Earlier this year, I used Purelymail until I switched back to a self-hosted email server. Today, I found out that Purelymail was sold shortly after I closed my account due to health reasons. The new owner has pledged to continue the service in the same spirit as its founder, who always provided excellent support when I needed it. My reason for switching wasn’t due to any dissatisfaction with Purelymail; I simply wanted more control and to host my data in Europe again. I wish Purelymail all the best and hope it continues to provide its great, no-nonsense email service.

After four years without a car of my own, I am a car owner again. I just picked up this 2025 Hyundai i10 with about 4000 km on the odometer. I still dream of a world where individual cars aren’t necessary, but we’re not there yet. My fiancée needs a car for her job, which starts in August. In a few years, when there is better charging infrastructure, we might switch to an electric vehicle. Let’s see!

I couldn’t sleep this morning, so I got up sometime, ate, exercised, showered and finished my ATProto/Bluesky integration in GoBlog. You can now follow me there too: @jlelse.blog. But I think I will only use it very passively and only post my links there automatically.

Nice weather, good mood. 😌 Spring is definitely my favorite season! 🌷

IndiePass, Indigenous or whatever it’s called now (for Android) supports unlisted and private posts now! 🎉 Or did it already before and I just did not notice the setting? At least that was a feature I always missed and needed to use frontmatter when creating a new reply for example. Thanks Mark Sutherland!

Just setting up a quick Mastodon instance to test some compatibility is a pain. Using test accounts on public instances is also unreliable, because many instances are already overloaded and I don’t want to create spam. So I got a new DigitalOcean account with a $200 starter credit…

DigitalOcean has a simplified Mastodon setup and now I can try to improve my ActivityPub implementation during the next two months and then probably have to create a new DigitalOcean account.

By the way, happy holidays! 🎄 My family’s Christmas wasn’t as expected. On Wednesday evening I got sick (I guess it’s RSV). But my girlfriend and my sister are also sick. 🤒 Today is my first day without fever, but it doesn’t feel like that.

Just for the record: I left Twitter before it was cool to do so. 😊 But seriously, it was the right decision back then and I have no regrets.

My evening project today was to develop a feature to display post locations in GoBlog, for which I created a custom Go module (100% test coverage!) that roughly parses geo-URIs according to RFC 5870. Nice feature for when the location should be relevant for the post context or I want to save where I shared a photo. An example in this post. 😉

Today was probably the last day with temperatures close to 20°C in the near future. But that’s ok, because 20°C is quite warm in February.

While in the beginning I integrated almost everything directly into my hugo-micropub tool, I now build separate tools for new features that can be used independently (like this one or this). Most of them simply use the JSON Feed as a kind of API to get information about published articles. Not real microservices, but it goes in that direction.