I wish you a Merry Christmas and / or happy holidays! 🎅

After reading books about Docker and Kubernetes for most of the day today, I wanted to do a bit of programming after all: My blog now has shortened URLs for posts. https://jlelse.blog/s/1 for example redirects to my last post about my current writing workflow.

Walking through the dark park is scary but fascinating at the same time. This is a night shot I tried capturing with my phone. In reality I can see even less.

Although Micropublish is an awesome Micropub editor, I just integrated a custom really basic editor into GoBlog to create, update and delete posts. I will also add image upload soon and then I don’t depend on any external software (except a web browser) for my blogging workflow any more.

GitHub finally has a dark mode. You can enable it in the settings. There are three options: system (automatic light or dark based on the system preferences), light and dark. Now I can better scroll through code at night or early in the morning. ☺️ Gitea (my preferred code hosting system) has a dark-mode too, but it’s more like a grey-green mode.

I just spent a few hours trying to setup Tor for this blog. You can now access this website using a hidden service at http://dvvbogg3cytomyhjf6jfzuaj4vuhjfvttn3wqdy25hpzgykstk5hjnqd.onion/. I don’t want to guarantee that I won’t shut down Tor support again, but it was interesting to set everything up and I learned a lot.

Once I am sure that everything works, I should write a more detailed article about it…

I should definitely checkout how to PESOS for Pocket. I use Pocket quite often, but don’t publish all links on my blog. For that I still need to improve bookmark support and than use something like IFTTT to publish recommended or starred articles to a bookmarks section.

Thanks for your tip to take a look at the post by Steve Layton! Unfortunately I’m not using micro.blog currently and rather want my setup to be self-hosted as much as possible. To do that I recently also started receiving webmentions myself instead of relying on webmention.io. It’s not that I don’t like these services, it’s more that I strive for full control over my setup.

I wrote about my Indieweb dream this morning. To come closer to this dream and to clean up some code, I started refactoring my hugo backend code. I made use of Go interfaces to later be able to easily add more storage, CDN or social network providers. It also made the code a bit cleaner and a bit more modular, but there’s still a lot of learning and work to do. What I still struggle with though is testing: I don’t have any automatic tests yet. How do I test HTTP calls to external APIs?

I plan to add a bit of ActivityPub to my blog to be able to interact with the fediverse, without the need to use Mastodon, Pleroma or my current microblog. Just my static Hugo blog with it’s dynamic Go-backend. Because I don’t want to implement everything from scratch - I haven’t yet added media support for MicroPub - I am in search for libraries that help implementing ActivityPub, or at least give me a starting point. I discovered the library activityserver, which is used by a tool called pherephone by write.as, maybe that can help me.

What I still have to think about though, is how I’m going to connect it with the rest of the system. And what’s also still missing: The media endpoint and update support for MicroPub (I should do this first).

Or should I just cancel my plans with ActivityPub and wait until Fediverse software supports IndieWeb technologies? :thinking_face: