I think the DNS has all updated now, so that’s that: I’m now serving my site through BunnyCDN, which should mean pages, images etc. will load from a server geographically close-ish to each visitor, rather than always from my shared host’s server in the US. The real load time savings will come as more of the site actually gets cached on the CDN servers, of course, so Bunny doesn’t have to fetch so much from the slow shared hosting server.

It might seem like a bit much for a personal homepage, but Bunny is very cheap (the minimum cost of US$1 per month covers up to 100GB of bandwidth, depending on where your visitors live), and the slowness with which my own site loaded here in Australia was really annoying me. So here’s to fast loading speeds!

I’ve run into more obstacles than I thought I would, but not only do I have an Indiekit Micropub endpoint up and running now (but not working for media uploads yet), but I’ve also set up continuous deployment with Github Actions, so my static Hugo site rebuilds after every new post. This guide here was really helpful for the Github Actions stuff, and the only reason I lost three hours of my life afterwards is that I missed the really critical information that it’s written assuming you haven’t set a custom value for publishdir in your Hugo config file. Whoops.

Anyway, I have more tinkering I want to do, but I’ve been staying up late night after night and it’s time I treat myself to getting into bed before midnight. My site will still be there to tinker on tomorrow, after all…

It’s been outwardly really quiet on this blog in the last few days, and that’s because I’ve been hard at work setting up Indiekit so I can post to here via Micropub (after my first attempt proved I am not good enough at programming to assemble an implementation by myself, even with loads of references 😂).

Once I’ve actually finished I might write up a longer post explaining how it’s all gone (because I’m sure it’ll be enthralling reading!). One thing I am really proud to have accomplished, though, is forking Indiekit’s Hugo preset and modifying it to generate my custom year and month metadata that I use to generate archives. Considering I’ve never written Javascript before, this was a huuuuge achievement for me. I still have a fair whack of stuff on my wishlist to work through, but the more successes I have the more confident I feel that I can get this working exactly how I want it 💪

So, I’m taking the teensiest little baby steps towards creating a Micropub endpoint for my Hugo blog 🙈 So far, I can… authenticate, and submit content. The part where that content is actually saved anywhere or published, that’s still in progress. But it’s a start!

Years ago I used to be active on Q&A site Quora. These days I can’t really be bothered with it (especially when I get emailed comments from people who lack reading comprehension!! 😠) but it occurred to me some of my answers from there might make good posts. So… stay tuned 👀

So I think I’ve now got interactions set up and displaying properly!

I’m relying on webmention.app to actually send my responses out, and while that seems to work well with Bridgy and to webmention.io endpoints, in my limited experience so far it seems kind of flaky when the destination is a Wordpress blog using a plugin to have a self-hosted endpoint. Unless it’s just confused by likes with no original content… IDK. More experimentation needed, maybe. Anyway, regardless, my implementation is basically working 😊

It’s been a busy day of barely doing anything but website work, but I’m making good progress getting the Hugo blog up and running 🙂 Today I have:

• Set up Bridgy and started displaying webmentions under each post (where they exist). I’ve gotta say, Bridgy is very nifty indeed!
• Created an archive page including what I think is a sweet view for month/year/front page views… I was so inspired by Micro.blog’s Tagmoji that every post now has an emoji going with it 😉
• Imported my old posts up to December 30 last year. This is a manual process so I can fix up images and include syndication links (for Bridgy, in theory), which makes it very slow… but I’m getting there 😪

If I have the endurance I hope to finish importing posts tomorrow. Then I’d like to code templates for bookmark/like/reply posts. And then finally (gasp!) I should be able to rest on my laurels a bit.