ALICE LIA MARO

"hey alice didnt you say you were working on a new post where is that" I GOT DISTRACTED AND/OR BORED!!!!!

old school runescape's raging echoes league started and i've been way more into it than i expected honestly. i've always quit leagues fairly quickly before but this time i'm way more invested - mainly because i've been playing it with my girlfriend <3

the other thing occupying my time has been: more crochet projects! when winter rolls around all my coding projects seem to fall by wayside and i pick up balls of yarn and start crocheting instead. there's one crochet project i shan't share here quite yet because it's going to be a christmas present and there's a slim chance the recipient may see it here. BUT look at this snowflake i made last night!!

for those curious, the pattern was designed by Katherine Eng and is available entirely free from yarnspirations!

i do really want to finish that post i was working on AND the coding project i started for my gemlog. BUT i suspect they're gonna be things that occur in the new year nowwwww whoopsie

hiiii! quick post to say i've added support for webmentions to my blog now! i actually added support yesterday but i made too many posts yesterday and didn't want to bombard your poor RSS readers.

i also have a new post coming soon - been working on a draft for a little while now. i'm excited to get that finished and posted! :D

OKAY LAST FUCKING POST ON THE MATTER I PROMMY!!!

there was a SECOND issue with images that i didn't notice til now: i compose blogposts via plaintext emails sent to a mailbox. plaintext emails typically have a line length imposed by the editor, after which a line break is inserted. my fucking image url had a line break in the middle of it in my last post FML. not a problem for web browsers as they handle that kind of shit very well! but a potential problem for RSS readers. (side note: browsers are so clever. did not notice my image tag typo discussed in my last post for ages because, guess what? the browser noticed it and just guessed what tag i ACTUALLY wanted and showed that instead. nice!)

i added a little bit of regex to hopefully fix this now?? i email from two different clients and idk if they handle newlines differently but this definitely works for betterbird which is what i usually write posts in LMAO

anyway so sorry everything should work now hopefully fingers crossed thanks byee <3

tell me how i repeatedly typed the <img> tag as <image> every fucking time. and did not notice once. im SO dumb

look at him again. as an apology

ok that also didnt work BUT i've just looked at other people's RSS feeds and they wrap their images in figure tags. so lets see if that does anything. please enjoy the below image: a fake youtube thumbnail i made for a tweet

so for some reason the image in my last post did not show up in my RSS reader. they did when i forced miniflux to fetch original content, but i'd rather people not have to do that, especially in RSS readers without that feature! weirdly the image is present when i use the Feed Preview firefox extension so i guess maybe it is my RSS reader being weird??

i think it may be a weird thing happening with inline styling on the image tag. so: below is a shite selfie i took yesterday on me lunch break. if it shows up in feeds: yay! if it doesn't: i can't be bothered to diagnose the issue further right now. soz

look upon him.. and know.

my boy,

i keep debating whether or not to add comments to this blog!!

problem is that slimeblogger, and my presence on tilde.town generally, was focused on minimalism and simplicity. that's why there's no categories, no tags and no pagination. i wanted my blog to be able to exist as a single page. it's the philosophy of a lot of members of the town, and one i'm keen to stick to! i decided long ago that comments were simply outside the scope of this blog & slimeblogger.

BUT! this place is now my eggbug-away-from-eggbug; this is where i'm posting more now that cohost is gone and its community has moved to RSS feeds and blogs. and one thing cohost taught me to love is the comments section. i have left comments on many blog posts that appear in my RSS reader's feed, and sometimes i want to enable that level of interaction to my blog as well. honestly, sometimes it's just nice to know people have read your writings, your thoughts put to paper, and acknowledge that you exist LOL

idk. it's more work, i'd need to find a suitable comment platform, and i can't decide if it works with the design principles i have imposed upon myself and my own blog. not adding them for now, but watch this space...?

maybe i'll add a means to comment on blog posts that is SEPARATE from my blog itself - comments and comment threads could exist, but not clutter the blog and exist on their own Comment Site. another design principle i am extremely keen to stick to is that this blog will function with NO javascript (pop open your browser dev tools - there's no javascript here at all!). it seems like any means of delivering comments embedded into the page WILL require javascript, especially when i can't do any server-side scripting here on the town (and nor would i want to use their resources like that!)

actually i suppose i could use iframes but fuck that those are ugly and annoying LOL

what do you think, reader? oh wait shit you can't comment uhhhhhhhhh send an email to slimeblog@slimelia.uk for now i guess. ive set that up as a dedicated mailbox for this blog only (actually its just a forwarder but whatever). maybe i should just do that instead of commenting: bring back email. love an email, me

sorry if you saw the last post in your feed reader as a garbled mess lmao. the desktop email client i was using during testing does NOT encode plaintext emails as quoted-printable. the email client on my phone, however, DOES. and i had not accounted for decoding that because, frankly, i only just learned quoted-printable exists

BUT IT IS FIXED NOW. SO LET THE NEW NEW AGE OF POSTING COMMENCE

a new age of posting begins.... being able to post whenever i want easily from my phone is gonna be insane

i'm gonna start posting blog posts while in Tesco. i'm gonna post them while sat on a train. blogging has never been so advanced

sorry in advance (but like not THAT sorry)

i just wrote a little script to check a special mailbox i created for new plaintext emails every hour & turn them into blogposts. its not perfect LOL but hey it works.

now i can post on my phone ooooooh

hiiii! very brief post to say that slimeblogger (and, by extension, this blog) now have h-entry support!

a big thank you to natalie whose blog post on the topic made me aware this was a thing that existed lol

i don't have anything to add here uhhhhhhhhh bye.

NOTE: The following post has been manually mirrored from my Gemini gemlog. For more information, read this post

omg hiiiiiiiiii!! how we all doing? theres no comments on my blogs you can't answer that sorry

keep meaning to write a new gemlog post but i kept putting it off for various reasons (mainly due to workin on personal projects) and now i have a lot to talk about!!

FIRSTLY! welcome any/all newcomers who are here following the shutdown of cohost! hope you're all well!
it still feels so weird to me that cohost is closed now. that website had its flaws, which many have discussed far better than i could, but i enjoyed my time there and will really miss it. godspeed young eggbug...

September was, overall, a really fuckin good month. my dear darling girlfriend Jasmine came to visit me and we spent an incredible 10 days in London!!! it was so nice to see her again and i miss her so much nowwwww :(

she was also here for my birthday which was great.. it's so nice to spend a special day like that with someone i love. we went to the V&A (one of my all-time favourite places in London) and spent time there, then made our way to a bar where we got drinks with some of my friends :3

it's weird, i live so close to London that i never bothered doing the touristy shit. it's weird to engage in tourist traps etc. when they're on your doorstep, so i've never bothered before. but y'know what, some are really good!! highlights include getting a canal boat from Little Venice to Camden Market, going to the Tower of London, and going for a cute walk through Brompton Cemetery. i had no idea the Tower of London was actually like.. worth going to and wasn't just a tourist hell-hole. if i lived in London and getting to it was slightly cheaper i'd legit consider one of those member passes because it's a very nice place to spend a day honestly!!

worst part of the trip was having to say goodbye to my wifey and going home and sleeping in an empty bed :( i miss herrr

what else happened in september? well, my mum had a big 60th birthday party at the end of the month at a crazy golf place in London and it was very good! far better than when we had a work party at the same venue LOL

and of course, the other thing that happened recently.. they locked eggbug in a glass cage. rip cohost..

following cohost's shutdown announcement i sorta threw myself into too many projects at once relating to my blog & gemlog, hence the aforementioned procrastination of writing this post. a project i successfully finished was refactoring slimeblogger & adding atom feed support, so that's fun!!! one day i may add pagination to slimeblogger but the original design choice was intentionally one long blog page, so idk if i can be arsed.

managed to finally reach a point where i felt happy posting to my blog, because the Software™ i use for the blog is now in a state i'm happy with.
BUT. the same wasn't true of the thing i wrote to generate my gemlog LOL. toying again with the idea of making my gemlog visible to the http web, but this time i'm thinking about only making the RSS feed available over http. that way it's still my secret special hidden-away blog, but you don't have to open lagrange or amfora every time you wanna read it innit.

some of you may be reading this and thinking "wtf is gemini, what's a gemlog" because.. i plan on mirroring SOME select gemlog posts to my weblog! a sort of "here's a sneak peek at the Alice lore that you're missing" type of thing.

now.. i WAS going to somewhat automate this by writing a python package to convert gemtext to html. and that's still in the works!! but i wanted to write it as a proper package and publish to PyPI so that project is taking longer than planned while i spend time being extra thorough before publishing it. this is the current project that was holding up writing this post - i've decided to just convert this one post to HTML by hand innit LOL

i've really been enjoying reading people's thoughts and posts in my RSS feed, though i must admit i do also mark some posts as read without readingggg SORRYYY ;-;
some are just very long posts that are a bit too technical for me, or they're reviews of films/games i have no interest in so i just don't feel like reading the review innit. some are also long & detailed thinkpieces and its like.. well im checking my RSS feed like i used to check cohost - at work, or while sat on the toilet, or while scrolling on my phone when i get up in the morning, etc.
some i have saved and then read later when i felt i had the time to spare! but others i do just go "oh this one isn't for me i fear"

it feels rude/wrong to mark posts in my RSS reader as read but idk why because i scroll past posts all the time on twitter, tumblr, bluesky & scrolled past plenty on cohost too. weirdly it feels more like a personal slight in my RSS reader even though literally nobody would ever know if i didn't announce it LMAO

update on personal organisation from the last post: i bloody LOVE Zim. i'm using Syncthing to sync my notebooks on all my devices, and Markor to edit & view my files on my phone. i had all our plans, important documents & notes for the London trip on one of my Zim notebooks and it honestly made it so easy to be organised on the trip. i'm a full-on Zim convert. i've also customised my zim style, GTK theme & icon set for Zim only on both Windows AND Fedora now so it looks consistent, modern and beautiful. if you struggle staying organised i would really recommend it!

and now, dear readers, we're here once again: at the end of a gemlog, with me having no idea how to end it. i'm going to put some links down below relating to stuff from this post. click them or don't idk it's your choice <3
anyway: THX 4 READING BYE XOXO

• slimeblogger repository
  
• details about the gemlog, for those of you reading this on the web who want to learn more
  
• lagrange, the gemini browser i mentioned that's really the best one available on any platform

if you just got all my posts appear in your RSS reader im sorry LOL i fixed a bug that came up when i re-wrote the Slimeblogger code. and that bug related to the atom feed and thus some readers read ALL the posts as new posts. sowwy x

hiiiiiiii! very small update to let you know i've added an RSS feed!! or rather, an Atom feed!! which isn't actually the same thing but everyone still calls them RSS feeds because otherwise there's too much confusion. and every rss reader in the world supports atom feeds. SO!! click here to subscribe!!

so cohost is dying, huh! maybe i should actually use this blog LMAO
mind that i do, in fact, still post semi-regularly to my gemlog at this address. but as a result this lil weblog has been neglected. woopsie...

such a shame about cohost though. there were flaws but i love what they were trying to achieve. i hate that they - we - were unable to create a successful and sustainable social media site. when it comes to managing running costs, decentralisation really is the best bet huh? i still can't get on board with mastodon though, idk why. the fractured nature of the fediverse isn't something i enjoy i think? idk.

ANYWAY yes maybe i will post more here. maybe i will mirror some gemlog posts here - i definitely really genuinely enjoy having my gemini capsule being it's own thing that doesn't surface on the normal web. having a protocol and separate space feels pointless when it all gets mirrored to the WWW anyway. BUT!!!!! it would be nice to sometimes mirror them so you get a glimpse into what's going on over on the other side :3

didn't have much to say rn i just wanted to finally update this LOL. see yas x

and the ultimate bloging begins...

i can't decide what to use this blog for!! i've been using my gemlog for more detailed personal life updates and i can't be bothered to repeat myself here. maybe i'll do something fun like just spotlight cool things i find online??

FOR EXAMPLEEEE i recently found the search engine Kagi. i really like it, the results it produces are very good, the people behind it and their ethos seem really good, and i love all the extra features it contains. they also have a few fun side projects like Kagi Small Web which highlights random individual blogs and small websites across the world wide web. it's a super cute initiative!

anyway, i guess this is what i'm gonna use this web-facing blog for, at least for now! if you have a passing interest in the woman BEHIND the blog, check out the super secret gemlog oooooh

hiya! just popping in to say this blog has a sister blog! or rather, a gemlog! because it is on gemini. that's what blogs on gemini are called. which is a cute name but like it's a bit unwieldy innit. like.. the word for blogs on gopher is "phlogs" which is FUCKIN awesome (it comes from 'gopherlogs').

anyway i digress!!!! i started a blog/gemlog over on my gemini capsule. i thought about mirroring it to this blog (or elsewhere on my web profile here) but i decided i prefer the idea of it being this exclusive little thing you need to seek out. plus i feel that it defeats the point a bit to have a gemini capsule then just make it available on the web anyway.

if you're not sure wtf gemini is or how to access it, there's some info on what it is and how to use it on the tilde town wiki (which i wrote!) if you just wanna access Geminispace the main part to pay attention to is the Clients section.

there's also web proxies avaiable - like you can click here to view my gemini capsule in your browser! if you do get a gemini client, have yourself a look at gemini://tilde.town/~slimelia/ ^_^

gawd i forgot i had a tilde.town account til recently!!!

i deleted all my old blogposts because i just didn't vibe with them any more (they're archived on the github repo for this site though shhh).

i don't have anything to say here except i might (maybe?) bring this blog back? maybe?? who's to say. i do not have the attention span for it but it's fine it's fine!