This weekend I worked on some things on Seblog, and since I did some productive work on other projects today, I feel like I can write a blogpost about it without sounding so procrastinating.

Inspired by Aaron Parecki's monthly overviews, and triggered by @zegnat, who was looking for the same type of page on my site, I started to 'deconstruct' my URLs. You can now remove parts of it and still get useful pages. That was on my list of itches since november 2015 now.

So let me explain my URL design first. This post, for example, is /2017/06/20/1/daily-and-monthly-overviews. This is an idea I got from the wiki, and probably also originates with Aaron. The identifying part of it is the date, followed by an ID (the nth post of that day). The slug is just for humans and can be omitted: you will get redirected to the right one. Some posts don't even have one. This allows for a Whistle-style URL shortener which I run at 5eb.nl. (This post can be found through 5eb.nl/4ox1.)

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The first step was to remove the ID, to get to a day view. I just list all the posts that are created on that day, including private posts when I'm logged in, but oldest-first instead of the newest-first order of my feeds. I also display a summary of the day in icons at the top. I'm really pleased with how it turned out!

After that, I also wanted the monthly view, to get a better overview. I'm really pleased with that too, it's nice to go through my old posts this way, seeing old memories. I'm now more interested in importing my Facebook posts too. I am still looking for a way to have some anchor or summary of the day in my monthly view, to find posts quicker, and adding a location like Aaron might do the trick, but I'll have to figure out how to do that still :)

I'm quite happy with this for now!

The past week I mentioned both Martijn and the Twitter-account of the Dutch Railways (@ns_online) in different blogposts. For Martijn, I used a hand-written link with the proper .u-category.h-card classes to person-tag him. [see update below] For @NS_online, I wanted to @-mention them in the POSSE'd tweet. Martijn complained that my blog didn't autolink them, so that's what I fixed now.

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I have a new syntax to @-mention (and thus tag) people in my blogposts.

• I want to match names like @name
• I don't want to match the word @-mention itself.
• I want to be able to escape the @-mention with a \, like \@name, so I can talk about @-mentions in a blogposts (this one, actually, I like meta-meta-meta).

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Then the syntax. Obviously I use an @-symbol, with a name behind it. I then check the name for the following:

• Is the name on my list of names? Then use the URL I provided.
• Does the name contain a dot? Then assume it's a domain / URL itself, so add replace @ with http:// (@seblog.nl becomes <a href="https://seblog.nl/">Sebastiaan Andeweg</a>)
• And if it doesn't contain a dot, assume it's a Twitter account.

I then fetch the h-card (or profile information) from the resulting URL, and use the name that's there.

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There are times, however, where I want to specify the name. In the example at the beginning of this post, I called Martijn 'Martijn', not 'Martijn van der Ven', which is on is h-card. Sometimes a full name makes no sense. So I can add the name I want to use in brackets behind the tag (@Zegnat[Martijn]). This way I have total control over my text (and possible conjugations if I start writing in a language that needs those, not that I speak one).

Then it all comes down to the following syntax:

@namefromcache        > the URL I specified
@someone.com          > that URL
@facebook.com/someone > also the literal URL
@twitteruser          > their Twitter profile URL
@someone[This Person] > my own name for them
\@someone             > escaped tag

I now need to redo my automated webmention-sending, for it does not yet recognise these tags. Manual sending works fine!

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Edit: after some discussion during the Virtual HWC EU-time, I realised that just doing @someone is not really person-tagging them. Person tagging is explicitly saying "I am now with this person", which makes sense for photos and checkins, but not always in blogposts.

I added a minor tweak: I can now use + instead of @ to really person-tag someone. The @ is used for just a mention, the +-mention will receive the class="u-category h-card" markup. I don't know how much I will be using that, but I have that option now.