Hens, interweb migration, and why Darren England is a soggy vegan bake.
This week was a very sad week. We lost Chewy, she was a Brahma that we adopted back in 2019. Chewy was my favourite hen, the one that I looked for every morning and night to make sure that she was ok. She had started going downhill. while Vickie was in hospital, and though I did my best to save her, and managed to get her to put some weight back on, it was not enough.
Hosting Platform
Losing Chewy probably accelerated some of the decisions that I had been talking about in this feed for the last couple of weeks. But also thinking back to other moments of miserableness too, I realised that the only people that reach out in dark times, are those that I talk to in the real world anyway.
So I have accelerated the move away from micro.blog. The main reason that I joined micro.blog in the first place was its community, but with a few exceptions that I can talk to on Mastodon (or in real life) anyway, I did not really feel part of that.
I talked in my previous note about preparing a Processwire build so that I could do more intelligent things with data in posts. I realised though that I didn't really want to spend the time theming up from scratch at this point. I changed tack and went back to my original option Kirby CMS, which I eventually managed to spin up on MAMP.
I have a staging build live now, and I'm putting all new content directly into it while bringing content across, upgrading it, and adding further to it. For the most part the them looks very Kirby Starter-kit, it probably will do for a while. I have though started to capture structured data within the content though which can be interrogated later.
I'm hoping in the future to be able to attach gpx files, and to produce maps and activity data on my own website (reducing the need for third party services as Strava). But thats a long way away.
You can review my progress live on my staging build. I am hopeful that in the next week or so I will be in a position to move the build in to the root, and switch the domain back to my own server from micro.blog.
There's still lots to do before that happens including theming up, webmentions, and especially setting up the rss feeds for feed readers. Not to mention moving 20 years of content across.
ActivityPub
As part of the transition, I also wanted/needed to move my interaction with micro.blog users and other activityPub actors away from micro.blog.
I wanted to transfer my followers and followings over to my indieweb.social account, which for some reason micro.blog would not recognise that account. It would let me transfer out to my mastodon.scot account. So I decided to transfer everything out to mastodon.scot, and to then transfer to indieweb.social. It worked, but left about half of my followers (which seemed to all be micro.blog followers) on mastodon.scot.
I gave it a couple of days to resolve itself, but when that did not happen I decided to transfer everything back to mastodon.scot and consolidate there. I cannot transfer out from there for last least another 30 days, so until at least then, you'll find me at https://mastodon.scot/@leeperry.
Scribbles
Vincent has been very busy at work on the system this week. He has added in letterbird forms and Reply by Email functionality. I don't know much about the former, but if you want to talk to be my email I've created an iCloud burner address which you can reply to below. If and when the spam gets too much, I'll just replace it with another sacrificial address.
Training
Training was fairly minimal this week, though notable for my first two
tough runs of the year. I struggled with asthma in both, but the second
run was far better than the first.
31/03/2023
- Around the Pie 5km
27/03/2023
- Run (3km)
I also got a little Fulgaz testing in, I've always liked Fulgaz, great
rides, minimal interface - I can just lack a little inspiration around
what to ride at times. The week started with this pleasant ride to
Wanda Beach on my Wattbike:
26/03/2023
- Kyeemagh To Wanda Beach
Football
Burnley travelled to Stamford Bridge (check out the stub page) on Saturday to take on Chelsea. Travelling South my expectations were not great, but we played really well despite an appallingly one-sided refereeing performance from Darren England making the game far harder than it should have been. Despite that Jay Rodriguez nearly stole all three points at the death. Why is Darren England a soggy vegan bake? You'll have to read my match report for the full explanation, but needless to say I don't think he can sue me for libel given that it is fairly obvious that he is not actually a soggy vegan bake - just about as much use as one.
The game was also notable for the amazing Burnley FC scarf that Vickie made me. Not only did it go 'viral' in the crafting community on her instagram, it annulled Darren England's soggy vegan bake powers too. It's going to be a bit warn wearing it in April and May, but it just has to be done.
We have Wolves on Tuesday night when we get the opportunity to build on a Season high 3 game non-losing streak. Enough of me for one week, until the next update, up the clarets.