Minor site updates

I've got a bunch of IndieWeb-related projects I'd like to work on. What I don't have is a good setup for working on bigger projects incrementally as I have time. The general pattern is that nothing happens for a very long time, then I become obsessed with a particular project and it fills my free time until it is "done" or I run out of steam.

All that to say, I recently had some lovely time on vacation and instead of working on big projects I did a bunch of little fixes to my site.

Probably the biggest is that my photos page now includes my daily-ish Caturday images. Previously it only pulled in still photos which, in the last couple of years, has only been from the very occasional check-in.

Marty's Photos page screenshot showing the top of a grid of square photos. The top three images are of a seated fluffy cat looking off-camera, two seated fluffy cats looking at an empty food dispenser, and a fluffy cat chewing on some twine. Each of the visible photos has a triangular "play" icon in the upper-right corner indicating that the linked post contains a video.

This was made pretty easy because I rely on Cloudinary to reformat my iPhone's "bounce" photos into a consistent mp4 format for the web and it's simple enough to change a Cloudinary URL for an mp4 video to  a still thumbnail image instead.

Other updates:

  • After my recent struggles with Hugo (or Go templates) turning parsing invalid times into a fatal error rather than something I can work around, I finally removed my now non-functional workaround.
  • I toyed around with a "fast build" step by copying my site's Hugo setup and removing all content and layouts except those related to one or two new or updated posts. It seems like I could reasonably set this up to run immediately when I make a site update via Micropub so that new and updated posts are up immediately, while feeds and tag pages get updated when a full site build finishes.
  • I upgraded my little Digital Ocean droplet to try and reduce that "when a full site build finished" time. Looks like I doubled my monthly from $6 to $12 for an inconsistent time savings of 5-15 seconds on a ~1 minute build. 😅
  • I realized that my link preview meta crap for Slack / Discord / hellsites has been broken for a while. I kind-of fixed it for posts with titles, like this one, but it's still rubbish for my usual short posts, like Caturday. Caturday posts deserve to have image previews when shared on social media!

Always more to be done. These weren't the biggest or most important projects but it felt nice to be tidying up the place.

#site-update
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