Cloudflare currently celebrate their 10th birthday and launch a new product or feature everyday for a week. Today they launched Cloudflare Web Analytics. Until now you had to proxy your site through Cloudflare to use their analytics, because they collected those stats – “at the edge” – on their servers. But now they are adding an JavaScript-based option, similar to Google Analytics and all the new privacy-focused analytics services like GoatCounter and Plausible. But like GoatCounter and Plausible and unlike Google, they promise privacy, because they don’t make their money tracking users, but selling products (that aren’t users) – at least that’s what they say in the announcement post on their blog:
I ordered some stuff online the last days and somehow all packages arrived today. In the middle of an important conference call. Well, when you order online, that can happen. But I not only ordered a new bicycle helmet (in XL, because my head is too big for most other helmets), I also ordered a new keyboard and mouse.
With Apple launching Fitness+, they launched just another service with an anti-competitive advantage. While they take almost 100% of what’s left after taxes etc., other services are forced to use In-App-Purchases of which Apple takes 30%. I don’t understand how some people defend Apple for this and think this behavior benefits them. Actually, it only leads to a decrease in the quality of non-Apple services, because they somehow have to try to compete with Apple, but get 30% less of the revenues. But in the end I don’t really care, I don’t buy any of Apple’s overpriced products with false privacy promises and platform lock-in anyway.
Today I have dealt with WordPress for the first time in a long time. I’m not planning to move my blog to WordPress (I’m in the process of developing my own content management system), but have set up a site for someone else and migrated a few articles.
Today, I learned that it’s possible to “vendor” Hugo modules. By vendoring Hugo modules, Hugo will add all required module files to your site directory and use them when building your site instead of trying to download them first. No need for me to use a module cache on Drone anymore and two seconds less build time. (But 3000 additional files in my blog repo.)
Next to my Microsoft Surface Go with Windows on it, I often take my Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga S1 with me, when I visit my family over the weekend. The ThinkPad let’s me do some development things on a Linux machine (with Ubuntu 20.04) during the long train trips (6 hours each direction). So I always try to get everything up-to-date before. It’s always amazing how fast it is to do this.
Shortly after the official announcement I pre-ordered the 12 GB version of OnePlus Nord on Amazon for 499€ minus 30€ Prime discount. It should have been shipped tomorrow and arrived at my place on Wednesday. However, I cancelled the pre-order today after I came across an article about display problems with this and other OnePlus devices (this is apparently not a rare problem with 1+).
After trying to write my own static site generator as an experiment, I now started to write my own CMS. Written in Go, SQLite as database (SQLite is awesome!) and focused on performance and simplicity. Currently I’m using Hugo with a number of dynamic additional services (for Micropub, Webmentions, ActivityPub, …), so it’s almost questionable why I use a static page generator at all. If I use my own lightweight and high-performance CMS, I could save myself all this extra stuff or at least reduce it in complexity.
I just dropped a lot of feeds (mainly news) from my feed reader. I can’t scroll through about 900 new entries every day and then have 60 bookmarks that I spend all my time working through. Even though there are no algorithms that want to get me addicted to never ending timelines, I have to set limits.
Recently, there has been a lot of talk in my blog bubble about email self-hosting again (here is one example, here is a second one). I myself switched to a self-hosted mail server over a year ago, only to switch back to a hosted version a few months later.