March has been in full swing for a while now, I have been doing some things, however nowhere near as much as I would like, perhaps the sameness of each day due to the lockdowns is taking its toll, i’m not sure. This style of blogpost probably wont be super common, but I think it fits for the meandering writing I do, anything Where I have lots to say will go onto its own page as per usual. It might get a bit long so just look for the heading if you dont wanna read the whole thing. Let us begin!
I have been ‘running’ the two things for a couple months now, and they have largely been fine on their own, which is nice. The XMPP instance has had a couple random people join, i’m not sure how much they use it, or even what they use it for. This is fine, although i’d have liked some more contact with them. This is a reality of running something open, that the XMPP is, and is something I have to accept. HTTP_UPLOAD still isnt working, which is a shame, I plan to give making it work another crack at in the future, however for now just text is fine and I dont think its caused too much issue not having it. The Pleroma instance has been running largely fine too, its got some federation issues, however I think that is because of the lower user count, I will be keeping it as is for the time being. Generally though its stable and works well.
I have been looking into writing or using a script to generate RSS feeds for the little blog section of this site, however the one I did find that I liked, didnt actually generate the text into the description, meaning anyone using the RSS reader would have to open the page in their web browser.
I gave altering the script a go but couldnt quite get the results I wanted, so I’ll have to try and redo it to get it the way I like, however i’ll have to learn bash to do it. It’ll be a good exercise, although it’ll be a better idea to learn bash for creating the webpages automatically.
future me here, I have pretty much properly figured out the kind of formatting that RSS likes (yes I know I should do that kind of thing first before trying to ram a square peg into a round hole, but its just how I am). I think that ultimately I will want to learn markdown and get comfortable writing in that format, rather than effectively writing my own markup language. This blogpost will be the first in such a format.
For the time being, I am updating the Blog site RSS feed manually, There isnt a whole lot, so I am happy to do so.
One of my fears with adopting markdown is that I will end up with webpages that look the same as every other site, an odd fear I suppose, given that my site is just the output of my mousepad text editor, but its one that is there. I will have to spice things up with my CSS.
As with just about everything this month, I have been slacking on my reading, i’m not entirely sure why to be quite honest, I think that my daily routine has been taking longer than usual and I just end up with shorter and shorter stretches of time where I am left to myself, so I end up just relaxing on the fediverse. I havent even been on any imageboards in a while, oh woe is me!
I did finish Henry By David Starkey, it was a very interesting book, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Tudor history, as it covers the usually untouched sections of Henry VIII’s youth. I found the first half of the book, which gave an incredibly dense account of Henry VII and the III’s childhood. The book was made even better by Starkeys wit, never too intrusive to be about himself or distract the reader, but done in a way where the 4th wall is broken for but a second. Excellent stuff!
The other book I was reading, before this recent drought, was Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. A fascinating work in itself, well written as it is, and the messages are very useful, however they are said quite matter of factly (or at least as much as they can for its age) It didn’t grip me nearly as much as the prior book, perhaps because its message doesnt strike the same chord with me as it might others, at least from the half of the book I read, I found myself on a bit of a ‘yeah I know this’ kind of reading. Perhaps I will pick reading it back up, but I might move on to something else for a while. We shall see..
I will be writing (am doing so now) a couple pieces on a couple fediverse topics since they have been on my TL occassionally. The first of which will be on the FSE drama with the user Snow of wintermute. I hope it is something of interest. Feel free to message me your thoughts on anything and thank you again for reading.