#dmwow

[the-dmwow]

anyway, today I did three things:

play Nier Automata (three months later and I still haven’t beaten route A…)

try to update my website, and fail

get my bots working again

I just want to get to the point where I can automate everything 😂

[the-dmwow]

Ok! How long has it been since I’ve been here?

(the answer is three months. whoops.)

in my defense, my SSH certificates expired and the bots were starting to leak, and it was a little too easy to put off fixing them.

but I still can’t seem to actually get myself to use social media sites, so this is still the easiest way for me to actually post updates every now and then. Whether or not I will actually be able to make a habit of it remains to be seen.

[the-dmwow]

I’m behind on inktober, both in drawing them and in uploading them. And also, it’s midnight.

But my brain is being difficult, and it has decided that this is the perfect time to play Sdorica chapter 15. This is almost certainly a bad decision. Oh well.

[the-dmwow]

Hmm, it appears there are still some bugs in my tumblr writing setup. Specifically, the ‘keep reading’ tag doesn’t seem to copy over properly (and neither does punctuation in titles, it seems).

I’ll look into it, but as these aren’t blog-destroying bugs, I’ll probably keep using the setup in the meantime. Ideally I’ll be quick enough at editing that all the glitches are edited out of the tumblr posts before anyone sees them, but they might slip through occasionally.

[the-dmwow]

Monospaced Font Search

Today I spent approximately four hours searching for monospaced fonts.

The entire (pointless) reason for this is that my favorite coding font — Input Mono — is only free for private use, and thus I’d be unable to use it as the font of choice for my web applications or code samples without paying for a license. (I wouldn’t be adverse to paying for a font I like, but I also had trouble understanding Input’s license terms, which was a bit discouraging.)

So I went to Google with three main criteria:

the font must be free to use both for web and desktop publishing purposes

for the most part, I’d be using the font for code. But I write prose in my code editor as well, so it should be readable for paragraphs

at minimum, I wanted regular, bold, and italic styles. This disqualified a surprising number of free fonts, including the well-respected Source Code Pro and Fira Code fonts.

Along the way, I also learned that ligatures exist!

They’re symbols that combine multiple characters into one (visually – the actual text remains the same). For example, ‘greater than or equal to’ is often marked as ‘>=’ in code, and a ligature can combine them into the single symbol, like such:

(image from https://medium.com/larsenwork-andreas-larsen/ligatures-coding-fonts-5375ab47ef8e – top row is without ligatures, bottom row is with.)

At any rate, while ligature support is interesting for code, they weren’t a requirement – though pretty much all the f onts I considered in the end had some sort of ligature support in the end.

Here were some of the more interesting ones:

The Short List

IBM Plex Mono – a font from IBM with all the weights I was looking for, and is much more angular than I find most monospaced fonts to be. While interesting, I found that sharpness almost distracting, and the ‘r’ weighting looked off to me.

Monoid Very crisp, has options that I liked, and had all the font styles as well as ligature support — but it was far too narrow for my tastes. Narrow is good enough for code, but it is not very suitable for prose, I find.

Iosevka – Like Monoid, Iosevka has a lot of options, a ton of font styles and weights, and ligatures…and it was also far too narrow.

But then I learned that Iosevka was open-source and generated from code. And that there’s a width variable that I could edit:

So that’s exactly what I did. I set width to 540 instead, which produced a font roughly similar in proportion to most sans-serif fonts, and also selected a few character variations that I liked, and built it.

This is the end result, in my code editor.

[the-dmwow]

Hi there! I made some updates to my bot system for this site, so now I can add tags automatically and publish things without manually approving them in WordPress.

Basically, I can now dump nonsense on this place at a much faster rate than before, assuming this all works. Which will be handy for things like liveblogging. Or for making a nuisance in people’s dashboards.

Yay!

[the-dmwow]

I had an overwhelming, sudden desire to draw a picture of orange juice, so here it is.

I might make this my avatar now.

[the-dmwow]

Bot Hiccup

The tumblr API sadly doesn’t have very many examples on creating posts, so a lot of the workings of the wordpress-to-tumblr bot has been figured out through trial and error.

Today I learned that you can’t backdate a new tumblr post. Meaning, that whenever you publish a post, the date is always set to be the present (or scheduled for the future). So that meant that all of my imports from wordpress were having their timestamps deleted and replaced with whenever the bot was running, which is not great. Especially since some of them would import out of order.

The silly workaround to this is to publish a post, then immediately edit it with the correct date. I wish this was better documented.

Anyway, the tumblr briefly got scrambled so badly that I had to delete all the posts and re-import them from WordPress. It should all be back now.