/blog

The Google 'At a glance' widget just showed me a PAGASA (Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration) warning for a tropical storm in the next 36 hours. Obviously a glitch but I hope everyone in the Philippines stays safe.

This time last year I was working on displaying 'revisions' for Garden pages using wp_get_post_revisions() and wp_text_diff() from WordPress. It showed a comparison between the current and previous versions of a page just in case "I accidentally save something incorrectly" and needed to revert the change.

Did I ever use it? Nope.

I wrote that it was "a typical example of how I work" – I have an idea with no clue as to how to achieve it then set about making it a reality – but this was definitely more an example of me overenginneering something and building it just because I could. It served no real purpose.

Getting away from WordPress has forced me to take a step back. Because I have been building everything myself (barring the libraries for things like Markdown and webmentions) my knowledge and skill has tempered what features I can implement. Yes, building (b)log-In has taught me things I never knew, enabling me to create things I would not have thought within my grasp, but the approach has been far less frivolous. Everything I've added has been more considered – with the probable exception of the Dictionary. That was definitely a 'nice to have' rather than a necessity.

However, within the new confines, my approach has remained the same: think of something then dig around looking for a way to make it happen; I've just had to be a bit more realistic and patient. Saying that, it has often been surprising how quickly some features have come together.

I'm having some issues with internal webmentions when publishing a post from draft so am having to do some testing, including with Postman, to work out why they aren't going through properly. An email is generated as expected but the endpoint doesn't seem to be pulling out the post content correctly which is preventing the mention being written as a comment.

Here's a test link.

Update: I've fudged a fix. Because internal mentions only show as 'Related Post' (and this only seems to happen on internal mentions) the content isn't needed. So, if the content is empty I just set it to a period. The comment is then saved and the webmention works properly.