/reader

A few days ago, on one of my favourite blogs Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity, a post about travelling on a budget airline contained the following illuminating thought:

For some reason, the American mindset is endless growth. Everything must get bigger, everything must get better, and more, more, more, how do you like it, how do you like it. But the truth of the matter is, nothing natural undergoes infinite growth, other than some cancers.J.P. Wing

J.P. is an amazing writer, and I share an awful lot of his attitude, fully respecting his opinions the rare times when they don’t align with mine. He’s American. So here I go again: why most of this growth-at-all-costs destructive culture seems to be coming from there?

I’ve recently decided to stop reading The Conversation, after two consecutive posts were openly accusing Europe’s investors of not doing enough to be more like Silicon Valley. I’m seriously confused: how can anyone really believe, in 2024, that their business model is anything close to being sustainable? The mental slavery that parts of Europe still seems to be having towards the rot economy fuelled by a type of capitalism not integral to the continent is truly bewildering.

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Unlike regular posts, likes and replies only require an URL, a name, and in the case of replies also a bit of written content. Everything else can be inferred automatically (date, file name, creation of the file, tags). That’s when I decided to make the creation of a webmention with Jekyll as fast as possible. What I’ve ended up with is an icon in the Dock that I can click whenever I’m ready to reply or like someone’s post. The applet asks me for:

• the URL of the post I’m liking or replying to;
• the name of the person that I’m mentioning;
• the title of the post (for likes only).

Everything else is created in the Shortcut automation:

Similarly to what I’ve achieved with the previous new post automation, once I input the two required info in pop-up prompts, a file is created, the editor Typora is launched, a Terminal session is launched—and minimised in the Dock—with the proper alias commands to serve the website locally. At that point, I can write my reply and be done with it in a very short time.

After duplicating and adjusting the script for likes, I ended up with 3 automation icons: new post, new reply, new like.

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Once created bots.yml in my Jekyll data directory, I used a loop to iterate through the single items in my robots.liquid source file:

---
layout: none
permalink: /robots.txt
---
{%- for item in site.data.bots -%}
User-agent: {{ item }}
Disallow: /

{%- endfor %}

The end result after a site build is a /robots.txt file containing the entire list of disallowed bots. The rewrite instructions to block AI crawlers in the .htaccess file are the same as suggested by Ethan. Instead of performing a for loop, I just print them inline within a rewrite condition, separated by a pipe character:

# Block bots
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteBase /
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ({{ site.data.bots | sort_natural | join: "|" }}) [NC]
  RewriteRule ^ – [F]
</IfModule>

Redirects

Since I was there, I also optimised the .htaccess.liquid source file by creating a further YAML data file with all my redirects, looping through them in a now neat source file:

# Redirects
{%- for item in site.data.redirects %}
Redirect 301 {{ item }}
{%- endfor %}

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After studying how the new 1.1 spec works, I put Liquid at work, exploiting all kinds of available site-wide variables, loops, conditionals. The end result is a compiled feed.json file that can be added on Echo Feed to extract different sections of new blog posts. In my case: title, summary, permalink, and the first tag.

Here is the compiled file, while this is the source code:

---
layout: null
---
{
  "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1",
  "title": "{{ site.title | xml_escape }}",
  "home_page_url": "{{ "/" | absolute_url }}",
  "feed_url": "{{ "/feed.json" | absolute_url }}",
  "description": {{ site.description | strip_html | jsonify }},
  "icon": "{{ "/assets/images/favicons/apple-touch-icon.png" | absolute_url }}",
  "favicon": "{{ "/favicon.ico" | absolute_url }}",
  "expired": false,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "{{ site.author.name }}",
      "url": "{{ site.url }}",
      "avatar": "/assets/images/minutes-to-midnight-portrait.jpg"
    }
  ],
  "items": [
    {%- for post in site.posts limit:site.posts_limit %}
    {
      "title": {{ post.title | jsonify }},
      "date_published": "{{ post.date | date_to_xmlschema }}",
      "date_modified": "{{ post.last_modified_at | date_to_xmlschema }}",
      "id": "{{ post.url | absolute_url | sha1 }}",
      "url": "{{ post.url | absolute_url }}",
      "authors": [
        {
          "name": "{{ site.author.name }}",
          "url": "{{ site.author.url }}",
          "avatar": "/assets/images/minutes-to-midnight-portrait.jpg"
        }
      ],
      "summary": {{ post.summary | strip_html | jsonify }},
      "content_text": {{ post.content | strip_html | strip_newlines | jsonify }},
      "content_html": {{ post.content | strip_newlines | jsonify }},
      "tags": [{%- for tag in post.tags %}"{{ tag }}"{% unless forloop.last %},{% endunless %}{% endfor %}]
    }{%- if forloop.last == false %},{% endif %}
    {%- endfor %}
  ]
}

I haven’t tested the feed with a RSS reader, therefore it’s not exposed in any page yet. I’m wondering if RSS readers could have any potential advantages.

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