Category: Technical

RSS Rants

I’ve got a lot of RSS feeds in my feed reader. Some are dead feeds, some are prolific. If I don’t keep up, after about a week, I’ll come back to around 700 articles waiting.

The thing is, a lot of those articles are bad. Here’s why:

  1. RSS getting treated like a notification system. If all your RSS feed does is post a one-liner saying you’ve got an article up, you’re wasting my time and missing the point. It’s another delivery channel for your content. You wouldn’t sign up people for a newsletter where you just send a message saying “I’ve got a new post up. Go read it.” The same should apply to your RSS feed.
  2. RSS getting treated like an afterthought. Cool, you added some neat integration with some external service! Did you look to see what happens to those posts in your RSS feed? A lot of the time it’s literally a blank post. Other times it’s malformed junk missing any context of what’s supposed to be there.
  3. RSS getting misconfigured. There’s a lot of implementations of RSS feeds for different static site generators and blogging engines and CMS’s out there, but a lot of them feel like they were implemented so they could add “RSS support” to their checklist. As a result, you get blogs where every time they make a new post, every single post on their site gets marked as updated in RSS. In most of the cases I’ve bothered checking, basically the lastBuildDate is getting populated with the last date the site was built, rather than the last date that specific content was updated.

I keep hoping some of these folks will fix their systems and approaches, but I think I’m going to have to do a cull sometime soon. Depending on your RSS reader, some of this may be more noticeable than others, but for me, I’ve had enough.

Delays and SSGs, Oh My

Apologies for the delay between posts — it’s not for lack of topics or interest, just a matter of time and energy. I’ve been spending time trying out different static site generators for a potential move off WordPress (at least for some projects), and that’s been eating into what spoons I have spare for writing. At this point I’ve been fiddling mostly with 11ty and Astro, and while I’m not 100% happy with either of them, it’s been a worthwhile learning experience regardless. I may also end up taking a stab at Hugo, but we’ll see. The main issues I have mostly boil down to opinion — every framework is opinionated to one degree or another regarding how to structure things, how to format things, and so on, and I don’t agree with those opinions all the time. Then it becomes a matter of how hard it is to override those defaults to work more how I want to work.

For instance, a lot of these frameworks/generators feel that any images you include should be optimized, and when optimizing, the file paths should become arbitrary hashes. I don’t mind the optimizing part, but I fuckin’ hate when the filename gets mangled into a hash like that. You’d think that’d be a matter of just passing a parameter as part of the image processor config, but in several of these frameworks, you’d be wrong. At least in 11ty I found some instructions in their docs to override things, but in Astro I was just out of luck, unless I wanted to store my images separately in the “public” folder.

Another recurring gripe I have is that the default markup is just markdown. Frequently either GitHub-Flavored Markdown (GFM) or CommonMark. These are fine as far as markdown goes, but they’re kind of limiting when you want to do anything more nuanced than basic formatting. Even things as common as changing the alignment for an image don’t have a generally agreed process. At which point, the question becomes: how hard is it to extend things to let you do stuff you want to do? 11ty lets you mix in a whole pile of different templating tools (Nunjucks, Handlebars, Liquid, etc), and extend things to add your own shortcodes and filters to let things work how you want. Astro gives you a few different markdown flavors, so you can go with markdown, MDX, or markdoc. From there, both MDX and markdoc have methods to extend your behavior. Personally, I’m actually more inclined to use a different markup entirely, and write everything in AsciiDoc, which I’m very comfortable with from work, and is designed to let you do the various bits of formatting you’d want to do in documentation (or a blog post, or an article/essay). The options for SSGs that support AsciiDoc, though, are quite a bit more limited — I’m aware of basically just two, Antora (which is oriented around documentation, not around blogging), and Hugo (which I should really give another shot).

So yeah, that’s basically where all that is sitting. Frankly none of the things I just griped about are all that important, but it’s been taking up that headspace I’d be usually using for writing on here, so figured I’d share. I’ve been dusting off one of my other random sites to use as a test bed — when I actually have something to share, I’ll be sure to mention it. The goal is something that feels frictionless to write and post in, and unfortunately the path to get there has been feeling pretty fraught.

De-crufting Google Search

Just a quick one, but I know some folks might want to know this: it sounds like Google finally added a way to remove all the AI and other self-insert bullshit from their search results. This post by Ernie Smith over on Tedium explains more, but the TLDR is: at the end of your search query URL, add udm=14. So, for example, if you do a search for Buckaroo Banzai, then go into the URL of the search and update it to https://www.google.com/search?q=buckaroo+banzai&udm=14, all the cruft drops away and you just get links to stuff again. (That may seem like kind of a pain, but as that post points out, there are ways to make your searches insert that automagically, depending on your browser.)

I’ve mostly migrated away from Google search and tend to default to DuckDuckGo, but it’s still good to know. (Personally, I’d love to see a way to customize which tools get turned on or off. Like, I don’t want the AI, and I don’t need the quora answers etc, but it’d be nice to leave the calculator feature turned on. Stuff like that.)

The Soul of the Web

Over at The Atlantic, Kaitlyn Tiffany has an article on The Battle for the Soul of the Web – a headline that may sound a little dramatic, but is touching on some important topics. The article touches on a few different topics, but a central one is about the decentralized web (DWeb), and where that both intersects and contrasts with the Web3 space. It’s an interesting topic that is worth a deeper dive if you care about online spaces at all.

Decades removed from the gonzo highs of blinging GIFs and wacky blogs, the web is now a place where many people feel exploited, manipulated, and tracked; where freedom of speech is being tugged around in a strange culture war; and where the rich get richer.

Among this set, one solution seems to be the consensus favorite. If these problems are intrinsically linked to consolidated tech giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon, why not embrace technologies that decentralize power? 

Kaitlyn Tiffany

I’ve been railing against and ranting about information silos for years, so I suppose it’s no surprise that this line of thought might be a little appealing to me. I’ve had a passing interest in the potential of technologies like IPFS for years, for instance, though it remains to be seen how things pan out, and what adoption looks like – how much broad adoption is necessary for a technology or philosophy on technology to sustain itself and become independently viable?

That said, I think they’re at least asking the questions, and that’s a good start:

Nathan Schneider, a media-studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a frequent writer on collectivism and tech, told me. “DWeb asks more,” he said, and dwells on two key questions: “What do we actually want socially, and how do we center those values in our technical designs, so the technical becomes a means to an end, rather than an end in itself?”

There’s obviously some overlap between some decentralized web efforts, and decentralized finance efforts. I hope that the former doesn’t get dragged down because of the latter (or, more specifically, the scam-filled gold-rush that congealed around DeFi in recent times). There’s lots of questions I don’t have answers to about this (perhaps others do?), like how do we make the technology useful, approachable, ubiquitous… without also making it a target for those who want to exert power and control, and exploit it? User congregation around particularly useful or interesting tools or information is inevitable, and with that, how do you prevent just making silos all over again? (Another topic that gives me a headache is how to shepherd information accuracy, and curb disinformation in a world where oversight is virtually impossible?)

Site Monitoring, Plausibly

I’m on my annual sojourn to Squam this week, listening to the lake and the loons. I’ve got a few personal projects I’ve been meaning to do that I hope to work on while here (in addition to the socializing and swimming and such). For instance, I’ve been meaning to move away from Google Analytics for monitoring site traffic. No diss on the quality of the tool, but philosophically I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with handing over my site’s viewership information to Google for their own purposes. I do still want some level of monitoring, though: site stats aren’t strictly necessary, but I’m enough of a stats geek that I do like to occasionally see what pages are getting views, what links are getting clicked, and so on.

There’s a couple different open source solutions out there that serve this purpose. Matomo is a popular one (it was previously named Piwik and has been around for quite some time), but seemed excessive for what I wanted. Personally, I ended up landing on Plausible. It’s fairly lightweight, fast, GDPR compliant, doesn’t collect PII, and I can self-host it. Setup was a little bit of a pain, but not an insurmountable one. To be more clear: installation itself is easy, as it’s just a docker container, but it terminates to http, not https. This meant I needed to set up a reverse proxy to pass it through a secure connection, or else browser content protections would block the script (they don’t like mixing secure and non-secure files). But hey, good opportunity to learn something new!

Link: Aqua Screenshot Library

This is for the UX and UI nerds out there: the Aqua Screenshot Library. It’s a collection of various windows, dialogs, screens, and other UI elements in Apple’s Aqua interface in each major version since the Mac OS X public beta. I’ll be curious to see how they handle cataloging Mojave, since there’s light and dark modes for everything. It’s really interesting to see how the interface has continued to evolve (and which aspects remain largely unchanged). You can really see where and how this:

Became this:

Certbot Gotchas

As a project this week, I’ve been doing some backend maintenance for my web hosting, which includes getting everything set up with SSL certs through Let’s Encrypt. (The writing is on the wall: most sites that can switch to HTTPS should switch to HTTPS. Not just for the added security for you and your viewers, but also because browsers and search engines and similar are starting to give warnings if it’s NOT secure.)

Thankfully, the days of having to pay an arm and a leg for a cert have passed. Let’s Encrypt is a free non-profit service (in partnership with other orgs including EFF, Mozilla, and Akamai, to name a few), which generates free, short term SSL certificates for your site. (For larger organizations, you may want to still throw down on a longer term set of certs, but for personal use this is great.)

Using the certs is pretty straightforward: they’ve created a tool that can run on your web server called certbot which streamlines the process and also monitors and automatically renews the certificates when they’re close to expiration. Installing certbot is pretty straightforward: it’s available via various package managers (apt and similar), so chances are good that whatever OS your server is running can install it pretty easily.

That said, there are still a few gotchas that I felt like got glossed over in the docs I was reading/following when using the tool, so here’s a few notes:

  • Be explicit about your domains: certbot doesn’t currently support wildcards (i.e. being able to say *.nadreck.me and have that handle any subdomains like images.nadreck.me). Instead, list them all out if you want them to share a certificate, and that includes both with and without www. So, for example, you might want to do something like sudo certbot --apache -d nadreck.me -d www.nadreck.me. If you don’t include both, someone going to your site using the address that wasn’t specified may end up getting the site blocked and the user warned of something potentially fraudulent.
  • If you already generated a certificate for a domain and need to update it (maybe you added a subdomain, or forgot to add www), the command you’re looking for is --expand. (I would have thought “update”, but no.) Note that when expanding a certificate, you need to re-list all domains you want included (you don’t just list the one you’re adding). So, using nadreck.me as an example again, if I wanted to add “images.nadreck.me” to the existing cert, I’d do sudo certbot --expand -d nadreck.me -d www.nadreck.me -d images.nadreck.me.
  • Keep it separated: the certs are free, there’s no need to overload the cert with a ton of domains. While it makes a certain amount of sense to bundle a domain and subdomains together, there’s no need to make one cert for all your sites. criticalgames.com shares a cert with nadreck.criticalgames.com, but not with nabilmaynard.com, if that makes any sense.
  • You can’t preemptively add sites to a cert. Certbot/letsencrypt performs a challenge response as part of the process to make sure you actually own the site you’re trying to set up, so if you haven’t actually set up that site or subdomain, the challenge will fail and the cert won’t be generated correctly. If you wanted to add, say, files.nadreck.me to your certificate, you’d need to set up that subdomain first, then expand your certificate. (The site can be empty, but the URL needs to resolve and land somewhere real.)

Anyway, hope that helps! The process really is pretty straightforward, and I recommend getting things set up to anyone maintaining a website these days.

Poking around with Python

With my usual caveat that I’m not primarily a programmer (and thus I’m sure there are better ways to do things), I thought I’d share a quick python script I put together.

For some context: I’ve been a long-time subscriber to the KEXP Song of the Day podcast, and I’m not prone to deleting songs after listening to them, which means that podcast is up to ~3000 songs, all sitting in a single folder. My car stereo has usb support, so ostensibly I can dump the whole folder onto a usb key and play it all while driving. Unfortunately, the car stereo can’t handle a folder with that many songs, so I needed to split it into smaller subfolders of around 100 songs each.

Now, I could do this manually (and did, the first time around), but I wanted an excuse to experiment with some scripting, and also wanted to fix some of the song titles (sometimes the ID3 title tag would include the artist, other times not). Doing some searching around, it seems like there’s a pretty solid python library for reading and manipulating ID3 tags, so I decided to use that.

You can see the resulting script here. It does two things: copy the files into subfolders (in a somewhat arbitrary order, which I may try to fix later), and then compare the ID3 artist tag to the ID3 title tag, and if the title tag starts with the same thing as the artist tag, strip the artist name out of the title tag (since it’s redundant, and meant the title was often cut off from being seen on the stereo’s display).

If it’s useful for you, cool! If not, I figured I’d at least share what I’ve been puttering with lately.

What I Use: RSS

I encourage people to subscribe to my site via RSS, when mentioning I have a site on the Facebooks and Twitters and similar. This may seem a little archaic (that is so 2008), but honestly RSS is still one of my go-to solutions for finding worthwhile things to read, watch, or experience.

One of the big reasons you don’t really see RSS mentioned anymore (despite folks actually using it often, without realizing it… looking at you, podcasts) is because Google stupidly shut down Google Reader, which was the de facto standard for reading your feeds. That killed a lot of momentum for its use.

While RSS may be limping along, it’s not dead, and a lot of sites actually do have RSS feeds, still — they just aren’t as prominently noted or advertised or linked anywhere.

Of course, even if you do decide to use RSS, there’s still the hurdle of finding an RSS reader you actually like. A lot of folks go with a web-based option (ala Google Reader), so they can read on whatever device they happen to be on. There’s also some pretty nice apps for sale (for instance, NetNewsWire), if you’re so inclined, and a lot of RSS-adjacent apps (like several web browsers, and even Apple Mail) are available as well. Personally, I use Vienna RSS, which is an open source project made for macOS. I’ve tried a bunch of other apps and methods, and this is the one I keep coming back to (there was a gap where development wasn’t really happening much, so I looked around a fair bit, but regular updates are happening again). It’s fairly fast, robust, and seems to handle a ton of feeds well. If you’re looking for a reader, I’d say it’s worth a try.

I recently went through and cleaned up my RSS feeds, getting rid of dead feeds. I just want to say, to all those bloggers who have continued to post after the blogging fad wore off: I salute you, and I’m still reading.