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.
I use hnrss.org to follow Hacker News and stay up-to-date with the tech and developer community. I followed the /frontpage feed, so that my feed reader would collect all submissions that reach the front page of HN. However that’s a lot of stuff and it got too much for me. I then noticed that one is able to filter the feed to just include submissions with more than 50 points (https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=50). That removed a lot of stuff and left me with only the top voted submissions.
This might sound like a post by a Microsoft fanboy, but honestly, WSL 2 on Windows 10 2004 is really great. It allows me to use Windows on my Surface Go, but at the same time use Linux (Ubuntu 20.04) on it, in a small optimized VM. For example I can run Hugo inside WSL 2 at Linux speed (fast) instead of Windows speed (slow). I just need to take care to save the Git repository with my site files inside the filesystem of the VM and not on Windows (passthrough is really slow). And it’s easy to start Visual Studio Code from inside WSL 2 by just tiping “code .” and the current directory will be opened in Code. I’m really waiting for official GUI support so that I can even use graphical applications under Linux. The best of both worlds.
It sometimes happens that I fall down a rabbit hole. Suddenly a subject catches my attention and excites me very much. The latest topic where this is the case is the software Sonic Pi and making music by code, basically “music programming”. I played the recorder for many years, but I do not have a real feeling for beat and rhythm. I like to listen to music, especially electronic music, but I couldn’t make music myself, I would miss the musical feeling.
As you might have noticed, the frequency of new entries on this blog, or even the activity on my social media profiles, varies a lot. On some days I’m posting a lot. But then there are days with almost no activity at all.
For about a month now, I do journaling again. Every evening before I go to bed, I try to write down everything that comes to my mind. I usually write what I have done that day, what my emotions where and other things that I thought about during the day. It has a very positive effect to do that. I wrote about that more detailed on my German blog.
A few days ago, I already added support for webmentions and microformats2 to this blog. Now I added a form at the end of every article, so you can submit your mentions more easily.
Today I did my first step to join the IndieWeb. I first had to generate a PGP key (that’s really new to me, I never did this before 😅) to be able to use my website for authentication. After I was able to successfully login to Webmention.io, the service, which can receive webmentions and pingbacks for you, I added support for webmentions to my blog, so I see when someone from the IndieWeb references my posts. After that I also added microformats2 support, so my blog should now be easier to parse.