My January ‘23 in Review
Before you realize it, January - and with it the first month of the new year - is already over. A little review.
Before you realize it, January - and with it the first month of the new year - is already over. A little review.
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.
Since I have YouTube Premium and log in to YouTube, YouTube is suggesting videos that seem to fit my interests a lot more (and it’s a little addictive again, but not as bad as when I was still studying).
I taught myself Go (and programming in general) by learning by doing. I learned by making a lot of mistakes and after noticing them, doing the necessary research. My Go code is probably a big mess, but it’s so satisfying, after not touching some code for a while, to do a major rewrite and improve the code with everything I’ve learned since the last time.
ChatGPT is smart enough to detect what the code in the single minified JavaScript file on my blog front page does. Try it out! 🙃
Ok, it’s also not that complicated to guess by looking at the long string at the beginning… But ChatGPT has figured out what it’s called.
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.
I posted about GoToSocial, but another Mastodon-alternative and Fediverse software, Takahē, seems to make fast progress and has some unique features like support for multiple domains or multiple identities per user. I haven’t tried running it yet, but it looks promising!
🖼️ View
Like of: Colin Devroe - Blogging is alive and well
Whether or not blogging is alive or dead is not a new topic of discussion. It is a topic that reoccurs every few years. I've written about it dozens of times. But the current push seems slightly different. I believe we will see many more people blogging again or, at the very least, publishing on a platform that compliments the web rather than chafe at it.
Probably preaching to the choir…
I had an AWS training in November and have the opportunity to get the “Certified Developer Associate” certificate. Even though I have two attempts, I want to do well on the first shot. Since the trainer didn’t show us everything that is required for the exam, I’m kind of re-doing the training with this Udemy course (luckily I have access to Udemy Business and don’t have to pay for it). It’s really helpful because it helps me demystify the AWS cloud and reduce the 🤯 whenever I do something in the AWS console.
I have a bit of an urge to try out everything I’ve just learned for myself, but most of the features are somehow too expensive for private use and I don’t like lock-in effects.