Hacking omg.lol

I’ve been a member of the Omglolverse for about two years. In that time I’ve used all the available services and in some cases been frustrated by their limitations. But working through—and sometimes around—those limitations (the “hacking” bit) is the fun part.

Weblog

The weblog service is where I do almost everything. I even use it for my profile and now pages, as I’ll explain below. But first, the basics: there are basically two kinds of content on weblog.lol, posts and pages.

• Posts are dated entries (articles) that exist at a given point in time. They generally don’t change once posted. I always write at least one post per week, sometimes more.

• Pages are static entries that may change over time.

Now I know a lot of people maintain multiple blogs based on different subjects. I prefer a single unified web experience for mihobu.lol that includes my profile, my web sitelets (defaults, uses, subscriptions, etc.) all under one roof and sharing common navigation. So that’s what I’ve tried to build. Here’s how:

• Weblog provides a built-in navigation mechanism, which you set up in the weblog configuration file. I don’t use it though because I wanted a “tabbed” style to separate the different sections, each having its own set of subnavigation links. To do this, I had to create a separate template for each section. This complicates maintenance because there’s a lot of duplication across templates. I use custom metadata fields to add inline CSS styles to highlight the current page link in the subnavigation bar.

• My now page is powered by an Amazon Web Services Lambda Function, which fetches activity from Goodreads (about the books I’m reading), Trakt (about the TV shows and movies I’m watching), and a paste (about everything else) to generate a markdown summary of what I’ve been up to for the last seven days. I use the now page service to store the content, but I don’t use the service to display it. Instead, I pull the now page content into a static weblog page using the now property.

  • I also have a special weblog template for the now page. To ensure the dates are correctly shown, I need to omit the date from the static page, which rarely changes. Instead, the Lambda function adds a date range explicitly to the end of the now page content.

• My profile page exists as a static weblog page. (I don’t use the omg.lol Web Page service for this. My system-wide profile pic and favicon live there though.)

• I really like FontAwesome icons, but I don’t use their icon fonts any more. Instead, I download the ones I like and use, and encode them into a CSS file of my own. I use the mask-image CSS property to display them either as list markers or as inline glyphs (as seen here). I don’t know if I really save much in terms of performance by doing things this way. I really just did it to see if I could.

• Weblog allows you to create custom properties that expand in markdown and can include arguments. I use this feature to generate nicely formatted image captions. The markdown looks like this (but must be placed in braces):

caption:text=This is a caption.

{% caption "This is a caption." %}

• I set up my post template (in the configuration) to include a default image (another custom property), although I try to create unique post images for all my new posts. These are included in the web page headers as part of the Open Graph meta data. This also has the side effect of rendering nice image cards on Mastodon.

• At this time, I’m not using weblog’s landing page and pagination features.

How I use the other Omglolverse services

• profile.lol As mentioned above, I don’t use this except that the avatar is shown on the directory

• now.garden Because I use it to store my now content, my updates do appear in the garden. So that’s nice.

• status.lol I occasionally post statuses, which are cross-posted to Mastodon. But I stopped showing these on my now page, because they hang out there forever if I don’t update. (I wish they would just age off and disappear.)

• Pastebin Used primarily as a key component in my now page updates as described above, but I keep a few other things out there too.

• Charms I haven’t started using these yet. 😄

• some.pics I don’t use it as a photo sharing service per se (I use Flickr for that) but I do use it extensively as a content store for my blog.

• PURLs I use it mostly to track downloads of things I’ve written.

• Email I don’t use mihobu.lol for email. All my email/calendar stuff is on Fastmail, which I recommend highly.

• DNS I don’t use omg.lol for DNS. Everything is at porkbun, which I also recommend.

• Switchboard Yes I have a lot of stuff in there, which I think might be a whole other post.

• Keys I keep my GPG and iMessage keys in there.

• Proofs I’ve got a few in there, including this one. FWIW, I also can be found on Keyoxide.