Notes

Sophie Koonin gave a really nice talk about personal websites.

View on youtube

It includes one of the best side-characters ever; SoHo Hank

A little while ago, my GitHub actions were failing because of the following error:

error An unexpected error occurred: "https://npm.fontawesome.com/@fortawesome/react-fontawesome/-/0.1.15/react-fontawesome-0.1.15.tgz: Request failed \"401 Unauthorized\"".
info If you think this is a bug, please open a bug report with the information provided in "/home/runner/work/appsignal-status/appsignal-status/yarn-error.log".
info Visit https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/install for documentation about this command.
Error: Process completed with exit code 1.

The reason is we use FontAwesome and our action didn't have access to the (private) FontAwesome repo.

In order to fix this we need to make Yarn/NPM aware of this private repo and to do that we'll create a CI environment under the GitHub Repository settings.

Under that CI environment we'll add a FONTAWESOME_NPM_AUTH_TOKEN "Environment secret" (Not variable, secret!) which we can use in the GitHub Actions runner.

To actually expose this secret, we'll have to tell the GitHub Actions runner to use this CI environment, and we'll have to set the NPM config to use the private registry.

For example; this is a linting job that uses the private repository.

  linting:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment: CI # << Set the CI environment
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Install dependencies
      run: |
        npm config set "@fortawesome:registry" https://npm.fontawesome.com/
        npm config set '//npm.fontawesome.com/:_authToken' "${{ secrets.FONTAWESOME_NPM_AUTH_TOKEN }}"
        yarn install
    - name: Run ESLint
      run: yarn lint

GitHub will replace the value with *** on an actual run:

Run npm config set "@fortawesome:registry" https://npm.fontawesome.com/
  npm config set "@fortawesome:registry" https://npm.fontawesome.com/
  npm config set '//npm.fontawesome.com/:_authToken' "***"
  yarn install

It took me a while to figure out where to place the code that loads data from an external CMS and makes it available in bridgetownrb.

The idea is to place a builder in the builders folder. This builder is called each time the site is... built.

plugins/builders/posts_builder.rb

This file should contain a class with a build method. Bridgetown exposes a get method that allows you to fetch any data without having to worry about using a specific HTTP client. It also parses the JSON for you, if present.

In my case I'm getting data from a pocketbase instance and for each item, I'm adding a resource to bridgetown.

class Builders::PostsBuilder < SiteBuilder
  def build
    get('https://pocketbase/api/collections/blog_posts/records?sort=-date&perPage=1000&expand=files&filter=(public=true)') do |data|
      data[:items].each do |post|
        add_resource :posts, "#{post[:slug]}" do
          ___ post
          layout :post
          permalink '/blog/:slug.html'
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

The first argument is the collection (in this case posts), and the second argument the "id" of the resource. You can alter the layout and permalink by using the DSL.

You can now call this resource anywhere in your bridgetown code:

site.collections.posts.resources

Adding a webfinger to your own domain lets you keep one point of truth for your social media handle. You can tell people to just follow social@matsimitsu.com for example, and through this webfinger file Mastodon will know where to look for your actual profile.

Bridgetown lets you create files with permalinks anywhere. In my case this file is in:

src/webfinger.erb

The contents contain references to my ruby.social account, where my actual Mastodon profile lives, which I can change at any time and anyone using my social@matsimitsu.com reference will end up on the correct instance.

---
sitemap: false
permalink: ".well-known/webfinger"
---

{
  "subject":"acct:matsimitsu@ruby.social",
  "aliases":
  [
      "https://ruby.social/@matsimitsu",
      "https://ruby.social/users/matsimitsu"
  ],
  "links":
  [
      {
          "rel":"http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
          "type":"text/html",
          "href":"https://ruby.social/@matsimitsu"
      },
      {
          "rel":"self",
          "type":"application/activity+json",
          "href":"https://ruby.social/users/matsimitsu"
      },
      {
          "rel":"http://ostatus.org/schema/1.0/subscribe",
          "template":"https://ruby.social/authorize_interaction?uri={uri}"
      }
  ]
}

The Fable (Japanese title: ザ・ファブル 殺さない殺し屋) is apparently the second movie about a hitman. I still have to watch the first one 🤦.

It’s about a legendary hitman named Akira who has to lay low and can’t commit any murders for a while. He works a menial job at a graphic design studio, and of course, things happen that make it really hard for him not to kill.

It’s a fun action-comedy that starts off slow but gains speed halfway through and has a nice ending.

Good for a boring night in COVID isolation, and it’s available on Netflix

I recently flew from Amsterdam to Amman, Jordan, with Turkish Airlines, and one thing I always like to do is skip all the blockbuster films and look for the “world movies” category. You can find some great movies there that you weren’t going to see otherwise.

This time it was The Eight Hundred; a film about the famous battle of the Sihang warehouse on November 1, 1937. This battle was during the Japanese occupation of China but before the second world war broke out.

Japan

Japan was still trying to play nice to the Americans and British, and part of Shanghai was known as “concessions,” a place that couldn’t be invaded or even shot at by Japan in fear of retribution from the US and Britain.

Next to this “concession” was a warehouse occupied by the remaining 800 soldiers in Shanghai, trying to defend it to the last man to give the rest of the Chinese army time to prepare better defenses outside the city.

The movie follows these soldiers (actually about 400, the number was inflated by the Chinese commander) in their defense. This story is based on actual events and follows them quite accurately, albeit with more dramatization.

As far as war movies go, it’s a nice film, and the quality is pretty good with sound special effects. It’s a nice view if you’re stuck in an airplane for 4 hours.

When I first came to Hong Kong, I was surprised by the scene of hundreds of people crowding the streets and overpasses on cardboard boxes. Only later I found out that this is a weekly occurrence on Sunday when the thousands of (mostly Filipino) maids living in Hong Kong have their day off, which they use to socialise with fellow maids.

Still Human revolves around Leung Cheong-wing, a paralysed and hopeless man living in a social housing flat in Hong Kong and Evelyn Santos, a Filipino domestic worker who came to the city to make a living.

It portrays the (often precarious) lives of Filipino workers in Hong Kong and how they are treated without becoming too heavy. The movie focuses on the brittle relation between Leung and Evelyn and is mostly shot inside the cramped apartment of Leung.

I really enjoyed the movie, the acting is amazing and the pace is just right. It manages to balance heavy subjects and light-heartedness and for me it was one of those movies that makes you think about the subject for the next couple of days.