2026-04-09 21:37
I've added some data analysis into my training log so that it can total up and average out across months and years - only from 2024 onwards until I format and add earlier data.
Tag: changelog
2026-04-08 21:48
I've fixed the color scheme of my rebuilt website in lightmode. A nice shade of Burnley claret now, not a royal blue and white belonging in a dark circle on the map, 13 miles away.
2026-04-07 22:09
I've added two functions to my PureBlog install, to extract the first image, and the first description or first paragraph in a post, with a custom header.php using them for opengraph. I need to copy two files into my install after each update - feed and header.
2026-04-04 Theme updates
What else to do on a long bank holiday weekend than play about with web design? I've implemented custom header and fonts, accented headers, widened view. Need to upgrade archives, and make that light theme Burnley acceptable!
Dark theme - Gold on Black
Light theme - Royal Blue on White
Hashtags in Pure Blog Feeds
I spent a little time this morning getting Pure Blog categories to automatically inject into the bottom of the feed content, using a custom function, and an amend to the feeds template. I will no longer need to write this manually at the bottom of each post.
/content/functions.php
----------------------
<?php
function render_hashtag_links(array $tags): string
{
$tags = array_values(array_filter(array_map('trim', $tags)));
if (!$tags) {
return '';
}
$links = [];
foreach ($tags as $tag) {
$slug = normalize_tag($tag);
$links[] = '<category>' . e($tag) . '</category>';
}
return implode(', ', $links);
}
?>
This creates a similar function to the existing tag function, but only provides the hashtag text, no link. This loads alongside the default /functions.php file, and will persist beyond updates. I then inject this into category elements below the description element inside feed.php
/feed.php (bottom of <item> block)
----------------------------------
<item>
...
<description><![CDATA[<?= $content ?>]]></description>
<?php if (!empty($post['tags'])): ?>
<?= render_hashtag_links($post['tags']) ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</item>
In theory I should be able to map a custom route to a custom feed.php, but in reality Pure Blog seems to default the original feed.php anyway - so while the custom function will persist, I'll need to remember to make this insert after the <?= $content ?> to feed.php whenever an update overwrites that file.
Also in version 2.0 Kev has added tag autocomplete. Once I've been through and made all of my existing tags lower case, that is going to be a great help. 2.0 looks like a monster of an update I still need to digest, I have no idea where Kev fins the time 🙏❤️!
Moving to Pureblog and a new domain
This website has become a bit nomadic over the last wee while transiting from lee-perry.co.uk to l.prry.uk before landing on its final resting place here at prry.uk.
The software powering the site has been similarly changeable. What started with amalgamating all of my wordpress projects in a single Hugo based site on Micro.blog, grew into a much more complex site built in Kirby CMS, simplified itself into a bearblog experiment, metamorphosed into a similar project using 11ty, before landing on Pure Blog via an abortive move back to Micro.Blog.
Why?
Explaining the domain name switch is simple, I'll always maintain my lee-perry.co.uk domain, I've been hosting on it since 2004. I just like the new shorter domain that I've got hold of. Originally I'd planned to host my Mastodon instance on that domain, but moved my site onto it once I'd decided (for the second time) that self-hosting is expensive, wasteful, and very quiet (moving to social.lol).
Explaining the move to Pure Blog is more complex, as I've enjoyed building every iteration of this site over the last few years. I loved learning to template in Hugo and applying it to make Micro.Blog more customisable. Then I really enjoyed building a more complex site and dashboard using Kirby CMS. Using Bearblog showed me how you could take a very simple blogging system and make it do more complex things, and in 11ty I applied the same concepts and design while going back to basics from the console before plugging in the excellent PagesCMS.
That last development introduced a few things that I was less happy with though. Having worked hard to exclude big tech from my life where I can, Apple largely excluded for the moment, using PagesCMS meant using Github and Netlify for hosting and deployment - though it did make deployment much more straightforward than my earlier Codeberg / Statichost setup.
I considered moving back to Micro.Blog at this point, spending a week building out a concept. This was borne out of a few things. I love the app environment over there, am interested in the new extended video hosting features, and also the new RSS aggregator inkwell. I was also intrigued by the 'check-in' functionality in the Micro.Social app. I aborted this though, it felt as isolated as my previous stay, and an expensive way of gaining a few phone apps and video hosting vs my current setup with Bunny.
Pure Blog
So here I am now rebuilding my site on Pure Blog.
I remember seeing Kev's earlier Hyde CMS sat on top of Jekyll, being impressed and envious in equal measure. So once I'd realised how straightforward Pure Blog is to install on traditional hosting without needing a VPS or Docker and any of that nonsense, I was sold (his Pure Comments project is similarly straightforward). I downloaded the zip from github, uploaded to the site folder in the file manager on my Krystal.io hosting, moved the files back to the root of the folder, visited my website, and followed the on screen installation instructions. Up and running in around a minute and all very straightforward.
If one of the reasons that I moved to Pure Blog was simplicity, as well as ejecting the big-tech addition to my 11ty setup, portability was also key. Pure Blog stores files in the content folder in plain markdown text format with fairly standard looking yaml frontmatter. It would be super easy to pick the site up later and completely rebuild it using Jekyll or Hugo in future, and for the most part the reader would not know or even need to know that had happened.
I've enjoyed my time writing in Pure Blog so far, easy to set up, pleasant but bare bones enough to enjoy writing in markdown text within. Ready to go out of the box as a blog, I've configured different content post types for articles, micro posts, image posts, training entries and link posts. I've not done much with the content structures yet, I want to keep this as simple as possible - but I can build specific fields into my custom content temnplates if and when I choose to.
I like Pure Blog so much that I have created a separate site trackd purely to capture short activity tracking posts that syndicate out to the fediverse, but otherwise feel weird to send out within my RSS field. I then plugged in Pure Comments to both, installed on my chatter subdomain, with Amazon SES to serve email (mainly because I just failed to get SMTP to work at all). I'll come back to this later, as I don't really want Amazon in my stack, or after a weird payment to Twilio after a decade this week, longstanding payment instructions sat in unused accounts.
Probably the most complex thing that I've done so far with Pure Blog is to build a custom front page, pulling through the latest posts from each section. Kev quickly update Pure Blog so that a custom front page would be selected where a custom route was set to it on the home url.
I have implemented microformats within the theme where easily able to, I don't think its straightforward to implement h-feed to archive pages without beginning to overhaul templates that would need to be reimplemented after every update. I've customised a Pure Blog version of the webmentions script that I had previously installed on both the 11ty and bearblog versions of my site. I think that is an improvement as it groups the mentions into a single row, taking up less space on the page. I have also made a wee Pure Blog svg to follow the day/night theme colours, positioned within my footer - that took far longer than it should have!
To do
I've still got plenty of work to do on this move, but I'm really happy with the choice and planning to hang around for a while.
I've brought across parts of my site collateral, but I've done very little theming so far, and need to put more of my stamp on the design. Part of the reason for that is, fonts aside, there are a lot of synergies between the core design and my previous design - especially in night view. So I need to style up my site.
I will probably have custom content structures that I want to create, but for now I'm trying to keep the field structure as flat as possible. Lets see how that goes.
The main thing that I need to do now is to import my existing content, preferably without making echofeed go haywire. On that point, echofeed definitely needs a master off switch. This is going to take some time though, I have thousands of pieces of content in different content structures across my 11ty and KirbyCMS builds, and its going to take some time to reformat the content and frontmatter and to move images into the right folder stucture - I'm going to try to write a script to do that when I have a moment.
Pure Blog
Great to write in, flexible enough to build custom content, but limited enough to make you not want to. Kev wrote that he thought that Pure Blog was feature complete ish. I think its great, I see a few areas where, selfishly, it can be improved further to simplify my workflow, without pulling it too far away from what it was designed to be:
- Automatically including categories as tags available within RSS feed content
- Automatically making the first image in a post available in a featured image shortcode
- Option to include post description in a summery element within post and feed
- Maybe even the ability to create a custom feed.php in the site content folder, bringing custom fields in to the feed.
- Multiple image upload.
I'd always advocate for baking microformats directly into posts, pages and feeds - but that may not be a direction Kev wants to take Pure Blog in.
Hopefully thats all constructive. I think anybody is capable of building and producing content using Pure Blog, and if you've never written in markdown, you'll not look at a text editor in the same way again once you have!
Until next time...
Footer update
Firmly in the incremental upgrades bracket, I have made myself a little SVG of the power of 10 logo, and linked it through to my 'athlete' 🤣 profile from my website footer.
Defaults
I added a defaults page to my site, talking through the applications that I use at the beginning of 2026 - https://l.prry.uk/defaults
Linkblog
Inspired by @paternoster@mas.to reading feed, I've bolted a simple linkblog onto my site. I need to weave it in properly to the topic archives, but seems to be working and echoing as intended.
Pages CMS
One of my objectives for this week off was to connect a CMS to my 11ty site to make it easier to post from mobile - here is PagesCMS editing my repo directly, with Netlify auto publishing any commits. ✅
Removing Image Transform
I've removed image transform from my 11ty site, I was concerned about build time and resource usage once I start to bring legacy content across, replcing it with a webp conversion action in automator on my images folder. Pagination is the final item left on my initial todo list, but is trickier than it should be due to the dynamic filtration in my templates.
2025-07-20 22:15
I've implemented the sharing and button upgrades from (link: https://mastodon.online/@mauricerenck text: @mauricerenck@mastodon.online) IndieConnector 2.10.0 for KirbyCMS. It tidied up my panel view, with most blueprints fitting on a page.
Webmentions
I have quickly added 4 x webmention templates to my site for bookmarks, likes, replies and reposts. Still working out exactly how they work, but excited about the functionality this adds to my site.
IndieConnector 2.8
Excited to have installed v2.8 of (link: https://mastodon.online/@mauricerenck text: @mauricerenck@mastodon.online)'s indieConnector, collecting responses directly from Mastodon and Bluesky. Now I just need to work out how to turn brid.gy off.
2025-04-22 21:25
After spending the evening rebuilding microformats, as hoped, comments are now landing on the target article, and not my homepage. The indiewebify.me validators made this so much easier than the documentation.
Activity metadata
As knee deep in code today, I also took the opportunity to upgrade the run/ride metadata on my site so that is more prominent and iconised, similar to my RSS and echofeed streams.
Komments 3.1.1
As it was a long weekend, I spent a day installing Komments 3.1.1 on my Kirby CMS build, and styling the new output streams. Have just concluded a morning of looking for html problems in my css.
2025-02-09 12:45
I have updated my rss feeds to incorporate additional metadata, and incorporated my final content types (for now). Except for some minor templating remaining, this phase of development is complete.
2025-02-08 15:50
I've completely rewritten my microblog page as I could not work out why responsivity on mobile was broken on the first archive page (only!). I've stripped back the code, making it simple and lean.
