SUBTERFUGUE DEVELOPMENT

My first project for Subterfugue was writing a framework to develop it within. I settled on rolling my own static site builder from scratch. It is also an ongoing work in progress that I am using in production. And since I rolled my own, I am able to design it to my needs as I figure out what I want, and as you would expect from such a process I discover new bugs of my own making, daily. Latest problems to solve: - changes to child don't trigger recompile of parent - needs 2 builds to gen all lists Following along at home?

Aaron Parr / Subterfugue Base · GitLab

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I saw this:

Eleventy, a simpler static site generator

Eleventy, a simpler static site generator.

That's Eleventy, another static site generator, and similar to what I am working on here. Eleventy does many things the way I like them done, and it is far more developed than what I am working on. For a moment I questioned my life choices. Why then am I "rolling my own"? Because fucking around and finding out is a valid life choice.

Fixed the two bugs with

Aaron Parr / Subterfugue Base · GitLab

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The solution was to collect data first, then after all the data was collected, compile web pages from it.

Implemented two new features today. - A 'Publish List' for a piece of text, identifies other pages to feature the text. (eg. Texts in the library have their own pages, and are also on both the Library page, and in 'Latest'). - A 'Digest List' for an index page identifying other lists to copy and repurpose (The Home page digests all content and shows the most recent item)

We persuaded our librarian to install a card catalog. So far it is rudimentary, but so is our collection.

Subterfugue Library

Stuff to read.

New features: - more dynamic templates which enabled me to cut down on clientside javascript. I created some helpers for handlebars templates which test conditions. - cards for posted links like you see in social media. pushed upstream:

Aaron Parr / Subterfugue Base · GitLab

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I restored the YouTube embeds with two work arounds. 1. lazy load their content 2. obscure the embed behind a screenshot You now have to wait a bit for the video to buffer. But whatever YouTube's scripts are doing, they don't execute until you click on the Image of the video.

After months of rejection, we finally gave up on trying to acquire Koons' balloon animals for free (to smash into shards for a glass wall mosaic of course), and put up some of our own pictures in the gallery instead.

Subterfugue Gallery

Stuff to look at.

The Auditorium Subterfuguem now has a jukebox. Unfortunately you do have to click play for each track rather than just let them go in the background. I have not figured out how to directly tap into YouTube's or SoundCloud's audio streams. I suspect they lock that down anyway so for now you'll just have to play one track at a time.

Subterfugue's Tunes

Bending your ear like the arc of justice.

Today I discovered YouTube's API for embeds:

YouTube Player API Reference for iframe Embeds

Embed a YouTube player in your application.

So (1) I should be able to get full playlists to queue for playback in the Auditorium, (2) but the intention is to play videos from any source, rather than just YouTube. (3) I have to think through how to implement this with Soundcloud and others. What about small websites which host their own and don't have an API? This will take a minute.

The Auditorium's playlists now play from one song to the next without interruption. A playlist can include tracks from both SoundCloud and YouTube. This took longer than I expected because I had forgotten to setup SSL certs locally for serving on my dev machine and didn't immediately realize this was the source of bugs I was seeing. My favorite playlist so far is

Holy Room - Somi

Quiet ecstasy. Dulcet tones. A deep breath. Peace.

My goal is to "federate" this website via activity-pub, meaning that I want Mastodon users to be able to subscribe to my content, respond to posts etc... Since the site is static, I created an application on the server which responds to particular requests following the activity-pub protocol. Step one, responding to webfinger requests, is complete. This site is now searchable on some Mastodon instances. Next up is handling follow requests.

I ported my site generating code to a command line tool called Site Builder. I should have done this from the beginning.

Aaron Parr / Site Builder · GitLab

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Subterfugue is immune to this: But I am annoyed. So I escalated my server admin beyond robots.txt and fail2ban and now I give these assholes the ol 444.

I worked out a method for archiving parts of the site without deleting the content and it works well. So I decided to remove the Auditorium. I also removed my old writing, and most of the social media posts. I should be focusing on creating new work - writing, music, painting - and being selective about what I share. I treated this too much like social media and got distracted.

I wrote a tool for scraping metadata for IP addresses from the whois database. I wanted to find all the IP addresses for Azure, AWS, and Google-Cloud.

Aaron Parr / IP Scraper · GitLab

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I pulled the site offline in April to save money. Yesterday I learned about Cloudflare's free plan. So as of this morning, Subterfugue is back online. Next step, probably, is to remake the website, but this will do for now.

I restored the Auditorium Subterfuguem. I enjoyed sharing music and making playlists last year. So here it is for a bit. But this is just fussing. I need to make a decision about whether this website is going to continue to just be a toy I am playing with or if I'll use it for an actual purpose.