One of the things I missed moving from WordPress to Hugo: scheduled posts. WP just… does that. Set a future date, and forget about it.

And static site generators don’t… The site only rebuilds when you git push, and that’s it. 😢

Why schedule posts, you ask? Because at times I write 3-4 posts in a day, and I don’t want to spam. ¯\(ツ)/¯ I have a rule that there should only be a single published post a day, and if I know I’m out of topics (especially for FlatTurtle) I tend to add a week or 2 between posts to spread it out evenly.

So I wrote (aka vibe coded) a little thing about a year or two ago, originally called BlogTurtle Rebuilder, because it was meant for FlatTurtle’s hugo blog. I’ve since repurposed it for this site.

The flow is quite simple:

1. I push a Markdown post to GitLab with date = "..." set to whenever I want it published.
2. Gitlab runs CI and deploys to Cloudflare Pages. Hugo will, however, hide posts with a date in the future.
3. On push, GitLab also pings a webhook (a docker container on a server).
4. Said container does a git pull and scans every .md for that date field.
5. Anything in the future gets an in-memory timer for that exact moment. Anything already due gets ignored at Gitlab CI would’ve deployed it.
6. When the timer pops, it triggers the GitLab CI/CD pipeline (through another webhook) that does a new Hugo build + deploy.
7. As an added bonus, I get an email telling me the post is live, with a Things3 deep-link to add a follow-up task to share it somewhere. It’s one click away.

That’s the whole thing.

Can’t believe it’s been so many years… But the time has come to say farewell to WordPress.

It’s been on my mind for years, but never really put in the effort to export so many years worth of posts, media, etc to a better solution… It felt like a Herculean job and everytime I thought about it for more than 3 minutes, I dreaded the idea.

But since the future’s (finally) here, thanks to AI, I was able to export it all without fiddling with broken or paid addons and get everything in Hugo within a few hours worth of work. The site lives (for now) on Cloudflare, with the media in R2. The deploy via Gitlab-ci is (or should, let’s find out after this post 🥲) be fully automated and media should sync up in R2.

There’s not a single reason I was fed up with WordPress, it was a mix of drama, the potential security issues (althought it was all running in containers, but still), the fact WP felt slower and slower (with a lot of bloatware), but also really because I started to hate the editor. It was bulky and annoying and a real pain to deal with lately.

I’ve been running Hugo for 2-3 years now at FlatTurtle, and started to love the simplicity and speed. So that’s what I went with.

Nothing more to say about it … -.-)

Started looking into a service to auto-post from this blog onto my Mastodon feed. Feed2Toot fit the bill perfectly.

I wanted to run the whole thing from a Docker container, though, so I'll quickly write a how-to.

This whole thing runs from a Raspberry Pi, as root. No k8s or k3s for me. The path I use is /root/git/feed2toot/, so be sure to modify that to whatever you're using.

First off, get your credentials for the app. You can either install the Feed2Toot package on a system (i.e. throwaway VM, to keep it clean), or use the Docker container below, but add RUN apk add bash and change the last line to CMD ["bash"] and then chroot into it via docker exec -it feed2toot bash.

This will generate two files (feed2toot_clientcred.txt and feed2toot_usercred.txt). Be sure to save these.

You can also try to run Feed2Toot at least once to make sure it's working and to fine-tune your ini file. This is mine:

[mastodon]
instance_url=https://m.superuser.one
; Here you need the two files created by register_feed2toot_app
user_credentials=/etc/feed2toot/feed2toot_usercred.txt
client_credentials=/etc/feed2toot/feed2toot_clientcred.txt
; Default visibility is public, but you can override it:
; toot_visibility=unlisted

[cache]
cachefile=/feed2toot/feed2toot.db
cache_limit=10000

[lock]
lock_file=/var/lock/feed2toot.lock
lock_timeout=3600

[rss]
uri=https://yeri.be/feed
; uri_list=/feed2toot/rsslist.txt
toot={title} {link}
; toot_max_len=500
title_pattern=Open Source
title_pattern_case_sensitive=true
no_uri_pattern_no_global_pattern=true
; ignore_ssl=false

[hashtaglist]
; several_words_hashtags_list=/feed2toot/hashtags.txt
; no_tags_in_toot=false

[feedparser]
; accept_bozo_exceptions=true

[media]
; custom=/var/lib/feed2toot/media/logo.png

I have three other files to make this work, first off Dockerfile:

FROM python:3.6-alpine
RUN pip3 install feed2toot && mkdir -p /etc/feed2toot/
COPY feed2toot.ini feed2toot_clientcred.txt feed2toot_usercred.txt /etc/feed2toot/
VOLUME /feed2toot/
CMD ["feed2toot", "-c", "/etc/feed2toot/feed2toot.ini"]

The script I run to build the container (start.sh):

#!/bin/bash
git pull

BASEIMAGE=`cat Dockerfile | grep FROM | awk '{print $2}'`
docker pull $BASEIMAGE
docker stop feed2toot
docker rm feed2toot
docker build -t feed2toot .
./run.sh

And finally, the script to run the container every so often (run.sh):

#!/bin/bash
docker run -d --rm -v /srv/mastodon/feed2toot/:/feed2toot/ --name feed2toot feed2toot

This will save the database file under /srv/mastodon/, to preserve states across rebuilds.

Note that once Feed2Toot runs, it'll exit, and the container will be stopped. So it does not automatically run all the time.

So, you'll want to run this every so often. You can add a file to /etc/cron.d/ to run it, for example, every six hours:

#
# cron-jobs for feed2toot
#

MAILTO=root

0 */6 * * *		root	if [ -x /root/git/feed2toot/run.sh ]; then /root/git/feed2toot/run.sh >/dev/null; fi

That's it. Should do the trick. It'll now post stuff from your RSS feed onto your timeline.

Oh, and Jeroen has a good post about Mastodon.

Around 1895, whilst investigating the case of a group of musicians who had died after eating cooked ham, a Belgian scientist called Emile van Ermengem identified the bacteria at the heart of Kerber’s sausage poisonings, a disease that had been coined Botulism, after bolutus, the Latin for sausage. Later work showed that these bacteria, which Van Ermengem named Clostridium Botulinum, would only grow under certain conditions. The inside of a piece of badly stored, processed meat was ideal, but when conditions changed, the bacteria would shut down, forming highly resistant spores and remaining in that form until conditions were right again for growth.

A few years later, scientists discovered something even more remarkable. The spores that produce these deadly bacteria were almost everywhere. They were found in the soil, on the surface of vegetables, in animal faeces and within riverbeds. They could survive being boiled, being frozen, and cope with highly acidic environments. Thankfully, these spores were also harmless, passing through humans unchanged if ingested. But under the correct conditions, they would turn back into bacteria, producing a deadly neurotoxin. If this toxin was ingested, even in the tiniest quantities imaginable, it would produce a slow paralysis moving down the body, eventually shutting down vital processes like breathing. For anyone unlucky enough to consume it, the survival rate was around 60%.

[...]

It is perhaps strange that such a rare poisoning event shapes our modern food system so profoundly, but this is perhaps because the toxin produced is one of, if not the, deadliest on earth. It has been estimated that in its pure crystalline form, six grams of botulism toxin, about one teaspoon full, would be enough to kill 200 million people. The lethal dose when consumed orally is around 30 billionths of a gram, which if you want a relatable comparison, is about the same as if you cut a single poppy seed into ten thousand equal pieces and ate one of them. It is an amount so tiny, it really doesn’t make sense.

[...]

The rapid, long-lasting and highly noticeable cosmetic effects made Botox a near instant success. In small doses, the same nerve damage that causes fatal paralysis in poisoning cases, helps to remove forehead creases and crow’s feet, with the only side effects being an inability to express emotion using your face, and an occasional case of drooping eyelids. A distinctive wrinkle-free and slightly startled look became fashionable among the Hollywood A-List, and eventually across the world. It is of course deeply ironic that many celebrities who publicly advocated a clean living, chemical-free lifestyle, were also early adopters of a treatment that involves injecting the deadliest substance on earth into your face (looking at you, Paltrow). If any of them were surprised at this seeming paradox, they certainly didn’t show it.

[...]

[I]t is likely that the pure crystalline form of Botulinum toxin is now also the most valuable, with an estimated street value of $100 trillion per kilogram. The entire global face paralysing industry is supported by an annual production of just a few milligrams.

Source.

Never linked Botulinum and Botox to one another. Wow.

Shameless plug to get Google to index the website faster. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was playing around with the idea to up the marketing and social media stuff for Shan (WFH is taking its toll -- I was bored, always doing the same, saw Shan struggle to do both creative and marketing work, and I had plenty of brainjuice left -- and in all fairness I was probably getting a bit frustrated and going "why don't you just ...". So yeah, decided to actually help out and experiment some).

Since medio April I have been running most of the social media accounts, having content scheduled using Hootsuite, increasing followers, etc.

I did some of this before, but it was mostly some random paid advertisement without a real strategy that didn't lead to anything very substantial. The ROI wasn't really there and was mostly just a gamble -- so far we've had more leads from organic growth than from paid ads on Google or Facebook/Instagram. Soooooo something must be wrong there...?!

Another thing that was missing to make her more prominent as SME (subject matter expert) was to have all the knowledge and experience she has more publicly available; ie give some away for free (and help those that wouldn't hire the services anyway), and then provide enough of a teaser to reel in customers that want more and have budget. The blog will also hold some reviews, plug some contractors and suppliers (create a bit of a win-win situation and platform), etc.

So yeah -- I suddenly had this epiphany to set up a blog (using Medium -- and I may have been late to the party, but I've been watching and wanted to get to know more about the platform -- and so far Medium actually has quite some interesting articles).

Got some interviews going with clients, show casing some projects (the portfolio is nice, but doesn't have a lot of written content) have some posts about what's going on in Shan's mind (those are the ones that take time as Shan needs to sit down and actually give me content) and even wrote about our house. :)

So let's see how that works out -- but so far it's been worth it.