Colin just reminded me, that it’s the third GoBlog birthday of this blog! I am still genuinely content with it, despite the apparent loss of my blogging momentum since then.

Nice, the number of GoBlog users is growing! 🤓 The next step is a growing number of GoBlog developers. It would be great to have more people giving advice on how to improve the code. 😅 Any senior Go devs out there?

GoBlog plugins enable completely new and optional functionality. Andrés created a plugin to show the song currently playing on his blog. I use this plugin for now as well. 🎶 If you don’t see a song in the header, I’m probably not listening to music right now. 😅

For performance reasons, the plugin will fetch the currently playing song from Last.fm every five minutes and display it if the song was played no more than 10 minutes ago.

My motivation to work on GoBlog isn’t always the same. Sometimes I don’t feel like programming in my free time, so the most I do is some bug fixing when I find broken things. Sometimes I just have no time to work on new features or improvements. But since yesterday evening I feel a new push and have completely rewritten the plugin system to make it much more flexible (and I like flexibility). I had to break compatibility with existing plugins, but given the small user base and the limited scope of what plugins could do, I suspect there weren’t many. But the future looks promising…

Interesting side note: Now that DeepL Write is in public beta, I used it to improve the writing for the post on the GoBlog blog and this post. As a non-native English speaker, it’s really helpful. Because sometimes I don’t find the right words and use unusual words, or have wrong tenses or word orders, then DeepL corrects me.

Nice to see that there is such a variety of MicroPub clients, next to Quill, Micropublish and the mobile app Indigenous, there’s also sparkles. But on the desktop, I mostly just use GoBlog’s editor nowadays. It has live sync and and a live preview, which is sometimes very helpful. But flexibility is the key, use what fits you and the situation the best.

Achievement for today: I can finally correctly reply to Mastodon/Fediverse/ActivityPub posts. 🥳

P.S.: And I can mention ActivityPub actors and they will get a notification (at least on Mastodon).

My website is powered by GoBlog, a simple and dynamic blogging system that’s open source, actively developed and implements most IndieWeb functionalities. It packages everything in a single binary and I’ve been so over the moon using it and seeing it improve week after week that I’m surprised it isn’t more popular. So I put on my evangelist boots to share how I use this “stupidly-simple” blogging system to power my online presence.

Thanks, Andrés, for all your great improvement ideas, will to try out all the undocumented features, your feedback and for sharing GoBlog! 😄