Tying up some recent loose ends

Of course, you folks don’t check my site to see all the little updates I make as information changes. I’m sure that’s particularly true for those who view my content only through my site’s RSS and JSON feeds. So, here’s a catch-all post to advise you of a few such additions to fairly recent posts.¹

In each part below, the first date shown is the post’s original date of publication. I reproduced each update mostly as it actually appears in its respective post, the original date of which will determine the order in which it appears below.

(Incidentally: before we proceed, please understand that I won’t be updating this post if I make further updates to any of the posts mentioned below. This one is what it’s going to be.)

Commenting with giscus

The first of two posts about using the giscus commenting tool with one’s website, “Tips for using giscus” (2022-05-10), warned of a bug in the GitHub Discussions API that would confuse giscus if you had pages with similar titles. By “confuse,” I meant that the same comment threads might appear on multiple pages with titles that began with similar strings — e.g., “Static tweets in Eleventy and Hugo” and “Static tweets in Eleventy and Hugo, Part II.”

Update, 2022-07-24: That problem was solved on 2022-07-23 with a fix that uses hashing as a workaround.

Git info

In “Get good Git info from Hugo” (2022-06-01), I described how to use Hugo’s built-in handling of Git commit data to automate the process of providing Git-related information in one’s Hugo posts.

Update, 2022-10-07: If you’re interested in displaying both per-page Git info and whole-site Git info in your Hugo site, check the solution suggested by Hugo expert/contributor Joe Mooring. Thanks to Rodrigo Alcaraz de la Osa for the Q&A session that led me toward this additional information!

Scoped styling in Hugo

One feature not built into Hugo, but which is often touted by advocates of various JavaScript-based site-building tools, is the automatic production of scoped styling. This functionality allows developers to minimize or eliminate the dreaded specificity issues which often go with CSS. I took a semi-automated shot at it in “Sorta scoped styling in Hugo” (2022-06-12), wherein I assigned one or more tags to each of my many posts and then set Hugo to give each post only the styling its tag(s) would dictate. It was as convoluted as it sounds, and it didn’t take long before I’d given up the ship on it.

Update, 2022-06-28: Consider this now an abandoned experiment. I went with it for a couple of weeks, but, in the end, decided to revert to my previous definitely-not-scoped configuration after seeing that this method hampered attempts to make certain styling changes — that is, without invoking chaos which wasn’t worth my time to resolve. Perhaps you’ll have better luck with it.

Image processing in Hugo

Using Hugo’s powerful, built-in image processing was the subject of “Responsive and optimized images with Hugo” (2022-06-29), which included a rather involved, annotated shortcode. I soon realized that I’d neglected a labor-saving aspect to that Hugo feature.

Update, 2022-07-26: In the original version of this post, I used Hugo’s imageConfig function to get an image’s width and height for styling purposes, only to learn later that it wasn’t necessary (and, in fact, caused an issue or two when I made some other revisions in my own code not related to or included in the sample here) so I decided to drop it in favor of the already-there .Width and .Height. Simpler is better.

Tabs, spaces, and .editorconfig

In “The accessibility argument for tabs over spaces” (2022-06-30), I mentioned changes to the site’s .editorconfig file that would go with, as the post title mentioned, tabs over spaces. However, in providing the original example, I’d forgotten that not all file types would be happy with that.

Update, 2022-07-04: The .editorconfig file now included in this post is a revised version of what I originally posted. This takes into account certain troublesome file types — especially YAML — which require spaces, not tabs, for indents.

Pagefind

In its earliest forms, the amazing Pagefind search tool, about which I wrote in “Pagefind is quite a find for site search” (2022-07-28), worked only on macOS and Linux.

Update, 2022-08-04: Now, there is a Windows version, too.

Static tweets using Twitter’s v2 API

Twitter prefers that you use Version 2 (“v2”) of its API for embedding Twitter content in your site. I’ve written a number of posts this year on how to embed such content fully statically but, in the beginning, I had to advise that this wasn’t a good idea with the v2 API, which didn’t yet support video URLs. Then, as I said in “Static tweets: Twitter’s v2 API and video” (2022-08-21), I discovered this limitation no longer existed. As a result, I was planning to follow up with a post and accompanying code on doing static embeds of tweets using the v2 API. That intention lasted only a few hours, and I ended up doing a rare (and unusually acerbic) same-day update . . .

Update, 2022-08-21: Turns out that effort wouldn’t be worth it; you still end up having to use other APIs to pull in what Twitter calls the “Summary Card with Large Image” which one typically sees in a tweet that includes a URL to a suitably managed web page.
In short . . . never mind. I’ll stick with what I’ve got now. The v2 API may be what Twitter wants everyone to use, but it’s both a major pain in the ass and not sufficient for proper embeds. To be fair, I know that’s not what Twitter wants us to do with the v2 API. (On the other hand: after spending hour after hour staring at the v2 API’s dev-unfriendly output and trying to find stuff in it, I’m fairly sure what I’d like Twitter to do with the v2 API.)

Astro

Although I gave it the old college try more than once this year, I found myself unable to continue satisfactorily with the popular Astro for running this site. As I explained in “Accepting reality about Astro” (2022-10-05), one of the key reasons for that is one particular “show-stopper” issue which has caused an unacceptably brittle dev-mode experience for my own specific use case.

Update, 2022-10-10: Bjorn Lu, a Vite core team member and Astro “core resident,” determined that the “show-stopper” issue is due to an interaction between Vite and Node.js; his fix should be reflected in a future version of Astro. I’ll keep you advised.

. . . and so I will (albeit in the original post).