the page so that it would look for it first.

{% if GITHUB_USERNAME %}
<!-- IndieWeb sign-in -->
<link rel="me" href="https://github.com/{{ GITHUB_USERNAME}}" />
{% endif %}

I then included the twitter login information with the rest of the twitter information.

{% if TWITTER_USERNAME %}
<!-- Twitter Specific Info -->
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@{{ TWITTER_USERNAME }}" />
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@{{ TWITTER_USERNAME }}" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
<link rel="me" href="https://twitter.com/{{ TWITTER_USERNAME}}" />
{% endif %}

Setting up webmentions

After the login was set up, I added this to enable webmentions that are specific to any website that uses the template.

{% if WEBMENTIONS %}
<!-- Enabling webmention functionality -->
<link rel="pingback" href="https://webmention.io/{{ WEBMENTIONS }}/xmlrpc" />
<link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/{{ WEBMENTIONS }}/webmention" />
{% endif %}

Unfortunately, I still need to test it and get it in front of other people to use. I'm going to lay the foundation down and do some research so that I can get ping backs to work properly.

More meta data

From my reading of indieweb.org, I see that it doesn't use the OpenGraph and Schema.org that I put in the theme.

I'm hesitant to add these new tags because it lowers the validation scores, but I hope that it will help with accessibility and just make the site work better for those who want to find it.

Conclusion

I've got a lot of things on my mind and places where I can make the site move forward. I hope that those who read this feel inspired and have some input on how to make the template better.

If so, the theme can be found here.

  1. I've got three places that I can sit down and make a blog post. My iPhone, my iMac, and my laptop. Currently, my favorite is my laptop but I don't take it everywhere or use it as much. My mind is having trouble just feeling comfortable writing recently. Add the complication of where the files should be saved and how to update previous posts and I start feeling like throwing my hands up. ↩

  2. Which was just bought by Microsoft a couple month ago. I don't know if it's the new Microsoft which is pro open source. ↩

  3. A dumpster fire of deplorables. ↩

In my last post, I left off with a list of things that I wanted to work on for the next release of the design of the blog. I'm still changing the header at the top of the page and I've been working on improving the contrast of the colors you see for links to make it easier to read. Something you can't spot just by looking is the fact that <h1> - <h3> tags don't correspond to the breakdown of the syntax of the rest of the site.

A small sample of the code that was being generated.

What do I see on the internet

I feel that a lot of the sites that are on the internet only use the <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags and looking at some of the templates that I've come across for pelican use css classes to differentiate them in the design.

I don't have a problem with that, but I felt that it doesn't help those that might be using some kind of screen reader or parsing system1.

Searching for a solution

Once again, I started looking for a place where this had already been fixed and quickly found one that would make sure that the html that python-markdown would give me would match what I was expecting to give to my template.

Christian Prieto had already come up with this handy solution in 2016 and had put some tests and an example of how to incorporate it into pelican.

But there are further complications

Unfortunately, pelican has changed since the original and I wasn't able to get the solution to work. The readme says to add the following:

MD_EXTENSIONS = ['downheader']

But the latest documentation found here, have the markdown default to be defined as a dictionary and not an array2. The simplest way to get it to work is to change your pelicanconfig.py to have the following code.

# Markdown Plugins
MARKDOWN = {
    'extension_configs': {
        'markdown.extensions.codehilite': {'css_class': 'highlight'},
        'markdown.extensions.extra': {},
        'markdown.extensions.meta': {},
        'downheader': {},
    },
    'output_format': 'html5',
}

For me, I had to specify a value because the title of my site is in a <h1> tag and the article headers are in <h2>.

# Markdown Plugins
MARKDOWN = {
    'extension_configs': {
        'markdown.extensions.codehilite': {'css_class': 'highlight'},
        'markdown.extensions.extra': {},
        'markdown.extensions.meta': {},
        'downheader': {'levels': '2'},
    },
    'output_format': 'html5',
}

I've since made a pull request so that others can get around this as well.

Conclusion

I'm happier and happier with the way that the site is coming together, but I'm afraid of the amount of technical debt that the site is accruing as I go along. I've to to make the readme a priority for those who come after me and want to make this design better.

I've also taken some time to just take the header and just make a standalone project that demonstrates how it works. I points to the simple theme that comes with pelican so people can just download it after installing pelican, python-markdown and the mdx_downheader package.

  1. From what I've seen a lot of webcrawlers use the headers of a page to determine whether a site was worth putting in search results. ↩

  2. This isn't the only place that has this, but I've been having trouble just getting the projects that I am using up to date. Heck, my readme is one line at this point! ↩

My wife had her wisdom teeth pulled today.

All four of them.

Well, things are going to be cheery around here. :)

I spent most of the day just caring for her or watching her sleep. It was kind of nice because it took me back to the early days of our relationship when I would just sit and stare as she slept. Natasha thought it was kind of creepy, but for me it was a rare moment of seeing her at peace.

Other Projects

I've prioritized my tech projects to two major things.

The website

I've taken my website down because I didn't like the direction (or lack thereof) it was taking. I originally had a lot of different ideas that I wanted to do, but got stuck with the tools on making it versus making the content the king. I've placed a holding page up for now while I come up with what the next step is going to be.

I haven't decided on whether I should move to a service lie calipin or just throw everything out and start completely from scratch.

Re-starting my career

I'm not happy with where I am and have decided that I need to start over from the very begining as far as my career is concerned. I'd like to take what I know about computer science and just go over all the little things that made me take the subject from the beginning.

On how to do this, I've been putting a plan together that focuses more on the how of computer science and "going deep" versus the why.