My 2019 in Review
Published on in ✍️ Posts
This year is coming to an end and so I want to take the chance to review the year and write down what happened this year. On the technical side as well as personally.
Self-hosting my blog and its services
Published on in 💭 Thoughts
Updated on
Reply to: A reply by Beko Pharm
Self-hosting my blog and the related services not only gives me the independence from third-party-services, it also gives me the option to customize things to my liking. In my opinion, this is even more important.
Published on in 💬 Micro
Reply to: A reply by Chris Aldrich
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.
Refactoring
Published on in 💬 Micro
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?
IndieWeb dream
Published on in 💭 Thoughts
My IndieWeb setup is continuing to evolve. I just added support for syndication (this post should appear on IndieNews) and JSON-posting to my Hugo backend and theme. Unfortunately, adding support for more IndieWeb features to this setup requires a lot of documentation reading, reverse engineering and looking at how other people have done that (of course in other programming languages, one has not much knowledge in).
Why you should remove Disqus from your site
Published on in 🔗 Links
Updated on
Marko Saric wrote down a few reasons, why you should remove Disqus from your website:
Building a new Win 3.1 app in 2019
Published on in 🔗 Links
Yeo Kheng Meng published an article about building a Slack client for the very ancient 16-bit Windows 3.1 (released in 1993) in 2019. It is very interesting to read about the challenges of developing for such an old system. To solve problems, one has to dig in books instead of doing a Google search or asking on Stack Overflow.
More thoughts about ActivityPub support for this Hugo blog
Published on in 💬 Micro
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:
My blog went viral and did just fine
Published on in 💭 Thoughts
Yesterday, I posted a link to a tweet by DHH on my blog. It’s about “Google tax”. Companies nowadays have to buy ads to appear on top for searches for their brand name.
A blog is not a commitment
Published on in 🔗 Links
Like of: A blog is not a commitment
Yes! A blog is not a commitment! If you want to tell something, just do it. Even if that’s just one thing. Another thing may come to your mind, but it’s no problem when that’s years later. Just start a blog.