This is a collection of links I stumbled across and found worth sharing. Also see the blogroll for links to blogs I regularly read.
Desmond Rivet wrote in a new blog article (in which he picked up my article) why he writes on a blog. Writing helps him to think:
View
100 Days To Offload, an initiative started by Kev Quirk, is a nice idea to get people blogging.
View
Thanks to Steven Ovadia’s post, I discovered the newsletter of Scott Nesbitt and the “musing” “On Minimalism”. This text, as well as some others that I have read, really speaks from my heart.
View
Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) got released today. I’m already using it for a week on my desktop and have to say it’s an awesome version. Gnome 3.36 is really smooth and the new features (like dark mode) are really pleasant. Ubuntu is in my eyes the Linux distribution that “just works”.
View
Martin Tournoij has written an article about line breaks in emails. Some people think that in text emails, lines should not be longer than ~78 characters. I also find that emails that have been adjusted to this limit look terrible on the smartphone because the maximum width is narrower than 78 characters.
View
British domain registry Nominet created a world map of country-code top-level domains. It’s really interesting to see that .tk (Tokelau) is is the world’s largest ccTLD, because registration is free and no expired domains get deleted. After that comes .cn (China) and .de (Germany).
View
It’s not that uncommon to come across a link to Twitter. But when opening the link in the browser, I am often told that the tweet has failed to load. This may be due to my Firefox settings, uBlock Origin or something else, but it was so annoying to have to click on “try again” that I installed an add-on that automatically redirects me from Twitter to Nitter. (See all my installed add-ons here.)
View
I’m currently browsing the docs of the static site generator Eleventy (also known as 11ty). Although I prefer Go and I’m not a big JavaScript (and npm) fan for various reasons, I now consider Eleventy as an alternative to Hugo for my blog. I’m reaching the limits of Hugo more often and have to find complicated workarounds, because it’s almost impossible to add custom functionalities to Hugo. Eleventy is apparently very flexible and can be easily extended.
View
Matt Baer from Write.as wrote about his ideas for a comment system for Write.as called Remark.as. I think he thought things out pretty well and instead of just building a comment system as known from other blog systems, he found a good solution that allows human conversations.
View
Desmond Rivet already wrote some pretty good articles explaining the IndieWeb (of which I already shared one on my blog) and now he adds another one about “How to Have a Conversation on the IndieWeb”. He explains things like Microformats, Webmentions and how those things play together. It’s a bit technical, but if you ever heard of words like “API” or “REST”, you’ll probably understand it.
View