CHANGELOG 2024-11-01

Here's a list of small changes around the site that didn't necessarily warrant their own individual posts.

-----

I introduced the "💯 Chronicles of a Critic" section and added my existing (2!) book reports to it, along with a recent movie review. I'm not going to write something up for _everything_ I watch or read, just ones for which I have something I want to say.

💯 Chronicles of a Critic

-----

I added Signal to the donations area. I've been a dedicated user for a long time, and figured it's time to give back.

🫶 Donation Station

-----

On the HTTP version of the site images will now be automatically inlined into the page, rather than requiring the user to click a link. See Happy Trees [0] for an example.

I was able to do this as a result of work I've done on my custom Caddy plugins [1]. I added a new HTTP middleware plugin which does the gemtext->HTML conversion, and as a result I have much greater control over how the HTML rendering happens than I did before.

Using this new plugin I am able render gemtext links in HTML using an arbitrary template. For this site the template I'm using does the work of injecting a gemini gateway for `gemini://` links, as well as inlining images. It looks like this:

{{- $url := .URL }}
{{- $label := .Label }}
{{- $isGemini := hasPrefix "gemini://" $url }}

{{- $ext := $url | ext | lower }}
{{- $isImg := any
  (eq $ext ".jpg")
  (eq $ext ".jpeg")
  (eq $ext ".png")
  (eq $ext ".svg")
  }}

{{- if (and $isImg (not $isGemini)) }}
  <p style="text-align: center;">
    <a href="{{ $url }}">
      <img
        src="{{ $url }}"
        alt="{{ $label }}"
        style="width: 600px;" />
    </a>
    {{- if (ne $label $url) }}
    <br/><small><em>{{ $label }}</em></small>
    {{- end }}
  </p>
{{ else }}
  {{- if $isGemini }}
    {{- $url = $url | trimPrefix "gemini://" | print "https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/" }}
    {{- $label = print $label " (proxied)" }}
  {{- end -}}
  <p><a href="{{ $url }}">{{ $label }}</a></p>
{{ end }}

The next plugin I'm thinking about will also be image related; I want something which will automatically resize images server-side based on a query parameter. This was a feature which existed as part of my old CMS I had written, and it was very useful for serving a smaller version of an image on a page while linking to the full-sized image, all without having to manually run a "convert images into different sizes".

I've got a few more posts in the pipeline, so keep yours eyes open!

[0] Happy Trees

[1] mediocre-caddy-plugins

This site is a mirror of my gemini capsule. The equivalent gemini page can be found here, and you can learn more about gemini at my 🚀 What is Gemini? page.