/blog

I managed to avoid disappearing down a rabbit hole yesterday.

Initially, I was looking at how to make RSS feed fetching more efficient but ended up looking at ActivityPub and thinking "it would be cool to add this to the blog."

A quick glance at the spec and some existing PHP implementations scared me off. I think it's way beyond my ability. I know I said that with webmentions but this is some next level shit.

Thinking about it, considering that I don't use federated systems like Mastodon, I think it would be a waste of effort for minimum gain.

I still need to investigate improving the efficiency of feed collection. I've been looking at options for processing PHP in parallel but not yet found anything suitable for my environment.

A longstanding feature of the blog has been the post count for 'Today' and 'post direction' in the top right. Because each day is chronological so the latest isn't on top I originally added them to my WordPress theme to give an easy, visual indication of updates and also to illustrate that the posts should be read down the page:

(b)log-In inherited this and, when I added the ability to change post order the direction indicator would change to reflect this.

I doubt I'll ever switch back to reverse-chron posting and really want to get back to thinking of each day as an item rather than a series of discrete posts. I am, therefore, considering dropping the post count and direction indicator. This will also further reduce clutter, increasing the amount of white space.

I've removed it for now (using a bit of logic that can never currently be true) to see how I feel about it after a couple of days.