Attention anyone reading via the feed: please switch to using the RSS feed instead of the atom feed. The atom feed has a number of issues with posts appearing out of order, the RSS feed doesn't have any of those problems. It's the same URL, just append ?type=rss to the end, like this:

https://bluelander.bearblog.dev/feed/?type=rss

I apologize for the inconvenience. I just learned that this option's available, otherwise I'd have used it from the beginning.

feedback

In response to webmentions & reply buttons, inbtwn said:

i really like the idea of webmentions... i just wish they weren't so confusing to understand @_@

also, i have a feature request for the blog: would it be possible to add a 'search' box or page somewhere? i remember mentioning gemini in one of your posts but i don't remember which one and it's kind of a pain to click through all of them, as good as they are. :P thanks in advance!

First off, thanks for the kind words! I replied to him over on fedi with the link (he was looking for garbage digest issue 05) but I wanted to answer it here too.

There's unfortunately no search function I can enable. The only thing I could offer was a promise to try to be better about tagging entries; however, I later remembered that the RSS feed contains a full text copy of the entire blog, and realized that would be the best solution.

Before I suggested it, I wanted to see if I could figure out what was causing all the bizarre timestamp errors,¹ so I was trying the feed in different readers and looking at the data and trying to figure out what the heck was happening. Finally, I searched the github repository and found an old closed issue where I discovered that you can get an RSS feed instead. When I tried it, that one works perfectly. So rather than wait for the bug fix, I suggest everyone please just switch to that. I've updated the link in the header, too.

I'll be honest, I don't know the difference between RSS and atom, and have no clue whether there's a reason to pick one over the other. I'm sure atom has advantages, otherwise people wouldn't use it; but all I know is that right now, the RSS feed works, and the atom feed thinks some entries were posted a month before I even signed up:

If you want to search the blog and don't have an RSS reader, I recommend FeedDemon for Windows, QuiteRSS for Linux, and Flym for Android. They're all extremely lightweight and functional. If you use an apple device, as always, my condolences.

You can also just open the RSS feed as text and ctrl-F, but picking the URL out of the morass of tags and funky character-escape code isn't pleasant, so even if you don't want to get blog updates that way, a feed reader is a handy thing to have 🦝

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1. Obviously the order of the entries doesn't matter if all you're doing is searching and clicking the link, but looking at the feed reminded me how much worse the problem is getting the more entries I have, and I really didn't want to suggest a solution to a problem that was itself full of problems.↩