Zandra asked:

Who's your favorite background/minor character in Her Majesty The Prince? (named or unnamed)

Ask me this on three different days and you'll probably get three different answers, but right now I'm feelin' Dusty because her metanarrative role as "the not-as-important one" tickles me immensely. Despite originally being envisioned as a way to backfill the flashback/present day chapter structure and flesh out the setting and Lou's character, the maid chapters have ended up introducing some extremely important characters—Sleeves is pivotal in Act 2, Chiffon is a crucial emotional support for Lou and looks to be increasingly relevant in Act 3, even the at-the-time-unnamed guard who stumbled upon Lou in the halls has gone on to be the storied Soixante Douze.

But not Dusty! Sleeves and Chiffon both know Lou's secret, but not Dusty. Sleeves and Chiffon have both left the city to seek adventure, but not Dusty. Dusty just stays Dusty. She's the archetypal friend in the group who's kind of out of the loop, doesn't really participate in the group chat, but who everyone's glad to see during the reunions. Dusty abides. And I love her for that.

Obspogon asked:

How do I reblog from you, webmention style?

I want to test out webmentions since I added h-card markup to my blog thanks to your posts. How do I reblog a post from you? What HTML and classes do I use? I'm using a static site generator.

I'll make a more thorough post about this at some point, but the short answer is that all you really need to do is tell my Webmention receiver the URL to your post and the URL to the post it's reblogging. You can do that manually by pasting the link to your post in the little webmention form beneath each of mine, or automatically by hooking up your blog's RSS feed to webmention.app.

The only bit of markup that can help here is adding either class="u-repost-of" or class="u-in-reply-to"^[1] on your post to indicate what it's reposting or replying to. Use u-repost-of if it's just a plain repost without any additions, and u-in-reply-to if you're adding any additional content. You can put these on:

• A simple <a> tag whose href is my post.
• The root element of an h-cite that provides more metadata about my post.
• The root element of an h-entry fully embeds my post in your blog. (This is technically non-standard but it's what I do and it seems to work with everything I've tested.)

I've set up my site so that it hides Webmention likes and reposts, but displays replies as comments below the post. See this post for an example of that in action.

Ryan asked:

Have you played with WebC? Like a lot of 11ty stuff they're not super well documented, but they seem like a good way to do code reuse without having to send JS to the browser (unlike web components or HTMX or things like that). I recently ported my blog over and while there's some weirdness that I had to get over, they're a good experience overall.

I haven't seen this, and it does look pretty cool. I appreciate a take on the web component idea that's legitimately built around running on the server and sending down normal HTML. That said, while I'm also not a huge fan of web components as a dev pattern either. I tend to pass a bunch of parameters to my components and that's intrinsically kind of messy with HTML.

I'm also rotating in my mind the possibility of pulling some of my embed logic out into re-usable packages, and if I do that I'd like to make them as general-purpose as possible. The less I can lock them into the Eleventy ecosystem, the happier I am, and this seems very tightly bound to 11ty.

alice slimelia asked:

HIII just wanted to say thank you for bringing h-entry to my attention! I've added it to my own static blog generator and, by extension, my blog! there's so many things out there in the world you just never know about and would never stumble upon without someone going "hey look at this cool thing"

hell yeah glad to see more people doing it! consider also annotating your p-author with an h-card so you can provide an avatar—I had to pull this one manually from your tumblr

Máxima asked:

Are you going to play Silent Hill 2 OG or Remake this halloween?

As good as the remake looks, it's made by an entirely different team

Good question! For those unfamiliar, I've had a yearly tradition since 2021 of playing a classic survival horror game each October, because I like themes. I've played Resident Evil (GameCube version), Silent Hill (PlayStation version which I think is the only one), and Resident Evil 2 (2019 remake) so far. This year, as Máxima accurately recalls, I am planning to play Silent Hill 2.

Originally I thought I would obviously be playing the original, since the remake was being made by Bloober Team whose horror output has not seemed particularly great. But with this remake reviewing quite well, I did take some time to consider it as a real possibility. Ultimately, particularly after consulting Christa who has strong opinions about these sorts of things, I decided to stick with the original.

Where I've found my interest in Resident Evil as a series largely orbiting its mechanics and the use of game design to convey a notion of "horror", at least in the first Silent Hill much more of what I found compelling was wrapped up in the story and atmosphere. That's much harder to preserve, let alone elaborate on, in a remake. Even a really good remake made in 2024 will still have 2024-era textures and mocap and movement. If I'm playing a game for its vibe, I think I want the first time I play it to be with the original vibe.

Brendan McLeod asked:

Cohost grid generator!

Hey, just wanted to thank you for making cohost grid generator, and hoping that you will keep it up online! It works great with bearblog and it makes my media posts look nice!

Yeah, I plan to keep all my generators online more or less indefinitely (except maybe letterboxd which does cost a bit of money to host a proxy). I might actually rework the grid generator a bit to be more explicitly targeted at general websites rather than just Cohost. Maybe add a mode where it provides you a simple stylesheet so it can use fewer inline classes and actually make the text properly responsive so captions look better on phones.

Máxima asked:

Have you tried using serializd for reviewing and logging TV Shows?

I actually do log what I watch there kind of sporadically. It's all right! I wish it had a better app and were a bit more like Letterboxd in general, but it's certainly better than Trakt, its most direct competitor.

Part of the reason I don't use it is the lack of the app, but part of it is also that it's a lot of effort to log every single episode of anything I watch, but if I only log season-by-season I'll often forget to log at all when it comes to the finale.

The final nail in the coffin of using it the same way I do other review apps is that I just don't have that much to say about a single season of a television show. (I find I have similar issues when I try to write reviews for manga volumes.) There's often not that much different from the season before or the season after, and I'll usually express everything I have to say about the show in the first review or two and then run out of steam.

RECCANTI asked:

RSS feeds for embeds

I was trying to parse the content field of your RSS (Atom?) feed, and I noticed I get a sort of flat structure for embedded posts like this:

<img src="..." width="64" style=" float: left; width: auto; max-width: 64x; margin-top: 1rem; margin-right: 1rem; border-radius: 32px; ">
<div class="npf_row">
  <div class="npf_col">
    <figure class="tmblr-full">
      <a class="post_media_photo_anchor" data-big-photo="..." data-big-photo-height="680" data-big-photo-width="669">
        <img class="post_media_photo image" src="..." srcset="..." sizes="..." alt="image">
      </a>
    </figure>
  </div>
</div>
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I'm having a hard time figuring out how to render this out as an embed with the current markup and was wondering if you had any ideas?

Also, I think the max-width on the avatar is incorrect. It's currently 64x, not 64px

Anyway, I'm really excited about all the stuff you're doing with h-entry, webmentions, and things like that. I hope I can integrate some of that stuff into my blog eventually!

Thank you for giving me a reason to make an ask component. 🙂

When I include a repost like this in my Atom feed, I treat it as though the post I'm reblogging is itself in the feed, rather than a wrapper that contains that post. Generally speaking, As such, most of the metadata (author name, link, title if it has one) is in the rest of the feed entry rather than in the HTML contents. I don't create embeds directly from feeds—I always go to the source web page and create the embed from that—but if I were to do so, I'd treat all that metadata the same way I treat h-entry metadata for sites.

I also always wrap the things I'm embedding in some extra markup to get the nice little boxes…