With Git it is possible to push only certain local commits to a remote repository.
This can be done with the following git push command, which pushes all commits up to commit to the branch remote branch in the remote repo repository:

git push <repository> <commit>:<remote branch>

For example the following pushes all except for the latest local commit to the main branch in the origin remote repo:

git push origin HEAD~1:main

Following up on yesterday's post about the Website Carbon Calculator, I saw that there is also the option to add a Website Carbon Badge.

Quickly this badge was added to the About page.

To make it more accurate and avoid hitting their API every time someone loads the About page, I made some changes to the provided code:

1. Calculate the results for the front page of the blog instead of the page where the badge is displayed (which would be the less significant About page).
2. Call the API to load the JSON file with the CO₂ results only once per week via a cronjob instead of every time someone new visits the About page.
3. Have the script load the cached JSON file from my server instead of directly calling the API.
4. Store the CSS and Javascript required to render the results on my own server instead of using the unpkg.com CDN (also helps with the above custom modifications).

While surfing around, stumbled upon this cool tool which allows to calculate the carbon footprint of a website: Website Carbon Calculator.

After having it analyze my blog, I was very pleased to see the resulting A⁺ carbon rating 🎉
The tool reports that every time someone loads my blog, 0.01g of CO₂ is produced.

I suspect that this value and rating might fluctuate based on how many images or videos appear in the last 10 posts shown on the front page of the blog.
The results page, also allows to calculate how much CO₂ would be produced in a year based on 10, 100, 1000, … monthly page views and compares this to everyday tasks.
Having 1000 monthly page views on this blog over a whole year, theoretically produces as much CO₂ as boiling water for 16 cups of tea 🍵

(via)

As the CSS code of the blog has been growing lately, I moved it from inline <style> definition to a dedicated css/plain.css file.

With caching headers configured to cache *.css files for 10 days, this brings the problem that browsers need to be instructed to load a new version whenever the content of the file changes.

Removing the caching headers is not desired (as we want to leverage caching and the file does not change so often after all).
Thus I came up with a different workaround:

We add a query parameter to the <link> element that references the CSS file, and then change this query parameter whenever the file content changes.
This way browsers will load the newest version and keep it cached until a newer version is available.

To achieve this, the following script is used to compute and inject the query parameter into the layout template before running Jekyll to generate the HTML pages for the blog:

#!/bin/bash

CSSFILES="css/plain.css"

TARGETFILE="_layouts/x-log.html"


for CSS in $CSSFILES ; do
	sum=$(sha256sum "$CSS"|head -c 6)
	sed -i -e "s_${CSS}_&?${sum}_g" $TARGETFILE
done

It performs the following change in the template file.
Before:

...
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://blog.x-way.org/css/plain.css" type="text/css" media="all">
...

After:

...
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://blog.x-way.org/css/plain.css?f00bad" type="text/css" media="all">
...

As the computed query parameter is based on the hashsum of the content of the CSS file, it only changes when the CSS file is changed, thus ensuring caching still works as expected.

To make emoji stand out better in the text, I applied a trick from Terence Eden to increase their size with CSS and no extra HTML.

It consists of defining a custom font which only applies to the unicode codepoints of emoji and leverages the size-adjust property to draw them larger.

@font-face {
	font-family: "myemoji";
	src: local('Apple Color Emoji'), local('Android Emoji'), local('Segoe UI Emoji'), local('Noto Color Emoji'), local(EmojiSymbols), local(Symbola);
	unicode-range: U+231A-231B, U+23E9-23EC, U+23F0, U+23F3, U+25FD-25FE, U+2614-2615, U+2648-2653, U+267F, U+2693, U+26A1, U+26AA-26AB, U+26BD-26BE, U+26C4-26C5, U+26CE, U+26D4, U+26EA, U+26F2-26F3, U+26F5, U+26FA, U+26FD, U+2705, U+270A-270B, U+2728, U+274C, U+274E, U+2753-2755, U+2757, U+2795-2797, U+27B0, U+27BF, U+2B1B-2B1C, U+2B50, U+2B55, U+FE0F, U+1F004, U+1F0CF, U+1F18E, U+1F191-1F19A, U+1F1E6-1F1FF, U+1F201, U+1F21A, U+1F22F, U+1F232-1F236, U+1F238-1F23A, U+1F250-1F251, U+1F300-1F320, U+1F32D-1F335, U+1F337-1F393, U+1F3A0-1F3CA, U+1F3CF-1F3D3, U+1F3E0-1F3F0, U+1F3F4, U+1F3F8-1F43E, U+1F440, U+1F442-1F4FC, U+1F4FF-1F53D, U+1F54B-1F567, U+1F57A, U+1F595-1F596, U+1F5A4, U+1F5FB-1F64F, U+1F680-1F6CC, U+1F6D0-1F6D2, U+1F6D5-1F6D7, U+1F6DC-1F6DF, U+1F6EB-1F6EC, U+1F6F4-1F6FC, U+1F7E0-1F7EB, U+1F7F0, U+1F90C-1F93A, U+1F93C-1F945, U+1F947-1FA7C, U+1FA80-1FAC5, U+1FACE-1FADB, U+1FAE0-1FAE8, U+1FAF0-1FAF8;
	size-adjust: 120%;
}

By adding the custom font as first option in the font-family directive for body text, it will be applied to the emoji and all other characters will use the existing font as fallback.

body {
    font-family: "myemoji", Verdana, sans-serif;
}

The outcome is nicely visible on posts such as Fifty Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio 📻, Puppet updated! and The High-Risk Refactoring 🍹😎

The following command outputs the current time formatted according to ISO 8601 and RFC3339. It can be used for example in JSON/HTML.

date -u '+%FT%TZ'

2024-08-03T14:41:47Z

Useful trick posted by Volker Weber: enable the Orientation Lock by default and use Automation Shortcuts to toggle it when Apps such as Photos or YouTube are opened/closed.
This allows to view pictures/videos in landscape mode while other Apps remain in portrait mode, all without having to manually toggle the Orientation Lock.

Discovered today that Puppet arrays have a built-in flatten method (which is actually provided by the underlying Ruby array).
This can make dealing with potentially nested arrays in ERB templates much easier.

The following example is from the ERB documentation:

# Peers
<% [@peers].flatten.each do |peer| -%>
peer <%= peer %>
<% end -%>

This allows for nice flexibility as @peers can now be either a single value, an array, or a nested array and all are handled in the same way without needing to write complicated if/else statements.

Let's Encrypt announced that it intends to stop supporting OCSP, which means that OCSP is basically dead now.

OCSP stapling on my server has been enabled since 2012.
With the prospect of it no longer working in the future, I've disabled it again in the nginx configuration.

	# aj, 05.11.2012, OCSP stapling (for testing see http://unmitigatedrisk.com/?p=100)
        # aj, 25.07.2024, turn it off again, as letsencrypt will disable it: https://letsencrypt.org/2024/07/23/replacing-ocsp-with-crls.html
#	ssl_stapling on;

There are some new blog directory sites popping up again. Nice way to discover niche personal sites outside of the big platforms.

• ooh.directory
• personalsit.es
• blogroll.org