Fixing RSS

Blue and red linked paper clips with one link broken
Fixing broken links in my RSS feed

One of the unintended effects of automating the posting of blog post links to Mastodon has led to the fix of a long standing issue I had with my RSS feed. As seems to be a recurring theme with running this blog, the fix was very simple, taught me more about the way Hugo works, and has delivered other benefits too.

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Publishing New Posts to Mastodon

A clipboard with a bullet list of tasks to publish a blog post next to a MacBook
Automation can help reduce the friction when publishing a new post

An thought struck me when browsing Mastodon yesterday - how can I automate the posting of a link to my new blog posts on my Mastodon account? While this took me on something of a journey to find what options exist, the actual solution I landed upon is very straightforward.

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Goodbye Friend

A cinema light box showing the words "Goodbye Friends"
Is this goodbye?

I discovered that the Hello Friend theme I am currently using will no longer be maintained. The repository was archived on 10 June 2023. This leaves me with a decision to make.

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Verification on Mastodon

Two mobile phones showing the Mastodon website
Mastodon is a free, open-source decentralized social media platform with nice people

With the demise of 3rd party Twitter clients such as Tweetbot (and with it my use of Twitter itself), I’ve started using Mastodon as an alternative. One of the capabilities it offers is verification of links added to your profile. There are a couple of ways to do this, and I’ve settled on what I think is a nice clean method.

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GoatCounter

A sample of analytics from GoatCounter
GoatCounter is an open source privacy-friendly web analytics platform

I haven’t really told anyone about this blog as it’s more of a project to give me somewhere to do something technical rather than a place I want to drive traffic to. Even so, as I write more content, it would be nice to see more traffic arrive organically at the site. To track how this grows over time, I’ve enabled GoatCounter on the site…

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