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! 😄

GoBlog syncs the editor state between browsers in real-time now. ✨ Thanks to WebSockets!

This way I can start writing on one device, continue on another and publish from just another one. WebSocket connections get also reestablished, when they fail, because the Internet connection changed etc. This was a fun programming evening. 😄

Tomorrow I will continue with some issues from GitHub…

I started working on plugins for GoBlog using a Go module I recently discovered: yaegi. It still feels like magic, because Go is typically a compiled language and yaegi makes it dynamic by embedding an interpreter. Is this overkill for GoBlog or does this possibly enable flexibility like WordPress plugins?

So far I configured most (almost all) settings for GoBlog through a YAML file. But this is not so optimal, after all it happens sometimes that I want to change a small setting, such as the description of a post section, from my smartphone. This would work somehow via SSH, but ideal is something else. Email conversations with Andrés Cárdenas inspired me to finally start the project “settings in the database”. The first step was to make it possible to configure the mentioned post sections. This is now finally possible directly via an administration web interface! This should also be a good step in the direction of making GoBlog more friendly for other users and of course it makes my life easier as well.