Thrilled to announce that I now have this up and running, at least in its most basic aspect. The embed above is automatically generated and pulled down directly from the source post. Nothing in this is specific to my blog; I can also do it with someone else's. By way of example, please enjoy this post from my beautiful wife:

Injecting embeds

Here's what the embed looks like in my blog source right now:

{% genericPost "https://nex-3.com/blog/once-i-add-the/",
    time: "2024-09-20T07:06:00Z",
    tags: "#meta",
    author: "Natalie",
    authorUrl: "/",
    authorAvatar: "/assets/avatar.webp" %}
  <p>
    Once I add the ability to embed arbitrary blog posts from other blogs on
    here it's over. I'm gonna be reblogging like a wild animal. Y'all are gonna
    have your eyes blown clean outta your heads.
  </p>
{% endgenericPost %}

I have a template for the embed, some CSS to style it, and a little custom Liquid tag to bring it all together. But the real magic is in how I generate the genericPost in the first place. Here's what the original source looks like before…

I've added WebMention support, both sending and receiving (although not currently displaying). I'll write more about that later. I've tightened up the microformats I'm using and, particularly including them on nested embeds. It's fun and I'm happy to have this blog set up to play real nice with all these interoperable standards... but so far I don't know anyone else who I can actually interoperate with.

I was all set to set up a custom Tumblr scraper so I could reblog art and stuff on here, but it turns out Tumblr already uses the h-entry microformat out of the box! I don't have to do anything special at all! Except maybe to handle reblog chains, but that's something I should really do anyway.

oops I lied

Actually it's just the theme Taylor Titmouse was using that has the right metadata. There's no way to get it for any arbitrary tumblr post. I'll have to write that custom scraper after all 😩

At least this post motivated me to come up with some sort of a story for reposts!

I'm really happy to see a bunch of the less-technical people I followed on Cohost setting up blogs with Bear or Ghost or WordPress. It's been fun for me to set this site up as a playground for what could be possible as far as bringing the aspects of social media I value to the web, but truly one of the biggest virtues of social media sites is making it so so easy to get set up and start posting. At the same time, it's also one of its biggest downfalls, because it's the same thing that makes it so easy to get sucked into the quicksand of corporate lock-in.

my least favorite thing about all my friends' BearBlogs is the total lack of avatars. if I don't have a fursona or selfie or silly little guy next to a post who I can imagine reading it to me, what's even the point

bitchin'