@bibbs@vocalounge.cafe There is! Being the #indieweb, though, it isn't...homogenous.
\nLots of Indieweb blogs either support federation directly (whether directly or through wordpress plugins) or use bridgy.fed. The closest thing to a \"federated neocities\" might be micro.blog. My website is sort of the other way around from most of those: it runs a single-user Activitypub server that also functions as an Indieweb blog.
\n","content_text":"@bibbs@vocalounge.cafe There is! Being the #indieweb, though, it isn't...*homogenous*.\r\n\r\nLots of Indieweb blogs either support federation directly (whether directly or through wordpress plugins) or use bridgy.fed. The closest thing to a \"federated neocities\" might be micro.blog. My website is sort of the other way around from most of those: it runs a single-user Activitypub server that also functions as an Indieweb blog.","date_published":"2026-04-20T04:58:27.812737","attachments":[]},{"id":"2H1AT","url":"https://bw3.dev/o/2H1AT","content_html":"I would like to file a complaint with my brain for the following pair of behaviors
\nA. It is often easier for me to remember something I'm supposed to do if I mention it out loud to someone. This correlates strongly with things I need to be somewhere else to do, especially things I should ideally do on my way from one place to another, such as when I need to run an errand on the way home from work, but that's not always the case.
\nIt is often harder for me to muster the energy/motivation to do something I'm supposed to do if I have talked about it with someone. My impression has often been that this is because it feels like I've expended the energy on it already. This correlates strongly with things I don't really want to do, such as when there's an appointment I should make or a service I should cancel, but that's not always the case.
\nThe overlap between these things happening is not huge, but it is also not trivial.
\n@soatok@furry.engineer Actually \"Where you take it\" probably isn't the right way to put that. How well adoption of it goes when the time comes is closer.
\n","content_text":"@soatok@furry.engineer Actually \"Where you take it\" probably isn't the right way to put that. How well adoption of it goes when the time comes is closer.","date_published":"2026-02-07T05:29:24.190577","attachments":[]},{"id":"2GbVU","url":"https://bw3.dev/o/2GbVU","content_html":"@soatok@furry.engineer Excited about the project and to see where you take it. Dreading that I'm going to want what it does and that I'll be the only one interested in trying to make Microblogpub/Tinyblogpub compatible with it. 😂
\n","content_text":"@soatok@furry.engineer Excited about the project and to see where you take it. Dreading that I'm going to want what it does and that I'll be the only one interested in trying to make Microblogpub/Tinyblogpub compatible with it. 😂","date_published":"2026-02-07T05:28:32.499519","attachments":[]},{"id":"2G79b","url":"https://bw3.dev/o/2G79b","content_html":"@xarvos@outerheaven.club Technically, I had an account on an Akkoma instance first, so I polled as \"some non-Mastodon server.\" But I didn't use that account for anything but...having it exist, while I read some stuff. I don't think I ever even followed anyone but Jeff Moss. I didn't even post an introduction until several months later when I set up my personal instance.
\n","content_text":"@xarvos@outerheaven.club Technically, I had an account on an Akkoma instance first, so I polled as \"some non-Mastodon server.\" But I didn't *use* that account for anything but...having it exist, while I read some stuff. I don't think I ever even followed anyone but Jeff Moss. I didn't even post an introduction until several months later when I set up my personal instance.","date_published":"2025-11-25T21:36:50.735973","attachments":[]},{"id":"2Ftbp","url":"https://bw3.dev/o/2Ftbp","content_html":"I think, due to an ill-advised attempt (or perhaps more accurately ill-timed - late at night right before going to bed not really being ideal) to update my reverse proxy, I might have somehow caused it to block posts from all instances. Either that, or everyone's been really quiet for the last day. I'm trying to get it fixed now.
\nThe intent was to switch from blocking all traffic from snac instances to blocking only their POST requests. I'm not sure yet what, if anything, I messed up.
\nSnac has a default setting to send all posts to all known inboxes, to improve reach for small instances; what I read on my #microblogpub instance is essentially the whole instance inbox. I do not find the result acceptable. I'm going to have to get more creative if I ever want to follow someone on a snac instance, but for now I thought I'd try to make it so that snac users could maybe make their instances retrieve my posts, even if they couldn't talk to me without someone else boosting them over the wall. Unfortunately, something seems to have gone awry...
\n","content_text":"I think, due to an ill-advised attempt (or perhaps more accurately ill-timed - late at night right before going to bed not really being ideal) to update my reverse proxy, I might have somehow caused it to block posts from all instances. Either that, or everyone's been really quiet for the last day. I'm trying to get it fixed now.\r\n\r\nThe intent was to switch from blocking *all* traffic from snac instances to blocking only their POST requests. I'm not sure yet what, if anything, I messed up.\r\n\r\nSnac has a default [setting](https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2/issues/345#issuecomment-3834470) to send all posts to all known inboxes, to improve reach for small instances; what I *read* on my #microblogpub instance is essentially the whole instance inbox. I do not find the result acceptable. I'm going to have to get more creative if I ever want to follow someone on a snac instance, but for now I thought I'd try to make it so that snac users could maybe make their instances retrieve my posts, even if they couldn't talk to me without someone else boosting them over the wall. Unfortunately, something seems to have gone awry...","date_published":"2025-10-23T00:49:06.097817","attachments":[]},{"id":"2FfMu","url":"https://bw3.dev/o/2FfMu","content_html":"Unfortunately, I think I'm going to be blocking any snac instance that has any users I don't want to follow.
\nhttps://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2/issues/345
\nI can kind of understand where this is coming from. However, in spec or not, this behavior is problematic for a single-user instance with a design that makes the instance inbox normally the most convenient place to keep up with what's been happening.
\n(I think I actually figured out at one point, when I was looking through the source code, why - aside from not being able to filter by activity - \"Stream\" never felt like as good an option, despite somehow giving the impression that it was supposed to...but unfortunately I don't remember what the reason was, nor did I try to fix it.)
\n","content_text":"Unfortunately, I think I'm going to be blocking any snac instance that has any users I don't want to follow.\r\n\r\nhttps://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2/issues/345\r\n\r\nI can kind of understand where this is coming from. However, in spec or not, this behavior is problematic for a single-user instance with a design that makes the *instance inbox* normally the most convenient place to keep up with what's been happening.\r\n\r\n(I think I actually figured out at one point, when I was looking through the source code, why - aside from not being able to filter by activity - \"Stream\" never felt like as good an option, despite somehow giving the impression that it was supposed to...but unfortunately I don't remember what the reason was, nor did I try to fix it.)","date_published":"2025-09-19T21:54:21.645504","attachments":[]},{"id":"2Ff0v","url":"https://bw3.dev/o/2Ff0v","content_html":"@soatok@furry.engineer I cannot think offhand of much you've written that I have put to practical use in any particular context (pretty sure there are things, but I would have to go back and look for them), but I enjoy reading your blog and I feel like I learn interesting stuff from it, and to me that is useful enough, even if I don't actively use most of what I've learned, and it just ends up filed away as a thing I will probably remember if I come across more information later about the subject.
\nOh, wait, I take that back. I can think of one category of things I've read from you that has been of practical use to me; although offhand I cannot think of any specific examples (I am absolutely terrible at thinking offhand of specific examples of things outside the categories of my personal obsessions), I know there are things that you have explained are dogwhistles (and in some cases, WHY or HOW they are dogwhistles) that I would otherwise probably still have absolutely no clue were dogwhistles.
\n","content_text":"@soatok@furry.engineer I cannot think offhand of much you've written that I have put to *practical use* in any particular context (pretty sure there are things, but I would have to go back and look for them), but I *enjoy* reading your blog and I feel like I learn interesting stuff from it, and to me that is useful enough, even if I don't actively use most of what I've learned, and it just ends up filed away as a thing I will probably remember if I come across more information later about the subject.\r\n\r\nOh, wait, I take that back. I can think of one category of things I've read from you that has been of *practical* use to me; although offhand I cannot think of any specific examples (I am absolutely terrible at thinking offhand of specific examples of things outside the categories of my personal obsessions), I know there are things that you have explained are dogwhistles (and in some cases, WHY or HOW they are dogwhistles) that I would otherwise probably still have absolutely no clue were dogwhistles.","date_published":"2025-09-19T00:55:10.614938","attachments":[]},{"id":"2FHb1","url":"https://bw3.dev/articles/2FHb1/state-of-the-blog-address","content_html":"Been a while, hasn't it, folks?
\nI thought several weeks ago that this was going to be a lot more interesting of a Next #bw3dev Update.
\nThat's because I was planning to rebase my customizations again onto the latest v2.1-dev branch the other folks with #tinyBlogPub have got, and then I was bound and determined to dig in and figure out which of my customizations was breaking part of the software for me, or else whether everyone else had the same problem and just hadn't mentioned or noticed it.
\nI finally figured the problem out a couple of days ago because, apparently for the first time despite having had several multi-hour sit-downs to puzzle over this since it started happening, I finally decided that since reverting all of my personal changes didn't fix the issue, and I couldn't figure out what part of the code was doing a 307 redirect from the intended URL to one with the query string stripped out, maybe I should add the \"Non-Authoritative Reason: WebRequest API\" header that was coming with that redirect into my search terms.
\nSome of you out there now know roughly where this is going.
\n...It was uBlock Origin. More specifically, it was a custom filter list I added to my uBlock Origin configuration somewhere along the way, the ➗ Actually Legitimate URL Shortener Tool. I don't remember why, so I should probably dig into that and see whether I really want that filter list - that's neither an endorsement of the list itself nor a censure; I'm just acknowledging that if I don't remember why I'm using it, I should probably make sure I still want to. I think I must have started using that list more recently than I thought, because I don't think I always had this problem with my blog, but this commit from October 2023 added a filter to remove the query-string parameter ap_id any time it appears. And that's the parameter #microblogpub uses on the /object endpoint when the logged-in admin wants to look at a post in its threaded context, to identify the post being focused.
I figured this out thanks to this ticket, where someone getting a similar redirect mentioned that the WebRequest API was a browser extension API.
\nThis entire time, I've been breaking that page because I added an extra filter list and didn't disable uBlock Origin on my own site.
\nOn the bright side, now I know, plus I got updated in the meantime. Although I didn't do a very good job reorganizing and now I want to go back and rebase and reorder everything again. Plus, I tried to add support for reading my inbox in #Indiepass based on a completely inaccurate guess about how that might work, so I need to go back and undo that. Nothing else in particular to report, though, other than the decision to name the org #tinyBlogPub. I think the current plan is to continue calling our updated fork just...a community fork of microblog.pub until we (that's a questionable \"we,\" since I'm not sure I have the time, motivation, and chops to contribute on this aspect) start landing some of the more major changes under discussion. Modularizing the protocols to try to make it easier to change which ones a given instance supports is probably a big enough deal to rename the fork, for example.
I do think I can actually get my feature for using #newbase60 object IDs instead of UUIDs ready to contribute back, this time. I need to add documentation for it first though.
\nAlso, now I seem to have a different and slightly less annoying problem: #AndStatus isn't working with my site anymore. Sometime either this weekend or in a few weeks, I will probably try reverting to an older version to try to start bisecting that problem. However, I rarely want to mess with my site or social media on mobile, and if I do, the mobile view of my site isn't that bad in the browser.
\nEdit: Just realized I had this article as a draft for so long that some references like \"couple of days ago\" are...kind of outdated, but I'm going to acknowledge that and otherwise leave them in.
\n","content_text":"Been a while, hasn't it, folks?\r\n\r\nI thought several weeks ago that this was going to be a lot more interesting of a Next #bw3dev Update.\r\n\r\nThat's because I was planning to rebase my customizations again onto the latest [v2.1-dev](https://github.com/tinyBlogPub/microblog.pub/tree/v2.1-dev) branch the other folks with #tinyBlogPub have got, and then I was bound and determined to dig in and figure out which of my customizations was breaking part of the software for me, or else whether everyone else had the same problem and just hadn't mentioned or noticed it.\r\n\r\nI finally figured the problem out a couple of days ago because, apparently for the first time despite having had several multi-hour sit-downs to puzzle over this since it started happening, I finally decided that since reverting all of my personal changes didn't fix the issue, and I couldn't figure out what part of the code was doing a 307 redirect from the intended URL to one with the query string stripped out, maybe I should add the \"Non-Authoritative Reason: WebRequest API\" header that was coming with that redirect into my search terms.\r\n\r\nSome of you out there now know roughly where this is going.\r\n\r\n...It was uBlock Origin. More specifically, it was a custom filter list I added to my uBlock Origin configuration somewhere along the way, the [➗ Actually Legitimate URL Shortener Tool](https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/discussions/163). I don't remember why, so I should probably dig into that and see whether I really want that filter list - that's neither an endorsement of the list itself nor a censure; I'm just acknowledging that if I don't remember why I'm using it, I should probably make sure I still want to. I think I must have started using that list more recently than I thought, because I don't think I always had this problem with my blog, but [this commit](https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/commit/e8f76e80b9d9127b07c3780ce1c3589713c8c648) from October 2023 added a filter to remove the query-string parameter `ap_id` any time it appears. And that's the parameter #microblogpub uses on the `/object` endpoint when the logged-in admin wants to look at a post in its threaded context, to identify the post being focused.\r\n\r\nI figured this out thanks to [this](https://github.com/firebase/firebase-js-sdk/issues/2732) ticket, where someone getting a similar redirect mentioned that the WebRequest API was a *browser extension* API.\r\n\r\nThis entire time, I've been breaking that page because I added an extra filter list and didn't disable uBlock Origin on my own site.\r\n\r\nOn the bright side, now I know, plus I got updated in the meantime. Although I didn't do a very good job reorganizing and now I want to go back and rebase and reorder everything again. Plus, I tried to add support for reading my inbox in #Indiepass based on a completely inaccurate guess about how that might work, so I need to go back and undo that. Nothing else in particular to report, though, other than the decision to name the org #tinyBlogPub. I *think* the current plan is to continue calling our updated fork just...a community fork of `microblog.pub` until we (that's a questionable \"we,\" since I'm not sure I have the time, motivation, and chops to contribute on this aspect) start landing some of the more major changes under discussion. [Modularizing](https://github.com/orgs/tinyBlogPub/discussions/16) the protocols to try to make it easier to change which ones a given instance supports is probably a big enough deal to rename the fork, for example.\r\n\r\nI do think I can actually get my feature for using #newbase60 object IDs instead of UUIDs ready to contribute back, this time. I need to add documentation for it first though.\r\n\r\nAlso, now I seem to have a different and slightly less annoying problem: #AndStatus isn't working with my site anymore. Sometime either this weekend or in a few weeks, I will probably try reverting to an older version to try to start bisecting that problem. However, I rarely want to mess with my site or social media on mobile, and if I do, the mobile view of my site isn't that bad in the browser.\r\n\r\nEdit: Just realized I had this article as a draft for so long that some references like \"couple of days ago\" are...kind of outdated, but I'm going to acknowledge that and otherwise leave them in.","date_published":"2025-07-25T00:01:54.018627","attachments":[]},{"id":"2FGi1","url":"https://bw3.dev/o/2FGi1","content_html":"@holothuroid@rollenspiel.social \r\njs;dr - requires enabling javascript to view; didn't read
\n","content_text":"@holothuroid@rollenspiel.social \r\njs;dr - requires enabling javascript to view; didn't read","date_published":"2025-07-22T19:01:01.752545","attachments":[]},{"id":"2D9iF","url":"https://bw3.dev/o/2D9iF","content_html":"...Well, the edit appears just fine on my site, but so far I still see the original post from my secondary account on another instance. And it occurs to me that I didn't go look at the update-sending code yet. No clue how long it may take and I haven't looked at whether it's supposed to support federating update, sending an update #webmention to any mentioned #indieweb sites, or both.
\n","content_text":"...Well, the edit appears just fine on my site, but so far I still see the original post from my secondary account on another instance. And it occurs to me that I didn't go look at the update-sending code yet. No clue how long it may take and I haven't looked at whether it's supposed to support *federating* update, sending an update #webmention to any mentioned #indieweb sites, or both.","date_published":"2024-09-08T07:15:36.848368","attachments":[]},{"id":"2D9hz","url":"https://bw3.dev/articles/2D9hz/state-of-the-blog-address","content_html":"So there's some folks, starting with @read@blog.nigini.me, who have put together an org (as mentioned here to help those of us using #microblogpub to move forward with some new development while the original developer is...well, apparently not originally developing for a while (I certainly wish him the best with whatever's keeping him away).
\nI definitely need to spruce up my own customizations so that maybe some of the ones that some other people might find useful can be contributed toward the new org.
\nFirst step of that was to try to get my changes rebased on top of some of what's already been incorporated.
\nI will readily admit...I did not comb through all of the changes trying to figure out what all of them were. I was interested in doing that rebase as soon as I was contacted about the community effort, really...but what got me eager enough to jump in feetvfirst this past week was finding out that one of the contributors had determined that the software already had support for federating updates, and had implemented a simple post edit ability.
\nWhich was a key thing I'd wished I had, although now that there's nowhere I care about syndicating to (and therefore no need for u-syndication links), I have less need for it. The bird site is no longer a place I consider worth caring about, and even if it were, the API changes have made syndication a hassle and backfeed nearly impossible. So far, I'm not really interested in federating to Bluesky or bridging to Nostr or anywhere else. So...I'm just here, and don't generally care about syndication links. But editing is still nice to have!
\nSo I spent some time on that these last few days, and now I'm up and running on top of that fork. #bw3dev
\nAs of this writing...the original dev's sites seem to be down, and the footer has been updated to have a link to one (the most prolific, I think) contributor's fork, but still lists the same version as before. I'm probably going to change a few of those things shortly and then test the edit feature.
\nEDIT: I have updated my site footer to point to the org and to indicate that I'm on a customized version, for now - my Site page already links to my own fork, although it occurs to me some of the info there is now definitely out of date. I'll probably make that a problem for after I get some sleep...and in a moment, I guess I'll know whether the Edit feature works! Editing appears to let me change the title and the content, but not the visibility (which I think may be an #ActivityPub limitation), sensitivity, content warning, post type, or attachments, nor does it give me the little emoji inserter bar which I never use anyway.
\nOne of the changes that was made was adding separate styling for some of the buttons, which made me very unhappy with how my site looked until I figured out why.
\nThere were also a lot of dependency updates. In fact, that same very prolific dev had updated FastAPI past what was apparently a breaking change. He compensated for most of that - in the same commit, in fact - but not for the semi-hidden custom route support that I use for my About, Site, and License pages, so I had to figure out why my site was broken and fix that bit. As a result...even though I tried to clean up my changes when I rebased...even my new branches are already kind of a mess again. Oh well.
\nAnyhow, because of my rush to get to that point, I actually spent little enough time perusing the rest of the changes that I'm not even entirely sure what else I pulled in. I think the place has a few minor appearance changes, but maybe that was only the new button styles before I figured out what had happened and changed my theme. So I guess I'll see if I notice anything else different, and this'll be an adventure!
\n","content_text":"So there's some folks, starting with @read@blog.nigini.me, who have put together an [org](https://github.com/microblog-pub) (as mentioned [here](https://blog.nigini.me/o/06654e795a684a4c971b6124a8db2c53) to help those of us using #microblogpub to move forward with some new development while the original developer is...well, apparently not originally developing for a while (I certainly wish him the best with whatever's keeping him away).\r\n\r\nI definitely need to spruce up my own customizations so that maybe some of the ones that some other people might find useful can be contributed toward the new org.\r\n\r\nFirst step of that was to try to get my changes *rebased* on top of some of what's already been incorporated.\r\n\r\nI will readily admit...I did not comb through all of the changes trying to figure out what all of them were. I was interested in doing that rebase as soon as I was contacted about the community effort, really...but what got me eager enough to jump in feetvfirst this past week was finding out that one of the contributors had determined that the software already had support for federating updates, and had implemented a simple post edit ability.\r\n\r\nWhich was a key thing I'd wished I had, although now that there's nowhere I care about syndicating to (and therefore no need for u-syndication links), I have less need for it. The bird site is no longer a place I consider worth caring about, and even if it were, the API changes have made syndication a hassle and backfeed nearly impossible. So far, I'm not really interested in federating to Bluesky or bridging to Nostr or anywhere else. So...I'm just here, and don't generally care about syndication links. But editing is still nice to have!\r\n\r\nSo I spent some time on that these last few days, and now I'm up and running on top of that fork. #bw3dev\r\n\r\nAs of this writing...the original dev's sites seem to be down, and the footer has been updated to have a link to one (the most prolific, I think) contributor's fork, but still lists the same version as before. I'm probably going to change a few of those things shortly and then test the edit feature.\r\n\r\nEDIT: I have updated my site footer to point to the org and to indicate that I'm on a customized version, for now - my Site page already links to my own fork, although it occurs to me some of the info there is now definitely out of date. I'll probably make that a problem for after I get some sleep...and in a moment, I guess I'll know whether the Edit feature works! Editing appears to let me change the title and the content, but not the visibility (which I think may be an #ActivityPub limitation), sensitivity, content warning, post type, or attachments, nor does it give me the little emoji inserter bar which I never use anyway.\r\n\r\nOne of the changes that was made was adding separate styling for some of the buttons, which made me very unhappy with how my site looked until I figured out why.\r\n\r\nThere were also a lot of dependency updates. In fact, that same very prolific dev had updated FastAPI past what was apparently a breaking change. He compensated for most of that - in the same commit, in fact - but not for the semi-hidden custom route support that I use for my About, Site, and License pages, so I had to figure out why my site was broken and fix that bit. As a result...even though I tried to clean up my changes when I rebased...even my new branches are already kind of a mess again. Oh well.\r\n\r\nAnyhow, because of my rush to get to that point, I actually spent little enough time perusing the rest of the changes that I'm not even entirely sure what else I pulled in. I think the place has a few minor appearance changes, but maybe that was only the new button styles before I figured out what had happened and changed my theme. So I guess I'll see if I notice anything else different, and this'll be an adventure!","date_published":"2024-09-08T06:59:55.880585","attachments":[]},{"id":"2D65_","url":"https://bw3.dev/o/2D65_","content_html":"@rajelaran@oldbytes.space https://xkcd.com/2038/
\n","content_text":"@rajelaran@oldbytes.space https://xkcd.com/2038/","date_published":"2024-08-30T05:34:34.763902","attachments":[]},{"id":"2D0Ed","url":"https://bw3.dev/o/2D0Ed","content_html":"@0x2ba22e11@unstable.systems @soatok@furry.engineer Folks who recognize that they have a different threat model may be less likely to argue, and less likely to make themselves annoying enough to provoke dunking.
\nNot immune to either, necessarily.
\n","content_text":"@0x2ba22e11@unstable.systems @soatok@furry.engineer Folks who recognize that they have a different threat model may be less likely to *argue*, and less likely to make themselves annoying enough to provoke dunking.\r\n\r\nNot immune to either, necessarily.","date_published":"2024-08-15T14:38:20.667604","attachments":[]},{"id":"2CftA","url":"https://bw3.dev/o/2CftA","content_html":"A thought that has occurred to me, as I head to bed a few hours later than I should have:
\nThere was probably a period of time after I had some interest in cryptography and before they were discontinued in 2018 during which, if it had occurred to me, I would have bought a pack of Certs mints because of the name. There are enough people in the world that I might not be the only one.
\n","content_text":"A thought that has occurred to me, as I head to bed a few hours later than I should have:\r\n\r\nThere was probably a period of time after I had some interest in cryptography and before they were discontinued in 2018 during which, if it had occurred to me, I would have bought a pack of Certs mints because of the name. There are enough people in the world that I might not be the only one.","date_published":"2024-06-28T05:10:16.216337","attachments":[]},{"id":"2CQs1","url":"https://bw3.dev/o/2CQs1","content_html":"Well, I've found another thing I may need to work on for my site...when people respond to my articles (reply, like, mention, et cetera), the Notifications page where I can review those things (inbound interactions with me in general show up there, as opposed to my stream or inbox where I can read everything from the folks I follow, whether it addresses me or not)...shows my entire article along with every one of those interactions.
\nConsidering how much I tend to ramble, that can make it pretty hard to keep track when scrolling through multiple reactions to one! I should dig into that part of the code and at least style my own writing differently, probably either collapse or truncate it, and maybe in the case of articles even just show myself the link... I should also capture that desire on my Indieweb user page.
\nThat said, it's a fun problem to have. Thanks for your kind words and reactions; I'm glad some folks enjoyed my rambling! #bw3dev
\n","content_text":"Well, I've found another thing I may need to work on for my site...when people respond to my articles (reply, like, mention, et cetera), the Notifications page where I can review those things (inbound interactions with me in general show up there, as opposed to my stream or inbox where I can read everything from the folks I follow, whether it addresses me or not)...shows *my entire article* along with every one of those interactions.\r\n\r\nConsidering how much I tend to ramble, that can make it pretty hard to keep track when scrolling through multiple reactions to one! I should dig into that part of the code and *at least* style my own writing differently, probably either collapse or truncate it, and maybe in the case of articles even just show myself the link... I should also capture that desire on my Indieweb user page.\r\n\r\nThat said, it's a fun problem to have. Thanks for your kind words and reactions; I'm glad some folks enjoyed my rambling! #bw3dev","date_published":"2024-05-19T04:01:00.257343","attachments":[]},{"id":"2CQTR","url":"https://bw3.dev/articles/2CQTR/state-of-the-blog-address","content_html":"Back in January, I made a post - written as a question/poll - although that aspect of it was just a whim - speculating about what things I might plan on writing about soon.
\nOne of them was "Microblogpub, one year in; likely accompanied by rambling thoughts about a recent Indieweb discussion of the distinction (or lack thereof) between blogs and social media."
\nQuite a mouthful. But also...I made my intro post on December 10, 2022. So when I made that post in January, I was already past a year.
\nI suppose at the time I could have said the four weeks I was offline starting in early September didn't count...but now it's May. So I decided I'd just call it a State of the Blog Address.
\nMy blog's address has not changed states; it is still http://bw3.dev thank you and good night.
\n...Just kidding.
\nGetting ready to write this made me go back and look at when and what I've written about my blog already. That in turn led to some updates to my Site page, and the decision to use #bw3dev for some things, and...I should probably make sure my #Indieweb Wiki user page is up to date soon, too.
\nAnyhow...this article was also the only one from the list about which I got a (belated) comment (via webmention), so there's that.
\nUnfortunately, because of how I rebased my customizations to #Microblogpub, I can't easily tell and remember anymore exactly what I worked on when. I know the commit for "thread rendering improvement" is something I wrote about on 2023-02-21, for example, but after rebasing, the corresponding commit is dated in July.
\nThe only major change I haven't already blogged about is that I found Microblogpub's existing support for custom routes, so I took advantage of that to make a way that I can add plain html files and render them as pages, with or without including a navigation link to them in my header.
\nThat lets me do a couple of things. First, I can have stuff like an About page more detailed than my profile, a License page, and a Site page without them being articles or posts which I then (currently) can't update without mucking directly with the database (and if I do that, I don't think I have a way to federate the updates, either). Editing (and federating the edit, and sending #webmentions if appropriate) is still on my itch list.
\nSecond, at least to a degree, it gives me that way I was looking for to make a post that is publicly visible, but doesn't federate (or appear in my feeds). I can send webmentions manually if I want. It's not a very convenient solution, but it's a solution. And the more I've thought about the circumstances and reasons I might want to do that, the more I've realized that there aren't all that many.
\nSo while I'm on that subject:
\nWhile I wouldn't rule it out completely, for the moment I've tabled the idea of implementing any other way to make non-federating posts.
\nWhat I still may want to implement is a collection of ways to see less of certain things in certain contexts. I think I want to implement some subset or combination of:
\nI'm pretty sure I have already figured out how to do the prune, and I think I might have seen something from the main dev about how the inbox view filter is pretty easy to add, at some point. The drop-immediately may be trickier; I know the software already does that with delete activities from unknown actors, but I think it does that before it has parsed the content and tags, so that might not be the right place to inject custom handling. When and if it becomes enough of a desire that I start working on it, we'll see.
\nThe main other thing I would like, as I mentioned before, is still the ability to edit, including support for appropriate federation and webmentions. It would be nice if that included a way to have a post in draft mode, so I can check the rendering before publishing it for example...but I would probably still work on my drafts elsewhere, as I do now; and I have the option of posting to Mentioned Actors Only so I'm the only one who can see the post, checking the rendering, then deleting and re-posting. And one of the main reasons for editing would have been for rel-syndication links, but...there's nowhere I want to syndicate to.
\nUnfortunately, I'll need to understand the code - and probably the specs - better than I do currently to try to do that myself.
\n...has mostly been Just Fine.
\nI had a bit of an issue back in January with the chirp dot social project. I am not sure whether the issue was that chirp itself sent all of its activity (or at least, a lot of it) to the inbox of every server it knew about, whether anyone on that server was following that "chirp group" or not, or if something else somewhere (either malicious or just broken) was relaying it all to me...because I didn't manage to figure out whether the originating server was part of chirp or not...but I was getting a lot of stuff delivered to my instance that I didn't want to see, wasn't following, and hadn't had boosted to me either. That ended up being the first domain block I put in place for what was, as far as I could tell, a technical reason. Chirp has since shut down. I was disappointed by the problem, because if Chirp had come to my attention some other way and, well, had only hit my inbox with things I followed, then it could potentially have been a nice partial substitute for following hashtags (which doesn't really work all that well on a single-user instance).
\ngup.pe is a similar project I may take a look at, but I'm a little cautious about that because the place I found it mentioned indicated it had even less moderation capability. And I'm also still trying to figure out whether Flipboard can help me out there to some extent.
As an ironic side note, there's an issue on the repository for guppe where someone was seeing excessive lookups for actors on his instance, and it turned out to be due to a combination of two things: first, guppe had a bug wherein if an actor URL had a fragment, it wouldn't be found in the cache and would be requested again every time; and second, the server seeing the problem...was apparently federating all its public content to every guppe inbox it knew existed, whether a guppe group was mentioned or not. So almost the inverse (or is that the converse?) of the problem I had with chirp.
\nI've also been seeing this odd wrinkle where sometimes when I click on the link for what something is in reply to, usually to open something in another tab and come back to it later while I'm reading my stream, I get an error page. This is particularly frustrating because I end up with no convenient way to figure out what I clicked to get there. I haven't dug into this yet. Maybe I'll post more about it when I do.
\nThere have been a few things happening in recent memory between the Indieweb and the Fediverse that I've found kind of interesting due to the way I interact with the two sets of conventions, among other reasons, and that I considered writing about at the time, but...I just kind of didn't have the energy for it then. So instead, I'm going to give some thoughts on them now, mostly from the perspective of how being part of two things also sometimes means being different from both.
\nWhen Bridgy Fed launched support for following RSS feeds as #ActivityPub actors, similar to rss-parrot and some other alternatives, I didn't have to worry too much about whether I wanted my feeds bridged to the Fediverse. I didn't, because...my blog is already an ActivityPub actor; it would be redundant. I was more academically interested in whether there was any good way for Snarfed to recognize when a feed was already from the Fediverse and not create the bridge.
\nI ended up adding #nobridge to my profile regardless, because at least one other bridge developer was considering support for it. I figured it could help prevent extraneous bridges from picking me up, I was in favor of that. I also decided that I wanted to take more direct control of any bridging of my content anyway. This is partly related to the (CC)BY-NC-SA license under which I choose to post my original content, but...that's not something I want to get into in detail right now.
\nWhen Bridgy Fed announced upcoming support for bridging to Bluesky, I also found it reassuring that, unlike people who had been using Bridgy Fed's excellent existing services to give their personal websites a federated presence, I didn't have to worry about collateral damage from overzealous domain blocking.
\nShortly before the Bridgy Fed stuff, there was a similar but smaller furor surrounding the release of version 2.0 of the Wordpress ActivityPub plugin.
\nUnfortunately, part of the announcement was phrased thusly:
\n"When you respond to comments from the fediverse on your blog, they will now be federated."
\nNow, in my opinion, to someone who already understands that the point of the plugin is to let you use your Wordpress site as your personal instance, that reads as meaning "When people make comments on your already federated blog post by replying to it through the Fediverse, and you reply in turn to those already federated comments, your replies will also federate.
\nUnfortunately, if you aren't familiar with what the plugin does, the antecedent of "they" can be unclear enough for it to be read as meaning "When people comment on your blog through the Wordpress comment system, and you reply to those comments, those comments will be federated.
\nWhich is very nearly the opposite of what was actually being described, and got a lot of people in a tizzy until they finally figured out they were talking past each other.
\nThat got me thinking a little bit about the fact that I don't have to worry about managing plugins for my Fediverse presence - although there are pros and cons to that.
\nMoreso, some of the comments about it got me thinking about something else.
\nThe third conversation that came up that I felt was relevant was one around the question of whether blog comments are social media. I think it might even have been prompted by some of the comments about the Wordpress plugin, because one of the things being discussed there was the possibility of people being surprised to see their Fediverse posts appearing on people's blogs, because while it's an expected part of the federated experience for a lot of people that their public posts can be viewed from other instances - possibly without logging in - a lot of blogs don't look like instances, even if they effectively are. Mine, I think, looks relatively "instance-y."
\nUnfortunately I don't really remember a lot of the rest of that conversation I'm talking about. The main pieces I do remember are this article and the one it was in response to. There have also been plenty of Indieweb articles I've looked at in the past about backfeed, surprise, and context collapse.
\nGiven how my blog functions, I guess it's only natural that I'm in the "yes, blogging is social media" camp. But then I thought a little more about whether I felt that way about blogs in general, and whether I always had...and I concluded the answer was yes, as long as there was a comment section at all.
\nAnother thing all these events had in common was bringing to mind the occasional strange feeling of hanging out in the Indieweb community, but having taken a somewhat less common approach from what a lot of folks there have done.
\nThere's quite a bit of presence of folks who use the Wordpress plugins for Indieweb functionality or ActivityPub or both. There are also a lot of Bridgy Fed Users, and users of various Webmention-assisting services, and some folks who use micro.blog (some in addition to all the rest). And there are some folks who roll their own functionality.
But one of the things that's less common about my setup, as I've mentioned before in a few places, is that it is essentially an ActivityPub instance first, that uses microformats and sends Webmentions; moreso than it is an Indieweb blog that also federates. The ActivityPub aspect is prominent, which means it is more natural for me (especially when it comes to conversations and threading, as opposed to just someone replying once) to interact with someone else's federated identity than with their Indieverse website...even if I do put in the effort to direct my reply to both and to elevate the personal domain; and when someone else tries to elevate my Indieweb identity over my federated identity - particularly, when someone posts an Indieweb reply and sends a webmention, but whatever they're using for federation doesn't also make their post an ActivityPub reply to mine - it can break the conversation threading as seen by the Fediverse.
\nI haven't decided yet how much that bothers me. It's definitely at least a little, but it might only be a little.
\n","content_text":"Back in January, I made a [post](https://bw3.dev/o/2BahR) - written as a question/poll - although that aspect of it was just a whim - speculating about what things I might plan on writing about soon.\r\n\r\nOne of them was \"Microblogpub, one year in; likely accompanied by rambling thoughts about a recent Indieweb discussion of the distinction (or lack thereof) between blogs and social media.\"\r\n\r\nQuite a mouthful. But also...I made my intro post on December 10, 2022. So when I made that post in January, I was already past a year.\r\n\r\nI suppose at the time I could have said the four weeks I was offline starting in early September didn't count...but now it's May. So I decided I'd just call it a State of the Blog Address.\r\n\r\nMy blog's address has not changed states; it is still http://bw3.dev thank you and good night.\r\n\r\n---\r\n\r\n...Just kidding.\r\n\r\nGetting ready to write this made me go back and look at when and what I've written about my blog already. That in turn led to some updates to my Site page, and the decision to use #bw3dev for some things, and...I should probably make sure my #Indieweb Wiki user page is up to date soon, too.\r\n\r\nAnyhow...this article was also the only one from the list about which I got a (belated) comment (via webmention), so there's that.\r\n\r\n## The technical side\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, because of how I rebased my [customizations](https://github.com/3b0b/microblog.pub/commits/custom/content/) to #Microblogpub, I can't easily tell and remember anymore exactly what I worked on when. I know the commit for \"thread rendering improvement\" is something I wrote about on 2023-02-21, for example, but after rebasing, the corresponding commit is dated in July.\r\n\r\nThe only major change I haven't already blogged about is that I found Microblogpub's existing support for custom routes, so I took advantage of that to make a way that I can add plain html files and render them as pages, with or without including a navigation link to them in my header.\r\n\r\nThat lets me do a couple of things. First, I can have stuff like an About page more detailed than my profile, a License page, and a Site page without them being articles or posts which I then (currently) can't update without mucking directly with the database (and if I do that, I don't think I have a way to federate the updates, either). Editing (and federating the edit, and sending #webmentions if appropriate) is still on my itch list.\r\n\r\nSecond, at least to a degree, it gives me that way I was looking for to make a post that is publicly visible, but doesn't federate (or appear in my feeds). I can send webmentions manually if I want. It's not a very convenient solution, but it's a solution. And the more I've thought about the circumstances and reasons I might want to do that, the more I've realized that there aren't all that many.\r\n\r\nSo while I'm on that subject:\r\n\r\n## Future Enhancement Considerations\r\n\r\nWhile I wouldn't rule it out completely, for the moment I've tabled the idea of implementing any other way to make non-federating posts.\r\n\r\nWhat I still may want to implement is a collection of ways to see less of certain things in certain contexts. I think I want to implement some subset or combination of:\r\n\r\n* Additional filter support for my stream and inbox, so that I can filter out activities by hashtags or other content details...similar to filters that can be done on other instances, but possibly with the ability to toggle them on and off. One use case: Hiding live-toots about an ongoing conference so that I can catch up on what the rest of the folks I follow are doing.\r\n* A filter that just drops the activity without ever storing it locally. One use case: maybe I just don't even want to store posts about hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, even if I could hide them from myself.\r\n* The ability to configure filters that, if matched, apply a different *retention* policy when I run the pruning task. One use case: I might follow a weather forecast bot and not want to bother keeping its posts longer than a week.\r\n\r\nI'm pretty sure I have already figured out how to do the prune, and I think I might have seen something from the main dev about how the inbox view filter is pretty easy to add, at some point. The drop-immediately may be trickier; I know the software already does that with delete activities from unknown actors, but I think it does that before it has parsed the content and tags, so that might not be the right place to inject custom handling. When and if it becomes enough of a desire that I start working on it, we'll see.\r\n\r\nThe main other thing I would like, as I mentioned before, is still the ability to edit, including support for appropriate federation and webmentions. It would be nice if that included a way to have a post in draft mode, so I can check the rendering before publishing it for example...but I would probably still work on my drafts elsewhere, as I do now; and I have the option of posting to Mentioned Actors Only so I'm the only one who can see the post, checking the rendering, then deleting and re-posting. And one of the main reasons for editing would have been for rel-syndication links, but...there's nowhere I want to syndicate to.\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, I'll need to understand the code - and probably the specs - better than I do currently to try to do that myself.\r\n\r\n## The Experience as a User\r\n\r\n...has mostly been Just Fine.\r\n\r\nI had a *bit* of an issue back in January with the chirp dot social project. I am not sure whether the issue was that chirp itself sent *all* of its activity (or at least, a lot of it) to the inbox of every server it knew about, whether anyone on that server was following that \"chirp group\" or not, or if something else somewhere (either malicious or just broken) was relaying it all to me...because I didn't manage to figure out whether the originating server was part of chirp or not...but I was getting a lot of stuff delivered to my instance that I didn't want to see, wasn't following, and hadn't had boosted to me either. That ended up being the first domain block I put in place for what was, as far as I could tell, a technical reason. Chirp has since shut down. I was disappointed by the problem, because if Chirp had come to my attention some other way and, well, had only hit my inbox with things I followed, then it could potentially have been a nice partial substitute for following hashtags (which doesn't really work all that well on a single-user instance).\r\n\r\n`gup.pe` is a similar project I may take a look at, but I'm a little cautious about that because the place I found it mentioned indicated it had even less moderation capability. And I'm also still trying to figure out whether Flipboard can help me out there to some extent.\r\n\r\nAs an ironic side note, there's an issue on the repository for guppe where someone was seeing excessive lookups for actors on his instance, and it turned out to be due to a combination of two things: first, guppe had a bug wherein if an actor URL had a fragment, it wouldn't be found in the cache and would be requested again every time; and second, the server seeing the problem...was apparently federating all its public content to every guppe inbox it knew existed, whether a guppe group was mentioned or not. So almost the inverse (or is that the converse?) of the problem I had with chirp.\r\n\r\nI've also been seeing this odd wrinkle where sometimes when I click on the link for what something is in reply to, usually to open something in another tab and come back to it later while I'm reading my stream, I get an error page. This is particularly frustrating because I end up with no convenient way to figure out what I clicked to get there. I haven't dug into this yet. Maybe I'll post more about it when I do.\r\n\r\n## The Experience, Part II: A sense of belonging, or not\r\n\r\nThere have been a few things happening in recent memory between the Indieweb and the Fediverse that I've found kind of interesting due to the *way* I interact with the two sets of conventions, among other reasons, and that I considered writing about at the time, but...I just kind of didn't have the energy for it then. So instead, I'm going to give some thoughts on them now, mostly from the perspective of how being *part* of two things also sometimes means being *different* from both.\r\n\r\n### Bridgy Fed\r\n\r\nWhen Bridgy Fed launched support for following RSS feeds as #ActivityPub actors, similar to rss-parrot and some other alternatives, I didn't have to worry too much about whether I wanted my feeds bridged to the Fediverse. I didn't, because...my blog is already an ActivityPub actor; it would be redundant. I was more academically interested in whether there was any good way for Snarfed to recognize when a feed was already from the Fediverse and not create the bridge.\r\n\r\nI ended up adding #nobridge to my profile regardless, because at least one other bridge developer was considering support for it. I figured it could help prevent extraneous bridges from picking me up, I was in favor of that. I also decided that I wanted to take more direct control of any bridging of my content anyway. This is partly related to the (CC)BY-NC-SA license under which I choose to post my original content, but...that's not something I want to get into in detail right now.\r\n\r\nWhen Bridgy Fed announced upcoming support for bridging to Bluesky, I also found it reassuring that, unlike people who had been using Bridgy Fed's excellent existing services to give their personal websites a federated presence, *I* didn't have to worry about collateral damage from overzealous domain blocking.\r\n\r\n### Wordpress Activity Plugin 2.0\r\n\r\nShortly before the Bridgy Fed stuff, there was a similar but smaller furor surrounding the release of version 2.0 of the Wordpress ActivityPub plugin.\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, part of the announcement was phrased thusly:\r\n\r\n\"When you respond to comments from the fediverse on your blog, they will now be federated.\"\r\n\r\nNow, in my opinion, to someone who already understands that the *point* of the plugin is to let you use your Wordpress site as your personal instance, that reads as meaning \"When people make comments on your *already federated* blog post by replying to it through the Fediverse, and you reply in turn to those *already federated* comments, *your replies* will also federate.\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, if you aren't familiar with what the plugin does, the antecedent of \"they\" can be unclear enough for it to be read as meaning \"When people comment on your blog through the Wordpress comment system, and you reply to those comments, *those comments* will be federated.\r\n\r\nWhich is very nearly the *opposite* of what was actually being described, and got a lot of people in a tizzy until they finally figured out they were talking past each other.\r\n\r\nThat got me thinking a little bit about the fact that I don't have to worry about managing plugins for my Fediverse presence - although there are pros and cons to that.\r\n\r\nMoreso, some of the comments about it got me thinking about something else.\r\n\r\n### Is blogging social media?\r\n\r\nThe third conversation that came up that I felt was relevant was one around the question of whether blog comments are social media. I think it might even have been prompted by some of the comments about the Wordpress plugin, because one of the things being discussed there was the possibility of people being surprised to see their Fediverse posts appearing on people's blogs, because while it's an expected part of the federated experience for a lot of people that their public posts can be viewed from other instances - possibly without logging in - a lot of blogs don't *look* like instances, even if they effectively are. Mine, I think, looks relatively \"instance-y.\"\r\n\r\nUnfortunately I don't really remember a lot of the rest of that conversation I'm talking about. The main pieces I do remember are [this](https://starrwulfe.xyz/2024/01/whats-the-difference-between-a-blog-and-a-social-posting-site/) article and the one it was in response to. There have also been plenty of Indieweb articles I've looked at in the past about backfeed, surprise, and context collapse.\r\n\r\nGiven how my blog functions, I guess it's only natural that I'm in the \"yes, blogging is social media\" camp. But then I thought a little more about whether I felt that way about *blogs in general*, and whether I always had...and I concluded the answer was yes, as long as there was a comment section at all.\r\n\r\nAnother thing all these events had in common was bringing to mind the occasional strange feeling of hanging out in the Indieweb community, but having taken a somewhat less common approach from what a lot of folks there have done.\r\n\r\nThere's quite a bit of presence of folks who use the Wordpress plugins for Indieweb functionality or ActivityPub or both. There are also a lot of Bridgy Fed Users, and users of various Webmention-assisting services, and some folks who use `micro.blog` (some in *addition* to all the rest). And there are some folks who roll their own functionality.\r\n\r\nBut one of the things that's less common about my setup, as I've mentioned before in a few places, is that it is essentially an ActivityPub instance *first*, that uses microformats and sends Webmentions; moreso than it is an Indieweb blog that also federates. The ActivityPub aspect is *prominent*, which means it is *more natural* for me (especially when it comes to conversations and threading, as opposed to just someone replying once) to interact with someone else's federated identity than with their Indieverse website...even if I do put in the effort to direct my [reply](https://bw3.dev/o/29Dfx) to both and to elevate the personal domain; and when someone else tries to elevate my Indieweb identity over my federated identity - particularly, when someone posts an Indieweb reply and sends a webmention, but whatever they're using for federation doesn't also make their post an ActivityPub reply to mine - it can break the conversation threading as seen by the Fediverse.\r\n\r\nI haven't decided yet how much that bothers me. It's definitely at least a little, but it might only be a little.","date_published":"2024-05-18T03:25:24.416379","attachments":[]},{"id":"2CQ50","url":"https://bw3.dev/o/2CQ50","content_html":"@colinstu@birdbutt.com @deviantollam@defcon.social ...And now I realize that's what you were talking about in the first place (albeit different features of said third party fix).
\n","content_text":"@colinstu@birdbutt.com @deviantollam@defcon.social ...And now I realize that's what you were talking about in the first place (albeit different features of said third party fix).","date_published":"2024-05-17T05:00:51.301430","attachments":[]},{"id":"2CQ4z","url":"https://bw3.dev/o/2CQ4z","content_html":"@colinstu@birdbutt.com @deviantollam@defcon.social Shoot, MS doesn't care if they break their OWN stuff. You need a third-party bugfix in Windows 11 just to turn the taskbar back to vertical like it belongs.
\n","content_text":"@colinstu@birdbutt.com @deviantollam@defcon.social Shoot, MS doesn't care if they break their OWN stuff. You need a third-party bugfix in Windows 11 just to turn the taskbar back to vertical like it belongs.","date_published":"2024-05-17T04:59:25.197534","attachments":[]},{"id":"2CFG7","url":"https://bw3.dev/articles/2CFG7/what-my-ideal-pants-would-be-like-and-how-the-pandemic-shaped-this-ideal","content_html":"First of all, the obvious: my ideal pants should fit me comfortably. At the moment I have several pairs of pants I probably ought to get altered, because I prefer wearing thin-soled, zero-drop, wide-toe-box shoes...which make the fact that most pants that fit around me tend to come with a slightly-too-long leg even more of an issue than it was when I habitually wore thicker and thicker-soled shoes that would help keep the pant hem from hanging all the way to the floor.
\nThey also need to be pretty durable. I had some convertible pants from LL Bean that I absolutely loved until unfortunately I discovered that the stress put on them by riding my bicycle to work basically tended to cause either a seam blowout or a wear-stress failure in the seat. They even felt like pretty tough fabric and fit me with room to move, but...well, the mechanics of my preponderous posterior on a bicycle seat were apparently beyond their capacity.
\nBut the part that has to do with the pandemic is the pockets. Although...it didn't start with the pandemic.
\nI suppose it really started with my first cell phone. To sum up a couple decades of habits...
\nI started carrying a cell phone circa 1999, when they were bigger than I felt was practical to carry in a pocket. (Look up the Motorola i88s, if you want a reference.) So I carried it on my belt. Eventually (by which I mean a decade or so later), a reference somewhere - it might have been an ad for a minimalist wallet - to people allegedly having spine alignment problems due to sitting on thick wallets got me contemplating the possibility of carrying my wallet on my belt. This led to replacing my wallet, phone holster, and multi-tool pouch with a Maxpedition Triad admin pouch for several years, and it gradually accumulated more and more stuff...but also kind of got more and more in my way.
\nThen came the pandemic...and I found that one thing I couldn't conveniently fit in my Maxpedition pouch was a mask.
\nAt one point, because the guidance being published seemed to suggest it was sufficient and it was definitely getting a better fit than anything else I'd tried, my mask of choice was a combination of things that resulted in at least three layers of different kinds of fabric and what seemed to me to be a better face seal than I was getting with any other sorts. That was the only kind I ever found that seemed to fit my face well and could be carried in a regular pocket without deforming problematically. So when the guidance on what kind of mask to use made me feel I needed to move on from that, I started looking for pants that I thought I could carry a mask comfortably in. And pretty much every kind of pants and shorts I've bought since has had that as a criterion. I have a lot more cargo pants than I used to.
\nSo where has that left me when it comes to my ideal pants?
\nWell. Basically, from the crotch up - and, comes to that, at the ankles - I want LA Police Gear Terrain Flex Tactical Jeans.
\nThese have the usual pockets one would expect from jeans - back pockets, front pockets, watch pocket...except there are watch pockets on both sides. They also have an extra pair of pockets on the hips - sized for rifle magazines, apparently; for my purposes, one usually holds the minimalist wallet I use these days, and what goes in the other varies a lot. There's also this tiny pocket in the rear belt loop that's supposed to fit a handcuff key. So far I've never used it. I don't think I could ever put something there that would be a problem if it got laundered, because I absolutely would forget about it.
\nThe one problem with these jeans is that after I stopped using the three-cloth-layers mask, they don't really have a very good mask pocket. I can sort of cram a Resonance 95 mask (the preference I eventually settled on) into one of those extra side-hip pockets or in a front pocket, but it always feels like it might mess up the mask structure a little to do that.
\nSo what I would like added to those jeans would be either the leg pockets of the (unfortunately discontinued) Amazon Goodthreads Carpenter Pant, or the Bocomal Fire Resistant Cargo Utility Jeans, or possibly a pocket similar to that of a Unionbay Survivor IV Cargo Pant - although I think the little mini-pocket on the front might be hard to do in denim. If I could get all three varieties, I would.
\nAnd then, for extra credit...take that result, shift the down-leg pockets a little higher if necessary, make them in a more cargo-pant-style fabric instead of denim, and add zip-off legs.
\n","content_text":"First of all, the obvious: my ideal pants should fit me comfortably. At the moment I have several pairs of pants I probably ought to get altered, because I prefer wearing thin-soled, zero-drop, wide-toe-box shoes...which make the fact that most pants that fit *around* me tend to come with a slightly-too-long leg even more of an issue than it was when I habitually wore thicker and thicker-soled shoes that would help keep the pant hem from hanging all the way to the floor.\r\n\r\nThey also need to be pretty durable. I had some convertible pants from LL Bean that I absolutely loved until unfortunately I discovered that the stress put on them by riding my bicycle to work basically tended to cause either a seam blowout or a wear-stress failure in the seat. They even felt like pretty tough fabric and fit me with room to move, but...well, the mechanics of my preponderous posterior on a bicycle seat were apparently beyond their capacity.\r\n\r\nBut the part that has to do with the pandemic is the pockets. Although...it didn't start with the pandemic.\r\n\r\nI suppose it really started with my first cell phone. To sum up a couple decades of habits...\r\n\r\nI started carrying a cell phone circa 1999, when they were bigger than I felt was practical to carry in a pocket. (Look up the Motorola i88s, if you want a reference.) So I carried it on my belt. Eventually (by which I mean a decade or so later), a reference somewhere - it might have been an ad for a minimalist wallet - to people allegedly having spine alignment problems due to sitting on thick wallets got me contemplating the possibility of carrying my wallet on my belt. This led to replacing my wallet, phone holster, and multi-tool pouch with a Maxpedition Triad admin pouch for several years, and it gradually accumulated more and more stuff...but also kind of got more and more in my way.\r\n\r\nThen came the pandemic...and I found that one thing I couldn't conveniently fit in my Maxpedition pouch was a mask.\r\n\r\nAt one point, because the guidance being published seemed to suggest it was sufficient and it was definitely getting a better fit than anything else I'd tried, my mask of choice was a combination of things that resulted in at least three layers of different kinds of fabric and what seemed to me to be a better face seal than I was getting with any other sorts. That was the only kind I ever found that seemed to fit my face well and could be carried in a regular pocket without deforming problematically. So when the guidance on what kind of mask to use made me feel I needed to move on from that, I started looking for pants that I thought I could carry a mask comfortably in. And pretty much every kind of pants and shorts I've bought since has had that as a criterion. I have a lot more cargo pants than I used to.\r\n\r\nSo where has that left me when it comes to my *ideal* pants?\r\n\r\nWell. Basically, from the crotch up - and, comes to that, at the ankles - I want LA Police Gear Terrain Flex Tactical Jeans.\r\n\r\nThese have the usual pockets one would expect from jeans - back pockets, front pockets, watch pocket...except there are watch pockets on both sides. They also have an extra pair of pockets on the hips - sized for rifle magazines, apparently; for my purposes, one usually holds the minimalist wallet I use these days, and what goes in the other varies a lot. There's also this tiny pocket in the rear belt loop that's supposed to fit a handcuff key. So far I've never used it. I don't think I could ever put something there that would be a problem if it got laundered, because I absolutely would forget about it.\r\n\r\nThe one problem with these jeans is that after I stopped using the three-cloth-layers mask, they don't really have a very good mask pocket. I can sort of cram a Resonance 95 mask (the preference I eventually settled on) into one of those extra side-hip pockets or in a front pocket, but it always feels like it might mess up the mask structure a little to do that.\r\n\r\nSo what I would like added to those jeans would be either the leg pockets of the (unfortunately discontinued) Amazon Goodthreads Carpenter Pant, or the Bocomal Fire Resistant Cargo Utility Jeans, or possibly a pocket similar to that of a Unionbay Survivor IV Cargo Pant - although I think the little mini-pocket on the front might be hard to do in denim. If I could get all three varieties, I would.\r\n\r\nAnd then, for extra credit...take that result, shift the down-leg pockets a little higher if necessary, make them in a more cargo-pant-style fabric instead of denim, and add zip-off legs.","date_published":"2024-04-25T04:07:21.971542","attachments":[]}]}