ok no it's fine i figured it out

archive.org couldn't reach my website for some time and cached its down status

but Save Page Now worked flawlessly thanks to me not blocking archivers from my blog <3

no robots.txt — winners keep winning~ though i think most modern archivists tend to ignore it anyway lmao

did i just fucking jinx myself

why can't the web archive reach my website

aaaaaaaa

It looks like this domain is in peril.

The Russian government has made a law that you have to be identified via Госуслуги to be able to manage a domain in the ".ru" zone. Well, guess what, it's two weeks before the deadline, and I'm not up-to-date on this.

I have a working Госуслуги account. I could tie it to my registrar. There's just one hitch. The domain registrar still has my deadname on file and they don't seem to want to update it. And I can't bind my Госуслуги to a domain which isn't registered "in my name" (meaning the data has to match).

Well, partially this is on me, I guess, I should've been more proactive in managing my domain owner info. But can you blame a girl for only learning about all this around July? And it all worked just fine before, the registrar for whatever reason didn't even care that the passport on file was expired, like, five renewal terms ago.

But now the form that updates one's owner data is silently eating my documents with zero feedback and I feel like I'll have to message support (which I did) and wait for their reply.

I guess the 14-year old me made a mistake when trusting my country with something so precious. And now I am paying the price for her lapse in judgement (but how could she have known?!)

What do I stand to lose?

Thankfully, the domain's not gonna be cancelled, but if I don't manage to update all of the data and bind the Госуслуги account in time, I may not able to renew it when winter comes. And this means I lose the domain in around 5 months. Let's try to enumerate what will be impacted:

E-mail

Thankfully, my email is self-hosted. My archives are going to be fine. But the ability to receive email may be compromised as a result. And when some services don't allow changing your email address, because somebody had a bright idea of using email as primary key, that might be a problem.

I'll need to compile a list of services I've ever registered on and see if any of them could accept an alternative email address.

Oh, and I'll have to put MX records on my other domain, probably. I think I could just route them to the same underlying mail server; Reverse-DNS could throw a spanner in the works, but surely one could work around that?… I'll need more research on this topic.

Blog permalinks

I've been linked around the web. I'm no celebrity, but I think there could be a few dozen permalinks on the Internet that will inevitably break if I have to move domains. Some of them are on publicly-editable websites, and I could update them; some of them are not and the website owners will have to put in the work.

Hopefully my website was crawled by the Web Archive? I'll need to test that~ I don't think I ever put on a robots.txt on the apex, so there should be nothing preventing archive.org from crawling my permalinks.

IndieAuth

This domain is my IndieAuth identity. And while the website itself will be forever preserved (and could move to another domain if needed), I'm not sure how IndieAuth consumers might handle my me value changing.

I planned to do roughly the following:

• Migrate my blog to another domain
• Put an IndieAuth shim onto this domain that redirects to the new location of my blog
• Try logging in around the web (mostly the IndieAuth wiki)
• Seeing if initiating the ceremony with https://fireburn.ru/ and ending it with me="https://vikanezrimaya.xyz/" is gonna be handled correctly

The answer to the last bullet point: probably not. As far as I understand (and I've written two or three IndieAuth implementations from scratch, so I know a thing or two about the protocol), the domain is the root of identity, and a different me value is a different user entirely. This is how someone on a multi-identity website could log in with the root of their website and get to an identity selector that would allow them to choose the hat to wear for this sign-in. Every single persona is a different IndieAuth identity, because it's a different URL. And I don't know if any software would interpret something like a 301 redirect from a me value as a sign that it will need to be replaced — after all, somebody could be using me as the primary key (see the "E-mail" section above!).

Memories

Well, those will remain. As long as the archives have crawled my blog. As long as I live. But it's still gonna be sad to lose such a memento — a domain I owned almost since the day I gained a semblance of legal personhood in form of a passport and a bank card.

I even messaged the support of my registrar back in the day, asking if one needed to be of age to register the domain. "No", they said, "having a passport and a valid payment method are the only requirements". It was a small window into the world for me — a place of my own.

I don't want to lose it. 😭

Afterword

If anything happens. If this page disappears from the internet. Look for me at vikanezrimaya.xyz — I promise I'll try hard not to lose that one.

I'll make sure this page is crawled by the Archive as soon as I post it, so this forever remains in history even if the domain were to be lost.

if your CLI tool doesn't have a man page, what the heck are you doing?

and no, auto-generated man pages from clap macros don't count. Conversions from asciidoc or markdown are on thin ice.

go learn troff and write a man page, it's fun~

i hate a/b tests, this feels unethical as fuck

wait what do you mean today's not saturday

i should stop nerdsniping myself with troff

I think default User-Agent headers in HTTP libraries are an anti-pattern.

Any HTTP library's Client object SHOULD require the consumer to explicitly set its User-Agent and MUST throw an error if the User-Agent header is implicitly unset and was not explicitly set.

Wow. I forgot how nice passkeys are. Two new devices added to my website in five minutes.

I kind of cheated when logging in on my phone — using my password instead of plugging in my NitroKey. But I could do that!

Then I created a device-bound passkey on my phone. At least I think I did — Google's passkey UI is rather inconsistent, but my phone is on an older version of Android/GMS and it still has this weird bug that makes Google Password Manager not activate on navigator.credentials.create(). Well, I did want a device-bound passkey anyway (a roaming passkey is only little more secure than a password, since it can be extracted still) so I achieved my goal.

Then I decided my tablet also deserves a passkey. In a fit of whimsy I decided to start acpassley authentication flow right away — and quickly found an option to scan a QR code with my phone to leverage a passkey I already created. A tiny bit of fiddling with a QR code and a fingerprint scan later my tablet was in my site's dashboard.

And then I wanted to create a passkey on my tablet. Which immediately tried to shove me into a cloud passkey flow. I had to tap "other" — and then it assumed I'd want to plug in a USB key. Sort-of reasonable assumption, but no — I had to press "other" again. Finally, the OS gave up and asked me directly: "fine, where do you want your passkey then?" "This device" was the option I wanted.

Aside from this little argument with my tablet… I love living in the passwordless future.

i really should stop making my poor raspberry pi 4 compile an entire linux kernel. this is single-board-computer cruelty

maybe I'm ignorant but why do a lot of research papers are published in two-column format? it's really inconvenient to read on-screen, I have to scroll up and down and it's distracting

I tried some solutions for rewriting such PDFs to something more acceptable, but they either don't work or rely on outdated dependencies…

Getting a proper "storybook"-ish renderer for Kittybox's templates was a good idea — now I can quickly iterate on the design of my comments section without actually running the app or populating the database with fake content!

I just pipe an MF2-JSON blob down a single executable, and out comes an HTML page I can view in my browser. Basic CSS is inlined so it looks almost the same as the finished product. The only thing broken is the font style, because the fonts are supposed to be fetched from the static folder, and the static folder isn't there in a self-contained HTML file.

I could probably produce an assets folder and rewrite all <link> URLs to point to that folder, but it's too much hassle for a simple hack. And it allows me to view what my pages would look like without custom fonts, which I heard some people forbid in their browsers anyway for bandwidth reasons.

…or I could just install the same font families on my machine. If I could be bothered doing that.

This solution doesn't require me to spin up a web server, doesn't require me to run anything, doesn't require me to run or manage a staging database filled with fake data, doesn't require me to submit web forms to configure template parameters, it does one thing and does it well. And it would probably run in CI, too, if I wanted to make snapshot tests. (Though in-crate tests are probably better for that purpose.)

Noticed some interesting effects on YouTube's buttons today. Turns out they seem to be created by a <yt-light-shape> custom element.

Seems to be mostly CSS, it kind of works when I copy it into a separate file, but not quite (the effect shows, but it doesn't look as good). Something's still missing, and I wonder what exactly. Perhaps the outer elements provide additional styles or settings or variables — the text color looked off, too…

almost got baited into posting a good-faith argument in a bad-faith discussion

don't make this mistake i beg of you

More and more I use my website's media endpoint purely for hosting random images I upload to the internet (most often images that I then post on tangled.org issues).

I guess this, too, is owning your data~

shit i can't nerdsnipe myself into reproducing a research paper now I AM EMPLOYED I HAVE A JOB