Monthly Recap: August 2023
Hello web surfers, and welcome to August’s recap.
I wrote three posts:
- Whakapapa Ski Trip, where I recapped a trip up north with family and friends and spent some time skiing.
- Show Some Love: Supporting Your Favourites, where I talk about supporting a free and open web by supporting the projects you love.
- Beervana 2023, where I spent the day at Beervana, Aotearoa’s largest beer festival.
I added four new vinyls collection over on the Recordshelf page:
- Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s E. 1999 Eternal. It’s an amazing album to have on vinyl.
- Inspectah Deck’s Uncontrolled Substance. It’s a great album, but the question remains: “What did his album that was lost in the floods sound like?”.
- The Game’s The Documentary. Absolute banger.
- Method Man’s Tical. The very first Wu-Tang solo album.
I sourced the above records from Vinyl Me Please, who seek to experience music more deeply and believe in the power of the album as an art form. They provide:
- A fantastic product.
- The reproduction of the covers.
- The records themselves.
- The OBI strips.
- The included album booklet that includes album commentary.
I played The Documentary first and, unfortunately, had a lot of skips throughout both disks. I reached out to VMP’s help and provided a video of the damaged vinyl, and within the hour, they had a replacement shipped. If you’re into collecting vinyl, check out their store and see if they have anything you like.
I got the website working with the IndieWeb. This involved following the guides on their wiki and the steps on IndieWebify.Me to get going. I verified my domain and Web Sign In enabled. I created my h-card, that also got me signed up to Mastodon, and I got all my posts marked up with h-entry.
I’m not planning on using Mastodon extensively. I’ll look into setting up feed syndication so that anyone who wants to can follow along and get updates over on Mastodon as an alternative to my RSS Feed.
I had a good go at getting WebMentions going but ran into some issues getting them displaying. I read heaps of posts about them from Max, Sia, Robb, Cory and others where they iterated upon each other but kept running into build issues with 11ty.
I’ll take another look at it another time cause I really want to be able to do the whole website to website reply thing. The appeal of WebMentions is not to use Mastodon as a comment system but to use our websites to reply to other websites.
I organised my posts tags. Removed duplicates, single-entry tags, etc.
And finally, I started re-organising my top-of-page navigation. I’m considering consolidating some pages and bringing others to the top level. I deprecated my contact page and moved the contact details to the About page. I have a few more tasks like this to complete; I must remember to set the redirects correctly.
That concludes everything for this month. We’ll catch up again soon.
