- (https://b-ark.ca/cIACYu)
I can’t say I’m optimistic that the #indieweb is gonna really take off, but a man can dream…
- (https://b-ark.ca/2MKESc)
Yeah yeah, I’m posting to Twitter now. But it’s from my own Jekyll blog using the IndieWeb stack. So it’s hipster enough to be cool.
Moving to Jekyll
Well… I’m going to attempt something pretty major, here, and switch over my blog from my trusty Oddmuse instance to Jekyll… for better or worse.
There are numerous upsides to this. First, I’ve already built a lot of habits around taking notes using Vimwiki, and having recently made the switch to Markdown for that wiki1, having a consistent set of tools for personal and work note taking, as well as blog management sounds pretty attractive! Doubly so since I really enjoy the writing experience I’ve set up with Vim.
Second, this rebuild moves me to a well-supported set of tools that’s currently being very actively maintained. I’ve been a huge fan of Oddmuse for a long time, if only for its light weight simplicity, but its lost momentum over the years. Further, the dependency on a semi-custom markup, and the storage being in an oddball custom format, means I’m a little more tied down to its infrastructure than I’d like. Moving to pure Markdown means I get the simplicity of wiki-style markup without being tied to a specific technology platform.
Third, security. Static site generators are simpler, faster, and less complex to operate, and have a lower footprint for abuse.
That’s not to say there aren’t downsides! I’ve written a lot of content using custom plugins and markup, and I don’t know how I’m going to replace all that.
And, of course, there’s simply the act of transferring all that content.
But. I strongly feel this will be worth the transition.
And it gives me a project!
Update: And obviously I’ve moved! Of course, there’s lots of work left to do as I move into this new infrastructure. The site layout needs more work. I’d like an archive navigator. I need to enable some sort of commenting mechanism. But, so far so good!
And yeah, the tale of this entire transition and a rundown of my new toolset is probably worth a series of blog posts. Stay tuned!
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This deserves a post of its own. This move has enabled me to do things like use Markor on my phone to share the same set of notes on both my laptop and my phone, which has had the ancillary benefit of basically killing Google Keep in my workflows. It’s not without its issues, and it’s not something I’d recommend to a casual user, but it’s pretty slick… ↩
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Experiments in Automation
With the knock out success of my ttrss service rollout, I thought it might be fun to look into other self-hosted services that I might find useful. Now, let’s be very clear, this was, on its face, entirely a make-work project to give me something fun to do with my spare time. But the outcome has proven surprisingly useful!
It all began when I came across Huginn. Huginn is an open source implementation of the kind of service offered by IFTTT, Zapier, and I’m sure others (Microsoft Flow popped up while I was finding the links to those services). The general idea is that these services allow you to plumb or connect various other services together to effect an automated workflow. For example, you might receive tweets on one end and shoot them off to, say, a Slack channel on the other.
Okay, so what would I do with this?
Well, as a bit of background, I’m an avid reader of Matt Levine. Mr. Levine offers a newsletter that one can subscribe to that is delivered daily to ones email inbox. Notably, if you want to read this content on the Bloomberg website, it’s hidden behind a decided effective paywall that happens to defeat web scrapers. That means getting this content into my RSS feed isn’t directly possible.
But wouldn’t it be nice if I could take those emails, scrape out the content, and republish them to a private RSS feed that I could incorporate into ttrss?
Continue reading...Goodbye Feedly, Hello Tiny Tiny RSS!
I’ve been a huge fan of RSS for a very long time now. For those not aware, RSS is a protocol that allows websites (news organizations, blogs, aggregators, etc) to push out a feed of content as they publish it. As an example, the CBC publishes a list of RSS feeds that any reader can subscribe to.
The reader then uses an RSS feed reader to subscribe to the feed and consume it.
Now, that by itself sounds just okay, but the real magic happens when you subscribe to a large number of feeds. What most folks don’t realize–even those familiar with RSS–is that RSS feeds are extremely common and widely available across many web properties. In my case, I subscribe to a number of news sources (CBC, BBC, NYT, etc), some technology aggregators (Hacker News, Reddit Programming), plus a number of random blogs and other outlets.
The RSS feed reader can then combine these streams of content in various ways. Personally, my preference is to just see a single list of all the most recently published articles that I can then scroll through. The best services allow me to consume that stream of content on multiple devices–in particular, on a desktop or on a phone–so that no matter where I am, my RSS feeds are at my fingertips, showing me a stream of all the content I’ve chosen to subscribe to.
Ultimately, what this amounts to is something like the Facebook news feed, except I’m personally selecting my sources rather than having content selected for me by some proprietary algorithm on a social network.
Now up until 2013 folks widely agreed that Google Reader was one of the best feed readers out there.
Unfortunately, Google, in their infinite wisdom, decided to shut Google Reader down.
Fortunately, there are plenty of fine alternatives out there, and for a very long time Feedly was my tool of choice. The web interface is clean and functional, the Android app is excellent, and it has a lot of interesting features if you’re willing to pay for their subscription. If you’re interested in dipping a toe into the RSS waters, I highly recommend it!
However, there are a couple of things about RSS that can be a bit of a nuisance.
First, news sources frequently only publish their article titles, perhaps a brief excerpt, and a link, so that you have to leave the feed reader and visit their website to consume the content. I can understand why that is (i.e. ad revenue), but it’s a real pain. First, the context switch to the website is always a bit jarring (and on a phone, a bit slow); each site has a different layout which means the reading experience isn’t consistent; and if I want to read the content offline, I’m out of luck.
Second, some types of feeds, notably Reddit and Hacker News, publish links to their aggregation service rather than to the article content itself, often without any excerpt at all. The result is a rather bland, difficult-to-use feed.
Third, call me paranoid, but I’m not thrilled about having a third party tracking what I’m reading.
And then I discovered tt-rss.
Continue reading...Revisiting IPv6
Many years ago I experimented with running IPv6 in my home network (dual-stacked, not IPv6-only… I’m not that crazy!). At the time this was mainly an intellectual exercise. While a lot of major services already offered IPv6 (including Google, Facebook, and Netflix), the big draw of v6 is the ability to completely do away with NAT and simplify access to services and P2P applications running out of my home. But without broad v6 support, even if my home network was available via v6, the rest of the world wouldn’t be able to access it, which pretty severely curtailed the utility of the whole thing.
But, it was still an interesting exercise!
Until, that is, Netflix started cracking down on VPNs.
The way v6 was deployed in my network was via a tunnel supplied by Hurricane Electric. That tunnel terminated in California, and, while not intentional, it allowed me to watch US Netflix in Canada.
That is until Netflix realized people were abusing those tunnels and started blocking inbound traffic via HE.
I considered potential workarounds, but I could never figure out a satisfying solution (in large part thanks to closed devices like Chromecasts).
And so I shut down v6 in my network. While, previously, v6 didn’t provide a lot of value, it also didn’t cause me any problems. Once this issue surfaced, it was no longer worth the effort.
Recently I decided to take another look at the situation to see if anything had changed.
Well, unfortunately Netflix still blocks traffic coming from Hurricane Electric traffic originating in the US.
However, it turns out, back in 2013, HE added new Points of Presence (POPs) in both Calgary and Manitoba. That meant I could set up a tunnel with an exit point inside the country.
Would Netflix block that?
It turns out, the answer is: No!
So I now have IPv6 back up in my home network.
But has the connectivity story changed? Yes!
Much to my astonishment, I discovered that in the last couple of years, AT&T, Rogers, and Telus have all deployed native IPv6 inside their networks. That means that, when I’m out and about in both Canada and the US, I have direct v6 connectivity back to my home network! Even my mother-in-law’s house has access thanks to her Telus internet package.
That’s a huge expansion in coverage!
In fact, ironically enough, of the places I frequent, the only location that lacks v6 connectivity is my workplace. Go figure. But, in that case, I can always just tunnel through my linode VPS, which has had v6 connectivity for many many years.
IPv6 adoption may be taking a while, but it is happening!