Endgame Viable

Morning! I awoke too early again this morning.

Yesterday I mowed the front and back yards with the riding mower (I live on about a one-acre lot, so push mowing is not an option), then I used my string mower to trim around the house, which is, unfortunately, a push mower. It was hot and humid outside but I wanted to get it done before the predicted rain today.

For me, a person who is not exactly in stellar physical condition irrespective of any current health issues, it was a lot of work, and this morning my whole body aches.

I spent the rest of yesterday working on the blog.

On the agenda for today is driving clear across town to get an MRI on my neck, and continuing to work on the comment system for the blog.

I’m working on adding real-life authentication to sign in for comments, another long-standing goal of mine. With Blaugust popping off, it seems like a good time to work on that.

Initially I’m adding Google auth and IndieAuth, two authentication schemes on the opposite spectrum of the privacy spectrum, which I find delightfully confounding. Is he a corporate shill or an indie darling? Nobody knows!

So far, adding Google auth was spectacularly easy.

Adding IndieAuth is nowhere near as easy. This matches my general web experience, where niche developer-focused solutions tend to be far less user-friendly.

Auth schemes I won’t be adding include Facebook and X, in case you’re wondering. I use Google auth as my primary Internet identity provider, so that’s why I wanted to add that one. The rest can go pound sand, as far as I’m concerned. Unless there’s a huge public demand for something.

However, I may also add a Mastadon authentication, because it looks straightforward and I know there are a lot of Mastadon users in this corner of the blogosphere.

There isn’t a huge benefit of authenticating to leave comments here, by the way. It mainly prevents anyone else from leaving comments under your name. Activity on my blog is so low that such a problem doesn’t exist anyway. The whole authentication addition is mainly a development exercise for me to play with something new.

Anyway I hope to roll all of that out to the blog by the end of the day today. Hopefully without completely breaking everything.

As for the MRI, I can report that my right thumb and arm have not been bothering me as much lately, and in fact I can bend my right thumb slightly more than I could a few days ago, so I’m hopeful that the underlying cause may be addressable with something like physical therapy rather than surgery.

I tried to read some Blaugust posts and even post some comments but, man, there’s a lot. I want to focus on more of the post-WordPress-era DIY blogs this year if I can.

Because WordPress still vexes me even from beyond the grave. I still have the same persistent problem where I simply can’t comment on WordPress blogs because of some annoying login issue. It keeps detecting that I have to login with my old blog’s WordPress credentials to post a comment even when I don’t want to, and of course my credentials are long gone, so it never works and I have to give up because I simply can’t be bothered to debug that issue.

And that’s about all I have time for. I forgot to set a timer once again, but I want to get back to working on the comment system.