Hey! iDestyKK here. Time for another diary entry. I'm going to try to keep this one short.

Website Statuses

It seems like the standard for posting statuses on the Indie Web is via status.cafe. However, when I tried to register, I found out really quickly that it is probably run by one person and registrations are done manually. It's been about a week now and my account hasn't been activated just yet.

Naturally, I wasn't going to wait for approval. So I decided to write my own engine for posting statuses onto my site. This also gives me full control over the content that I publish. I can adjust indicators, timestamps, format, etc.

The plan of attack is simple, but not scalable. Write a JSON file that contains all of the statuses in reverse-chronological order where the newest status is at the top of the file. Then the oldest status is at the bottom of the file. Something like this:

[
	{
		"message": "Hello! This is my second message.",
		"date_unix": 1772390247
	},
	{
		"message": "Hello! This is my first message.",
		"date_unix": 1772306448
	}
]

If you load this file in PHP and decode the array, the 0th index is guaranteed to always be the latest entry. And we can skip sorting by just making sure the file is always stored in sorted order based on date_unix. It's a very, very simple status-updating system. It's also very simple to make an archive page that just loops through the JSON data and injects it straight into the page.

I like the simplicity of this. But it also means that I must push to my site via SFTP on every single update. Additionally, it isn't scalable. Like if I have a thousand statuses, I don't want to load all of those on every single page load. There are UNIX tools such as head to help with this. But until we hit a scalability problem, I'll keep it simple for now. I also debated whether to use Discord messages or not. It's possible to write a bot that will extract message data and upload it via SFTP automatically. Then just have a channel of "statuses".

Edit: My account got approved just after I complained. Maybe I will use it then? Who knows. But it allows my site to be a little more visible so I might switch over. I'll think about it.

Secret String

On the home page of my site, you might notice a new asset:

On the topic of Discord, the "secret" string is powered by a Discord bot. The bot takes my Discord status and uploads it via SFTP automatically to the web server as a TXT file. Then some PHP pages will read the contents of that file and use it. What the string means will remain a mystery. But just note that it comes from Discord.