So you have an ActivityPub actor and you want to say something. What are you going to post? Might I suggest a Note?

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One of the basic objects in ActivityPub is the actor. Also known as a Person, although there’s no promise it’s a human. If you are building ActivityPub software, or curious how the network works, it’s a good place to start. The ActivityPub spec (and underlying ActivityStreams vocabulary) explain what could or should be here, but not necessarily what you’ll see in the wild.

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When a web page (or other resource) cannot be found, a web server is supposed to return code 404, Not Found. Additionally, it can return some other content for a human viewer. And so, if you visit https://mastodon.social/honktime with a browser, you can watch a tooter tantrum, but requesting the same URL with curl displays < HTTP/2 404.

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You’re out there posting on your federated status federator, and people are reading your posts, and you’re reading their posts, but how exactly does it happen? What’s talking to what? (Equally applicable to tooting, but we don’t use that word in my house.)

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One of the unexpected but very interesting side effects of the brutalist html quine is that anything added to the page suddenly becomes visible as well. In the common case, this might be browser extensions adding custom stylesheets, but it might also be stylesheet or script injection by a network interloper.

What if every web page had a little something like this embedded in it?

<style>head { display: block; }
link[rel=stylesheet], style, script { display: block; font-family: monospace; white-space: pre-wrap; }
link:not([href^="/style.css"])::before { content:attr(href) }</style>

That’s an actual style. It should be the only one visible on this page. If there’s anything else visible, it’s not coming from me.

It’s been a little while, so a few more notes about ActivityPub implementation, federation, and other odds and ends. There’s no real order to these notes, just things that have come up in the past two months.

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The wifi network at BSDcan, really the UOttawa network, blocks a bunch of ports. This makes it difficult to connect to outside machines using “exotic” protocols, basically anything except http or https. There are many ways to resolve this, here’s what I did.

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Something that’s annoyed me for some years is that all the web sites I build don’t work quite right with my iphone. Scroll down a page, visit a link, go back, and safari jumps back to the top of the page. Very annoying. Pretty much no other site I visit seems to have this problem, yet I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong since I’m barely doing anything at all. There are some support forum complaints about similar bugs, but mostly from several years ago, and mostly “solved: it works now” without explanation.

Finally, figured out what seems to be the problem. The iphone introduces its own viewport meta tag, to define the screen dimensions, and control whether the user can zoom or not. A lot of sites abuse this to the point of unusability, so I very determinedly stayed clear. But without a viewport tag, safari is really dumb.

Without a viewport setting safari picks some defaults and renders the page to fit. They seem fine to me. The problem is that after leaving a page and coming back, safari has forgotten what size it picked, picks again, and then has to reflow all the page content. Even though it has picked exactly the same dimensions as the previous render. With the result that it forgets its scroll position and resets to the top of the page. Sigh. At least that’s what I’ve determined is going on.

So I finally broke down and added a viewport tag to the header. This required futzing with the CSS some more because now it rendered to a much smaller virtual canvas, but generally solvable.

Anyway, this frustrated me for a long time, I couldn’t find any useful information about it, and now it seems to work.

I posted a tiny png, a mastodon stepped on it, and... it got really big.

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honk is my take on a federated status updater. One might say it’s opinionated software. Since my opinions are correct, this makes honk the world’s first provably correct social media application. Here’s a formerly brief rundown of things that work, things that don’t work, and things that won’t work. Plus some complaints about how other people do things. The version number, 0.1, indicates your expected level of satisfaction.

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