So there's some folks, starting with @read@blog.nigini.me, who have put together an org (as mentioned here to help those of us using #microblogpub to move forward with some new development while the original developer is...well, apparently not originally developing for a while (I certainly wish him the best with whatever's keeping him away).

I definitely need to spruce up my own customizations so that maybe some of the ones that some other people might find useful can be contributed toward the new org.

First step of that was to try to get my changes rebased on top of some of what's already been incorporated.

I will readily admit...I did not comb through all of the changes trying to figure out what all of them were. I was interested in doing that rebase as soon as I was contacted about the community effort, really...but what got me eager enough to jump in feetvfirst this past week was finding out that one of the contributors had determined that the software already had support for federating updates, and had implemented a simple post edit ability.

Which was a key thing I'd wished I had, although now that there's nowhere I care about syndicating to (and therefore no need for u-syndication links), I have less need for it. The bird site is no longer a place I consider worth caring about, and even if it were, the API changes have made syndication a hassle and backfeed nearly impossible. So far, I'm not really interested in federating to Bluesky or bridging to Nostr or anywhere else. So...I'm just here, and don't generally care about syndication links. But editing is still nice to have!

So I spent some time on that these last few days, and now I'm up and running on top of that fork. #bw3dev

As of this writing...the original dev's sites seem to be down, and the footer has been updated to have a link to one (the most prolific, I think) contributor's fork, but still lists the same version as before. I'm probably going to change a few of those things shortly and then test the edit feature.

EDIT: I have updated my site footer to point to the org and to indicate that I'm on a customized version, for now - my Site page already links to my own fork, although it occurs to me some of the info there is now definitely out of date. I'll probably make that a problem for after I get some sleep...and in a moment, I guess I'll know whether the Edit feature works! Editing appears to let me change the title and the content, but not the visibility (which I think may be an #ActivityPub limitation), sensitivity, content warning, post type, or attachments, nor does it give me the little emoji inserter bar which I never use anyway.

One of the changes that was made was adding separate styling for some of the buttons, which made me very unhappy with how my site looked until I figured out why.

There were also a lot of dependency updates. In fact, that same very prolific dev had updated FastAPI past what was apparently a breaking change. He compensated for most of that - in the same commit, in fact - but not for the semi-hidden custom route support that I use for my About, Site, and License pages, so I had to figure out why my site was broken and fix that bit. As a result...even though I tried to clean up my changes when I rebased...even my new branches are already kind of a mess again. Oh well.

Anyhow, because of my rush to get to that point, I actually spent little enough time perusing the rest of the changes that I'm not even entirely sure what else I pulled in. I think the place has a few minor appearance changes, but maybe that was only the new button styles before I figured out what had happened and changed my theme. So I guess I'll see if I notice anything else different, and this'll be an adventure!