Natalie
wrote:
Once I add the ability to embed arbitrary blog posts from other
blogs on here it's over. I'm gonna be reblogging like a wild
animal. Y'all are gonna have your eyes blown clean outta your
heads.
Thrilled to announce that I now have this up and running, at least
in its most basic aspect. The embed above is automatically generated
and pulled down directly from the source post. Nothing in
this is specific to my blog; I can also do it with someone else's.
By way of example, please enjoy this post from my beautiful wife:
Liz
wrote:
Injecting embeds
Here's what the embed looks like in my blog source right now:
{% genericPost "https://nex-3.com/blog/once-i-add-the/",
time: "2024-09-20T07:06:00Z",
tags: "#meta",
author: "Natalie",
authorUrl: "/",
authorAvatar: "/assets/avatar.webp" %}
<p>
Once I add the ability to embed arbitrary blog posts from other blogs on
here it's over. I'm gonna be reblogging like a wild animal. Y'all are gonna
have your eyes blown clean outta your heads.
</p>
{% endgenericPost %}
I have a template for the embed, some CSS to style it, and a little
custom Liquid tag to bring it all together. But the real magic is in
how I generate the genericPost in the first place.
Here's what the original source looks like before I run my
embed injector
on it:
https://nex-3.com/blog/once-i-add-the/
That's it! Just a URL surrounded by empty lines. The injector pulls
down the webpage, extracts critical information about the blog post,
and replaces the URL with a call to genericPost. My
Letterboxd and Cohost embeds work the same way, with their own
custom templates and metadata that let me match the style of the
original websites.
Structured post data with h-entry
But I did say that this wasn't specific to my blog. With Letterboxd
and Cohost, I've just hard-coded their HTML structure. I can't rely
on that if I want to get information from any old blog, though. They
all use different HTML structures!
So instead, I'm making use of the
h-entry microformat. This is a tiny little specification that defines a way to mark up
an existing post to indicate metadata in the existing HTML
structure. At its simplest, it's just a few class names annotated
with the HTML. Here's the simplified HTML for the post above:
<article class="h-entry">
<p class="attribution">
<a href="/blog/once-i-add-the/" rel="canonical" class="u-url">
Posted
<time datetime="2024-09-20T07:06:00Z" class="dt-published">
20 September 2024
</time>
by
<span class="p-author h-card">
<span class="p-name">Natalie</span>
<data class="u-url" value="/"></data>
<data class="p-logo" value="/assets/avatar.webp"></data>
</span>
</a>
</p>
<div class="e-content">
<p>
Once I add the ability to embed arbitrary blog posts from other
blogs on here it's over. I'm gonna be reblogging like a wild animal.
Y'all are gonna have your eyes blown clean outta your heads.
</p>
</div>
<ol class="tags"><li><a href="/tag/meta" class="p-category">meta</a></li></ol>
</article>
Here are the special class names I'm using:
-
h-entry wraps the entire thing, indicating that it's
a post.
-
u-url goes on a link and indicates the post's
canonical URL.
-
dt-published goes on a
<time> element
and indicates when the post was made.
-
p-author can just be the author's name, but I've made
it into a whole
h-card with the
following metadata:
p-name is my name.-
u-url is my personal URL, which is to say this
website.
-
p-logo is the URL of my avatar, so people
reblogging me have something to show by my posts.
-
p-name isn't used here because this post is untitled,
but if it had a title that would be the class for it.
-
e-content is the HTML content of the post itself.
-
p-category is the name of a tag associated with the
post.
Of these, only h-entry, u-url, and
e-content are really critical. There are a
handful of other features defined in the spec, including a way to
indicate which post you're replying to, that you should check out if
you're interested. But these are the most critical.
Make your posts rebloggable!
You should do this too! If you can edit your blog's post layout,
it's extremely easy. Just add those classes to the appropriate
places, and you're off to go. If you don't already have an HTML
element for some piece of information, you can add invisible
<data> tags like I did above to provide the info
to consumers without changing the way your post looks to readers.
Even if your blog doesn't allow you to edit the layout, if you can
add HTML to the posts you can do this by hand. There's no need to
use the specific <article> or
<p> tags I do above... just divs will work. You
can even make your rebloggable content different than the original,
which I'm planning to do to avoid having my embeds look too weird if
they get reblogged.
If you end up adding h-entry support, or even better if you end up
making use of mine, drop me a comment and let me know!
