stuff&things

Some Updates (and Fixes) to my Site

Some time ago, in the midst of all of the fires burning around us, I decided to make some changes to my site. Some of this was born to move it from GitHub, which I did via Codeberg then via a Forgejo instance hosted by Adam via OMG.lol (definitely worth checking out).

I was deploying the site to Codeberg Pages prior to that, which you can find some more info about in this post. But never to be satisfied, in the move to Forgejo, I had to find a new deployment avenue and decided that would be Bunny CDN. And I had it sort of working for a day. Then, after a minor redesign (or reverting a new design back to my old design), realized something wasn’t working. Locally, in my repo, and Bunny storage all of the files for the new design were there but the site live on the interwebs was still showing the old design. I couldn’t figure that out. With some help by John, it was discovered my deploy.yml file was a little, well, wrong. Or overcomplicated? Or wrong.

The big streamlined fixes are in the bottom of this code in the section Deploy to Bunny CDN:

name: Deploy 11ty Site to Bunny CDN

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  workflow_dispatch:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 */4 * * *'

jobs:
  build-and-deploy:
    runs-on: docker
    container:
      image: node:20-bookworm
    
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: npm install
      
      - name: Build 11ty site
        env:
          WEBMENTION_TOKEN: $
          MASTODON_INSTANCE: $
          MASTODON_USERNAME: $
        run: npm run build
      
      - name: Deploy to Bunny CDN
        uses: https://source.tube/jasonm/bunnycdn-storage-deploy@v2.4.0
        with:
          source: "dist"
          destination: "/"
          storageZoneName: "$"
          storagePassword: "$"
          storageEndpoint: "$"
          accessKey: "$"
          pullZoneId: "$"
          upload: "true"
          remove: "true"
          purgePullZone: "true"

That updated file is about 30 lines shorter than the previous iteration and far less complicated. And guess what? It. Just. Works.

But I made some other changes in the meantime. I have a Social link on the site. The previous .js file that feeds it used to have the instance and my username hardcoded into it. Not in and of itself a major issue, especially if you follow me on the Fediverse, but to make it a little secret(?) I created environment variables. And that worked great!

But I noticed, while trying to fix the Bunny deployment issues, that the Social link was showing sporadically. I didn’t realize at the time that the sporadic nature was because the deployment wasn’t purging the cache of the old files and so was retaining the Social link at times. But THAT was actually wrong! It shouldn’t have been showing it at all. When I created the environment variables for the instance and username, I never added them to the deploy.yml file. So they were always going to error out. I just hadn’t realized it because the whole site was not deploying correctly. After John’s help, I figured that last piece out.

And, finally, last night I added a JSON feed to the site and, in fact, that’s what’s now linked at the Feed link. This was really to help add options to the EchoFeed echo that posts to Mastodon when I post to this. (I didn’t remove the Atom feed so that anyone who was subscribed to that wouldn’t need to change anything.)

Ok, P.S.? I really finally lastly changed my authentican for Webmentions to email rather than GitHub (or TwiXtter). Yes I need to get sent a code now via email, but I think that was the last component that had me tied to GitHub (since I long ago moved my Tailscale account from authenticating via GitHub to Apple authentication via Hide My Email … something to be revisited on another day).

Anyway, yes, things are awful out there and I think a lot about what’s happening in Minneapolis, Chicago, LA, LV, and across the country. It keeps me up at night. It’s affected my appetite and mood. It has galvanized parts of me that haven’t been awakened since my early 20s. The lack of sleep is what’s “freed” up the time to make these changes talked about here and is probably also why I broke some of them in the process. But there are far better people in the Fediverse, reporting via some non-major news outlets, and out on the streets doing the work than me and you should find them and read and listen to them if you’re not already. We must – and will – overcome what’s happening but it will take all of us who care to do so. And there are all levels of engagement in doing that. But take care of yourself as well as best you can.

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photo of the author of one of the webmentions for this page

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