Codecademy was once a great source to learn new programming languages, but it seems in the last year, they started to push harder to increase revenue. After login you get presented a page to buy Pro access (and you need to find that small “Back” link), Pro banners everywhere and popular courses like the one to learn Python 3 are Pro-only anymore. Seems like I need to find another source to learn some Python basics for my seminar paper about Falcon.
Aral Balkan is doing some cool things with his Small Technology Foundation. Recently he built a personal mobile web server using a Raspberry Pi Zero (+ an LTE modem) and his web server project Site.js. What really fascinates me, is that it just needs a 14500 Lithium-ion battery, but then it is able to operate from basically everywhere with an LTE connection. Imagine all the use cases.
Imagine holding your personal web site in the palm of your hand. Imagine carrying the digital aspects of your self in your pocket instead of having them on some abstract cloud under the watchful eye of some faceless multinational corporation.
Like Jamie Tanna, I now added the series taxonomy (more on taxonomies in the Hugo documentation) to my blog. The first series is “Using Windows. I plan to make more use of this feature in the future.
I’m expanding my hugo-micropub endpoint all the time. My next planned features are:
- automatic webmention sending, probably by using Telegraph
- automatic posting to my Microblog.pub instance
- support for updating entries (I already built support for querying content items)
This is my first micro-post on my blog in the new micro section. I updated my theme to better handle posts with no titles. And: I added support for likes. (You’ll probably see some in the future.)
StartPage recently sold a majority stake in it’s company to the “Privacy One Group”, “a separate operating unit of System1”. You can read more about it here.
Because of that, I’m now going to try Searx, an open-source meta search engine, you can easily host yourself (or use a hosted version). There are a lot of available instances. I’m going to use the instance by privacytools.io, a website with recommendations for privacy-friendly softwares and services.
Do you know how difficult it is to tell someone your email address with your custom domain name?
It seems people only know the big players: @gmail.com, @outlook.com or @gmx.de and @web.de in Germany. But telling someone to mail to @jlelse.de, @jlelse.dev (or any of my other domain names) is a bit more difficult, I always need to spell letter for letter and that is really annoying.
But this has now come to an end.
Benjaming Congdon shares in an article, why he appreciates Go’s simplicity. To summarize: Its great forward / backward compatibility, dependencies (stable, fewer dependencies needed), included functionality (testing, http, …) and formatting (because Go has an integrated formatter, although every project has its own way to do things, all code follows the same formatting conventions).
This corresponds to my own experiences. When working on my Micropub-endpoint for my Hugo-blog setup, or my website statistics tool, I rarely have any problems with the language itself. Go is simple, so I can think more about the way to solve my problems. The code I write probably isn’t the best, but Go helps getting things done.
My favorite feature: The standard library. For my Micropub project, I currently only need one single dependency, a YAML parser. Everything else I need is already included.
What I wish for: Better error handling.
It’s not 2020 yet, but Ben Werdmüller shares great advice of how to blog in 2020. It’s a great article for everyone thinking about starting a blog. He tells which platform to use and how to get into writing.
Here’s what [Blogging is] not: professional article writing. If you want to go through multiple rounds of editing, please do. If you want to write two thousand word epics about your topic of choice, please do. But it’s also okay to write up a hundred quick words and post them without thinking twice about it.
I personally love blogging, because it’s the best way (for me) to share all kind of thoughts: learnings, cool stuff I found, questions I think about, … Sometimes it’s even a kind of public journal.
A livestream on YouTube (German) shows two moderators trying to break the Guinness World Record of the longest talk show. They have to moderate for at least 70 hours and 5 minutes (their goal is 72 hours) and only get 5 minutes per hour, which they can use for other activities (like sleeping or going to the toilet).
Although I don’t mind such stupid record attempts, it’s amazing to see that after almost 48 hours they’re still surprisingly fit.