Jan Boddez @[email protected]

I’ve been using Mastodon for quite a while now—since #DeactiDay, give or take—but have never posted a proper #introduction.

So, I’m a thirtysomething mechanical engineer and lousy guitarist. I work in the semiconductor industry, spend most of my spare time developing for the web, and own quite a few affordable (!) electric guitars, a handful of Raspberry Pis, and a couple hacked together MAME—I know—cabinets. Also, happily married, father of two, wannabe investor.

#introductions

What I’m saying is, interests include #PHP, the #IndieWeb, #PunkRock, #HomeRecording, #art, and personal finance.

My feed reader had turned fairly slow, apparently because I was running HTMLPurifier on every entry’s title. Replaced with `strip_tags()`, which is less safe, but we should be sanitizing titles and such on _retrieval_ anyway. (And then run output through `htmlentities()` or similar, which we do. Except for content, because we want that to be HTML. Which was previously sanitized.) Slowly getting there.

Like, wouldn’t it be nice if you could pick a theme that _almost_ does what you want, that you could then extend with just a tiny bit of custom code? (And if blocks get you 98% there instead of the previous 82%, all the better!)

Bookmarked https://wptavern.com/should-users-be-able-to-select-more-than-one-block-style.

How about a Tailwind-like set of utility classes that can be stacked on top of each other, without having to actually code? Either that, or, you know, use … CSS.

“Should Users Be Able To Select More Than One Block Style?”

(https://jan.boddez.net/notes/a6c7bae268)

Looking to add a bit of top margin to feed reader items that start with an image, i.e., with no text node in front (the image itself can still sit within a `figure`, `p`, etc., nested deeper, even). (Line-height doesn’t “stick out” above most images, and `:first-child` doesn’t work because it ignores text nodes.) Used a bit of JS but might look into PHP’s DomDocument functions again.

I’m basically rewriting X-Ray, slimming it down in the process. Getting posts to look consistent, whether they’re microformats or RSS or Atom or JSON Feed. Then wrapping all that in a fairly minimal feed reader, with support for “plugins,” i.e., WordPress-style packages you can turn on or off, just like that. All runs on just PHP + MySQL. Should probably publish soon—I’ve been saying that for, like, a year.

Stumbled across a couple posts that turned up empty in my reader/X-Ray, which seemed to not return HTML if there’s no plain-text content either. Doesn’t work with image-only posts, especially if they don’t come with a `u-photo` class. So I fixed that.

Anyhoo.

Bookmarked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24274919.

This. I’m not a software engineer, either. (Well, I’m not _active_ in IndieWeb spaces, like, at all, but I have implemented and am greatly enjoying some of the typical “IndieWeb” building bricks. They’re open protocols, after all.)

> I am fairly active in IndieWeb spaces and I disagree with others in these spaces all the time.

(https://jan.boddez.net/notes/ec51b7c37c)

Bookmarked https://css-tricks.com/social-image-generator-jetpack/.

Which is why I used—wait for it—Dompdf.

> My dream for this thing is, eventually, we could start building social media images via regular WordPress PHP templates. The trick is that you need something to screenshot them, like Puppeteer[.] An average WordPress install doesn’t have that available[.]

(https://jan.boddez.net/notes/6919d05684)

Reposted https://werd.io/2021/theres-a-fun-story-going-around-that by Ben Werdmüller.

> There’s a fun story going around that WalMart will accept Litecoin payments. It’s completely untrue, is perpetuated by scammers, and illustrates neatly how easily anyone can release a press release and have real news organizations (Reuters!) pick it up.

(https://jan.boddez.net/notes/eee5cd87f2)

Looks like Yarns might eventually add OPML support. ’Til then, Ima go with my own solution. 😃 https://github.com/janboddez/add-opml-to-yarns

Played with the Yarns Microsub server a bit. Created an OPML import and export add-on. Don’t really like how it stores feeds in the `options` table, but okay. Or that metadata is sparse, or some (Atom and RSS) items seems to be lacking author information (should be an easy fix, as it runs on SimplePie). Anyway, think Ima use this for a second Micropub account, to help test my reader.

Bookmarked https://github.com/neild3r/vscode-php-docblocker.

(https://jan.boddez.net/notes/5d3af87360)

So, I, uh, did revive my Mastodon-to-WordPress sync thingy, I mean, plugin. It’s very basic, which is good. (More advanced features, like improved reply contexts, should probably be the subject of an add-on plugin. Like, eventually.) https://github.com/janboddez/import-from-mastodon

(https://jan.boddez.net/notes/9592c14025)