So both Google and Microsoft are pushing for this PWA concept (Progressive Web Apps) where a normal web site can function like a native app if configured in a certain way. It's in early stages, but it's supported by the major browsers and mobile operating systems. So I played around with the idea and now there is a new option in the menu of the blog: Notify me. What it does is it lets you grant notification permissions for the web page of the blog and then you get a notification whenever I write a new post or update an old one. In order to remove the option you have to reset the notification permissions for the website yourself (there is no way to do it programmatically, yet) 

  At the moment the registrations are saved in memory, so whenever the web site is restarted (like with a new update), you will lose any notification sending until you enter in the web site again. I will work on persisting it on the disk, but that will come later.

  Meanwhile, enjoy! Also, you can install the blog as an application, too, which makes little sense, really :) but it gives you the option of having it in the phone or in Windows in the start menu and pinned to the taskbar and everything.

Just saying.

  Just wanted to give you a heads up that Siderite's blog now has a Discord server and you can easily talk to me and other blog viewers that connected there by clicking on the Discord icon on top of the search box. I just heard of this Discord app and it seems to permit this free chat server and invite link. Let me know if anything goes wrong with it.

  Try it! 

I've changed a little the way the blog is being displayed. Now posts should present a more specific image than the general blog icon and the list of posts should display an image and then text, regardless of what is in the post. Let me know if anything goes awry.

Welcome to my new blog!

Please let me know what you think.

I've had some issues with Blogger and that pushed me towards the step that I have been too lazy to make for so long a time: my own domain and hosting. So, from today on, my personal blog is at https://siderite.dev. I am working on it, still, so forgive the occasional hiccups.

Let me know if anything is wrong or, even better, that everything is right!

Siderite

As I was saying in a previous post, I came back from vacation to about 5 DMCA notices about posts that had no infringing content that I could see. I've tried changing the URLs of links, the images, then reposted the posts. DO NOT DO THAT ON BLOGGER! Apparently, even if their rule says to not publish the post unchanged, they consider any republication of a post automatically put in Draft because of a DMCA notice to be infringing. And what happens after trying to republish five posts a few times? Your blog gets deleted and any attempt to contact the assholes at Blogger is ignored or, worse, a complete farce.

Example: A DMCA requests comes for a blog post containing only my text, a link to IMDb and a YouTube embed. The post gets sent to Draft. I send a counter notice to Blogger, then republish the blog. This might be considered "infringing" of their policy, but it only happened once, so I don't think this is the reason why they deleted the blog. Then they delete the blog (all the blogs on that user, I had some private ones that I hadn't backed up at all and now they are completely gone) and send me an email containing, I kid you not, this text: "we have removed the blog. Thank you for your understanding."

I've tried contacting them about my user being blocked from Blogger and the blogs deleted, but they have replied only with an automated message saying it usually takes two days to get back to me. Two weeks later, no reply from them... except the ones for the DMCA counter-notices. Guess what they said? I kid you not: "Thanks for reaching out to us. We have no record of the following URLs having been removed by Google due to a legal complaint". I replied with a quote of their previous email. No reply.

So the only solution, until I find my own hosting and I set up my own blog, is to rename the blog and move it on another user.

This is a cautionary tale, too. Always backup your blog and any content you post on another platform, no matter how "no evil" it is. Also, make sure you backup everything, even the little details, checking the result, because backup and restore tools don't bring money to the platforms, so they usually suck big time. For example for Blogger there is no way to import a post with a JavaScript script in it that contains comments, because the newlines have been stripped and the comment affects the next line of code. And most of all, when your post gets DMCA'd, leave it in draft, file a counter-notice and pray that they actually mean something.

On the administrative side, because of the domain change and the backup SNAFU, the blog might not work completely as expected. Please let me know if anything goes wrong so I can fix it. For example, the links to the blog are automatically converted by JavaScript, because I can't export, replace and import the posts again without losing the JavaScript in some pages and posts. Plus, I have no idea if this blog is going to last.

Wish me luck, folks!

I have a few posts that link to various sites that provide free online viewing of manga. Recently, I've been getting DMCA notifications about "copyright infringement", therefore I am replacing them with Wikipedia links. I am aware that whoever sent those notifications is wrong, since they can't possible have copy rights for links of sites they do not control, but I am not going down that rabbit hole. Google still works, after all.

And speaking of Wikipedia, I've recently been to Turkey where I was shocked to see that the entire Wikipedia site is blocked. According to Wikipedia, the site is or was censored in one way or another in China, France, Germany, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan and Venezuela. Hmm, France, Germany and the UK, huh? I wish you'd have said something, visitors from those countries... assuming my blog is not censored as well, [intense stare into the future, horizon and the wall in front] as the shining beacon of freedom it is for the entire world [snapping out of it].

Anyway, seems that only China and Turkey are seriously banning the Wikipedia articles, so I've added a way to "Fix" the links by replacing them with Google queries *if* you are in Turkey, China or Taiwan, thanks to ipapi for the user location detection service.

On the 3rd of August I get this email from IFTTT, a service I have been using to automatically post Blogger posts to Facebook: Hello siderite,

Facebook has recently made significant changes to their platform. One of those changes includes removing the ability for third party applications, like IFTTT, to publish status messages, link posts, and photos on your behalf to your personal Facebook profile.

The following three Facebook actions will be removed from IFTTT starting today, along with any Applets that used them:

• Create a status message
• Create a link post
• Upload a photo from URL

While it’s unfortunate to see some of your favorite Applets removed, we support Facebook’s decisions to evolve their platform in the way they best see fit.

Thank you for your understanding.
The IFTTT Team

It was nice that at least they warned me, but how can anyone imagine that the best way to announce breaking changes in your clients' systems is to write an email that says "from this very second we are going to rip it all away from you"? Even funnier, they link to this Facebook policy change link that was published on April 24th and which announces their own breaking changes starting from the 1st of August. See, IFTTT? This is how you warn your customers: three months in advance.

Strangely enough, some of the applets work, while some just disappeared. I don't mean disabled, I mean completely gone, with no trace or warning on what they had been. Probably these will soon be gone as well. So expect (from this very second) that blog posts will not appear regularly on Facebook until I fix the problem with my own tool. On the other hand, you can always subscribe to the blog itself via RSS, a well proven technology ever since 1999 (that's the reason they partied then). You know that something is good quality when engineers name it: the first letter of its acronym comes from another acronym and when you don't understand what it means even if you have all the words.

I have updated my blog page with the Asteroids in the Solar system. There are only 892 at this date, rather than the 1500 I had before, but these are only the NEOs larger than 1 kilometer and the data is dynamically loaded rather than embedded in the page as it was before. Why didn't I use all of them? Because there are almost 500000 asteroids in the database and displaying them all would have been meaningless. Enjoy!

BTW, if you are wondering what the effects of an impact would be, play with this simulator.

Microsoft is closing Codeplex, so I had to migrate all projects that I felt were still relevant to Github. First of all, you should know there is a migration tool at Codeplex to do this automatically. Second of all, you SHOULD NOT USE IT, because it's just stupid, plus it only works in cases where you committed source code, not archives of source code. It does't add a proper readme file or a licence file and it doesn't even migrate the description. So don't use it, just don't!

I don't know how I feel about this. I always wanted Codeplex to be successful, but with so little resources allocated for the project, I think it is better that they are closing it. It was a slow, out of date web site and Github is clearly better for many reasons. However I don't see how a monopoly on online source control is good either. Well...

I am not going to keep it there for long, so try it out. It is based on Markdown CSS, by mrcoles.

I have enabled Disqus comments on this blog and it is supposed to work like this: every old comment from Blogger has to be imported into Disqus and every new comment from Disqus needs to be also saved in the Blogger system. Importing works just fine, but "syncing" does not. Every time someone posts a comment I receive this email:

Hi siderite,
 
You are receiving this email because you've chosen to sync your
comments on Disqus with your Blogger blog. Unfortunately, we were not
able to access this blog.
 
This may happen if you've revoked access to Disqus. To re-enable,
please visit:
https://siderite.disqus.com/admin/discussions/import/platform/blogger/
 
Thanks,
The Disqus Team

Of course, I have not revoked any access, but I "reenable" just the same only to be presented with a link to resync that doesn't work. I mean, it is so crappy that it returns the javascript error "e._ajax is undefined" for a line where e._ajax is used instead of e.ajax and even if that would have worked, it uses a config object that is not defined.

It doesn't really matter, because the ajax call just accesses (well, it should access) https://siderite.disqus.com/admin/discussions/import/platform/blogger/resync/. And guess what happens when I go there: I receive an email that the Disqus access in Blogger has been revoked.

No reply for the Disqus team for months, for me or anybody else having this problem. They have a silly page that explains that, of course, they are not at fault, Blogger did some refactoring and broke their system. Yeah, I believe that. They probably renamed the ajax function in jQuery as well. Damn Google!

After a month of trial with no one to complain of HTTPS issues, I've decided to set the blog to redirect normal connections to the secure URL. Let me know if you experience any problems.

I have created a Facebook page for the blog, so if you are tired by my Facebook ramblings and only need the updates for this blog, you can subscribe to it. You may find it here.

Also, I've discovered a bad bug with the chess viewer: it didn't allow manual promotions. If you tried to promote a pawn it would call a component that was not on the page (an ugly component) and then it wouldn't promote anyway because of a bug in the viewer. Hopefully I've solved them both. It mainly affected puzzles like the one I posted today.