Blogging

There are 146 posts filed in Blogging (this is page 1 of 15).

Followup on support for Drummer oldSchool blogs

Recently, I mentioned that I worked with Claude Code to add scripts and changes to the drummerCms Github repo to be able to build a local copy of an oldSchool blog from a Drummer OPML file. In conversation with Frank McPherson, he asked if the web-based outliner from Dave Winer that I modified this year could support editing a OPML file for Drummer oldSchool blog use. This morning, I was able to add outline elements matching those in an oldSchool blog OPML file and was able to build a new local copy with those changes correctly rendered.

Based on this testing, I believe my OPML outliner can support oldSchool blogging use, with some inconveniences (having to add other outline elements used within oldSchool). If anyone is interested in collaborating on updating the outliner UI to support oldSchool blogging, let me know!

Got the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress working

Today I gave the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress another try, and was successful! First, I upgraded to the latest version (from 9.0.2 to 9.3.1). I accepted the default settings, so my new ActivityPub account based on my settings would be alsylves@andysylvester.com. Next, I logged into mastodon.social (https://mastodon.social/@AndySylvester), pasted my new account in the search box, clicked “Cancel request” on the old version, then clicked “Follow”, and saw the button change to “Unfollow”. Finally, I went back to my website, created a post, and saw it appear on my Mastodon home page. After that, I marked the post as a “favorite” and I created a reply to the post in Mastodon. Within a minute, it appeared as a comment on my WordPress post. Success!

Creating a local version of a Drummer oldSchool blog

As part of migrating my main website and other sites to a new hosting service, I have also been working to create backups of sites hosted elsewhere. One of those sites was a weblog I created using Drummer (created by Dave Winer) and using the oldSchool blogging template/tool. As part of other updates made by Dave Winer, there was a problem with the template being used for the oldSchool blogs. One Drummer user (Frank McPherson) did make updates to his template and was able to restore full display of his site. After that incident, I decided it would be better for me to have a separate backup site from the Drummer-hosted sites.

Dave Winer created two repos related to publishing blogs using Drummer and oldSchool. One (oldSchoolBlog) was the code used to create the blogs. Another (drummerCms) was a shell to allow other outliners to use the oldSchoolBlog code.

I installed both of the repos locally and made some attempts to execute the code, but had some problems. I did some troubleshooting, and added a config.json file which helped somewhat. However, the design of the oldSchool logic was set up to publish files to Amazon S3, which was not my goal (I wanted a local copy that could be hosted wherever I wanted).

Eventually, I used Claude Code to create a runner for the drummerCms repo to take the weblog OPML file and create a website on the local filesystem. The updates that Frank McPherson had made to his site were helpful in reaching this goal.

I have created a Git repo (oldSchool-backup-tool) which includes build scripts to call drummerCms to build a local copy of an oldSchool blog, and instructions for running the scripts. I have uploaded my converted site to be part of my main website. If any former Drummer oldSchool bloggers have questions on use of the tool, feel free to add issues to the Github repo above or contact me directly (see my About page).

Another whiny post about Hugo breaking a site

I decided I wanted to experiment with my linkblog again, which uses the Hugo SSG tool. However, I upgraded my Hugo installation sometime in the last 3 months, so I had a feeling there was going to be some breakage, and I was correct. When I tried to rebuild the site as-is, I got this kind of error:

ERROR error building site: html/template:_partials/disqus.html:1:12: no such template “_internal/disqus.html”

After some searching, it appeared that the latest version of Hugo made some changes in the default structure for Hugo sites (ugh) and the recommendation was to see if theme owners had made updates. I then decided to get the latest version of the Anubis2 Hugo theme, and to move the content folder to the main directory instead of the example-site folder.

The next error blocking a rebuild was the following:

ERROR The “twitter”, “tweet”, and “twitter_simple” shortcodes were deprecated in v0.142.0 and removed in v0.156.0. Please use the “x” shortcode instead.

I then removed “twitter” and “tweet” shortcodes from several posts to clear the above error. This led to the next error:

ERROR error building site: render: [en v1.0.0 guest] failed to render pages: render of “C:/Hugo/hugo-theme-anubis2-main_update_Sept2026/main/content/posts/demo-code-pre-kbd-mark.md” failed: “C:\Hugo\hugo-theme-anubis2-main_update_Sept2026\main\layouts\baseof.html:14:11”: execute of template failed: template: page.html:14:11: executing “head” at <partial “head/head.html” .>: error calling partial: “C:\Hugo\hugo-theme-anubis2-main_update_Sept2026\main\layouts_partials\head\head.html:76:5”: execute of template failed: template: _partials/head/head.html:76:5: executing “_partials/head/head.html” at <partial “resource.html” (dict “context” $ “type” “js” “filename” .)>: error calling partial: “C:\Hugo\hugo-theme-anubis2-main_update_Sept2026\main\layouts_partials\resource.html:8:25”: execute of template failed: template: _partials/resource.html:8:25: executing “_partials/resource.html” at <resources.Get>: error calling Get: CreateFile C:\Hugo\hugo-theme-anubis2-main_update_Sept2026\main\assets\https:\cdn.jsdelivr.net\npm@tailwindcss\browser@4: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.

At this point, I felt I should look at some other options. I reviewed some themes and tutorials for the Eleventy SSG but the first tutorial I tried had an error. I then went to the main site, and the “Get Started” page barely created a single page. I reviewed some blog themes, but did not see much to my liking. I then took a look at Astro but it felt even more overwhelming than Eleventy, and again no simple blog themes to be found.

I then went ahead and fired up Claude Code, pasted in the Hugo error message, and asked for suggestions. Claude found a bug in the theme when being built on Windows systems (removed 3 lines from a file). After that, the site built successfully, and looked the same as before. I felt relief and anger and the same time – aaaarrrrrgh! Why did this have to be so difficult! This reminded me why I use WordPress for my main blog – It Just Works.

Other examples of inbound/outbound RSS support

Dave Winer pointed to Ricardo Mendes from his linkblog on July 10 with the title “Inbound and Outbound RSS”. I took a look at the Mendes post, he describes using Indiekit and plugins to both read and write posts. I think this is very similar to my minimal blogging tool MyStatusTool. In the Mendez setup, it sounds like he is also reading feeds that do not include rssCloud support.

Mendez also mentions work by Aaron Parecki on the Monacle social feed reader/writer. This tool used the Micropub and Microsub specs for publishing and subscribing. The above link is from 2016, so you can see that this predates both the MyStatusTool and rss.chat tools.

I appreciate blogs and RSS

I use River5 to read feeds (see here). When I read feeds on my phone, I open tabs with posts I want to read/keep. At this writing, the number of tabs is 81. Why is the number so high? Because I read a lot of feeds, and these feeds are from blogs, not news websites. I check news websites, but I do not subscribe to many feeds from news websites (too much flow there).

I appreciate blogs because I would not be able to get the wide variety of information/viewpoints if I only subscribed to mainstream media. Also, I can drop feeds if they no longer are of interest. Finally. almost all blogs have feeds to which I can subscribe. Interestingly (or perhaps sadly), many mainstream media newspapers/news websites do not provide feeds – grrr!

I want to send out a big “Thank you!” to Dave Winer for his work in making blogging and feed reading available to all, and for developing and promoting the use of RSS to share the work of our blogs with the world.