CHANGELOG 2024-11-01

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

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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

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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

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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.

Hi! I'm available for remote contract work. You can learn more about me and my skillset by browsing around this site, head over to my resume to find my actual work history, and shoot me an email when you're ready to get in touch.