Tech, life and everything else
Mastodon finally has an official share button. Or at least a page you can use that enables the sharer to select their Mastodon instance and then get redirected to the share page there. I directly used that to replace the share to “Mastodon.social” with share to “Mastodon” in GoBlog. 😊
Using AI, I just added a new (experimental) plugin to GoBlog, one that finally leverages app passwords, now that I’ve overhauled the authentication system some time ago. The plugin implements MCP, short for Model Context Protocol.
Recently, I noticed in my blog database export that a couple of ActivityPub users unfollowed. All at the same time. It was strange. Until I noticed all were GoToSocial (GTS) users. In the logs I found the reason: GoBlog failed to deliver some updates to the users, and so the accounts were marked as dead and removed after twenty failed tries.
GoBlog not only has a new README file on the repository (replacing the old, cluttered, incomplete documentation) but also has a new share button implementation. No more relying on third-party services for that basic functionality!
Given that AI agents and GitHub Copilot is an integral part of my work day nowadays, I decided to tackle a massive task I neclected for too long. AI should now help me with it: writing entirely new and better documentation for GoBlog.
If you’re reading this, it seems that my GoBlog Telegram Bot (just another embedded plugin) is working!
This new bot probably has no real use, but it was a good experimental project to try and get a bit more familiar with the current state of GitHub Copilot, especially as we can now use it at work.
Probably the biggest use is for uploading photos from my phone. I can just send them as files and get a link back. But I can also send text and it publishes it. Even with frontmatter to configure parameters for the post.
Regarding Copilot: For whatever reason (maybe my adblocking DNS?) the VSCode extension keeps asking me to log in again, but still works for the non-chat features.
However, I am still a little worried that AI will make my work obsolete.
To reduce my dependence on USA-based products, I switched from using the OpenAI API to Scaleway’s Generative API for my blog. Not only is it cheaper, but it’s based on open-source models, hosted in Europe. 🇪🇺
It was straightforward to just add an option to change the REST endpoint in my GoBlog plugins, and then use Scaleway’s API for creating the post summaries and the image descriptions. For the post summaries, I am now using llama-3.3-70b-instruct, for the image descriptions pixtral-12b-2409.
Let’s hope that there will also be a model that supports audio transcriptions until April 2026, so I don’t have to renew the credits on the OpenAI API for my Telegram Voice-To-Text bot. 🤞
My blog still has a long way to go when it comes to accessibility, but I’m excited about two new plugins I’ve just added to make things better.
The first plugin uses AI to generate image descriptions for me – far better than I could write myself. It even works in multiple languages, adapting to the blog’s language settings. The second plugin improves how these descriptions can be accessed on mobile devices. Now, you can simply tap on an image to read its description (on desktop, the descriptions are still available as tooltips when you hover over the image).
Since image descriptions aren’t created automatically for older posts and I haven’t manually updated all of them yet, you can check out this post as an example of how it works.
Every few months, I inevitably catch a cold or some other virus and end up stuck at home for a few days. Right now, I’m in one of those phases again. Thankfully, this time hasn’t been too bad, and I’m already on the mend. After a lot of Netflix marathons, I realized I couldn’t just sit around doing nothing – I’m the kind of person who needs to feel productive, even when I’m under the weather.
It’s not a winter wonderland out here, but with Christmas and winter coming soon, maybe a little snow on my blog isn’t a bad idea. I’ve just programmed a snow animation for another project and thought I could reuse the code in the form of a simple GoBlog plugin. ❄❄❄