Moin!

I don’t like all-dark websites. My eyes cannot read well in the dark and I struggle to adjust to black-on-white afterwards. I don’t get this white-on-black obsession many people have.

WISDOM FROM SANDI METZ

„The verse method is getting simpler, but it still has more than one responsibility. This problem is reflected by the very structure of the code—the above method contains a blank line. Programmers add blank lines to signify changes of topic. The presence of multiple topics suggests the existence of multiple responsibilities, which makes code harder to understand when reading, and easier to harm when changing.“

Excerpt from “99 Bottles of OOP” by Sandi Metz

The book is full of small (and bigger) nuggets of wisdom regarding OO programming.

I just used this project to migrate my DayOne entries (over 3000) into Obsidian. Some small issues but in the end it worked perfectly and now I have all text, audio, photo and video entries in Obsidian. Since my Instagram exported to Day One, I have those as well now 🎉

I’m done with closed services by @rknightuk is spot on! I really like this shift as of lately to the open web. Maybe it really is turning full circle and we get back to having a better web.

Want to know what my day is like? I am snoozing Slack to find enough headspace to think and am glad that the Apple Silicon Macs still get warm enough to warm the hands, given the right workload. That’s what today feels like. And coffee.

Tschüss Hamburg

I will try to use Readwise and their Reader app for my RSS reading for a few days. Ususally I use the Reeder.app on Mac and iOS. The integration/workflows/highlighting in Readwise’s Reader does look really good though. And their integration into Obsidian is already really good…

My post about an article by @tomcritchlow appear weired on micro.blog but fine on my own website

Anyway. There’s no real point here. But isn’t the web amazing?

The web is amazing, indeed. I really like this article by @tomcritchlow@twitter.com about how he utilizes different small tools on the web and a low-code approach to build solutions for his clients. I am, of course?, doing a more high-code approach. But still, sometimes I do think too complicated and other approaches might work better (see: https://holgerfrohloff.de/2023/01/20/so-today-i.html)

IDEA FOR A LOW-FI SOLUTION TO SUBSCRIBE TO KEYWORDS ON THE FEDIVERSE

So today I read this interesting conversation by @rknightuk. The topic isn’t “finished” and he might post updates on the topic. If he remembers he might add them to the conversation. But maybe he doesn’t. (I wouldn’t blame him!)

That brings me to the question: How could I make sure I don’t miss the update? Checking in daily is one option. It’s unrealistic for me though. If you consider the case that you want to see posts from someone you don’t follow/subscribe to, how can you make sure you get updates on things you might care about?

This is just me thinking out loud, I don’t know the answer, yet.

Maybe there could be a service that monitors their feed for certain keywords and pings you once they post something containing those keywords? There isn’t even the option to subscribe to a conversation as that conversation doesn’t have an RSS feed associated. One way would be to have a service that subscribes to his RSS feed and monitors that one for designated keywords. If it finds the keywords it creates a post mentioning me.

What comes to mind for me is a CRON job running on a server. But that sucks. Using cron doesn’t feel right to me today. Another idea was to have a GitHub action running. But that always needs a trigger to get started. So what could be a trigger?

goes away to read GitHub Actions docs

Turns out: You can schedule a workflow on GitHub actions, using cron syntax. Awesome! I mean it’s still somehow cron, but it’s more accessible than some bash thingy on some server.

So what is left is figuring out, what the GitHub Actions workflow should run. It could be a javascript or ruby script inside the repository that the workflow belongs to.

• This script needs read/write access to a micro.blog (or other fediverse) account that can send @mentions to me.
• The script needs to parse the feed (in this example micro.blog/rknightuk…) for keywords
• I need an option to provide the keywords. Could be hard-wired into the script for starters
• if a keyword is found, create a new post mentioning me and containing the link
• since this could be high-volume as the keywords are maybe too broad it shouldn’t mention/ping the creator of the post

It doesn’t sound too complicated right now. I’ll leave that for later and will come back to this idea!

edit: this sounds like a solution that probably already exists. if you know about something like this, let me know. maybe you could even use google alerts or something like this!

Honest question: Am I paranoid or too worried? People leave their stuff all alone on their desk in this WeWork space. Their phone, computer unlocked. They were away for around 4 minutes. Enough time to be evil. If I wanted to 😇🤷‍♂️🤔🤔🤔

So, heute arbeite ich beim Kunden in Hamburg. Immer wieder schön, diese Stadt.

Ich habe heute dieses Video gefunden Happiness by Steve Cutts und das passt ganz wunderbar zum Artikel „No other love“ von @Buddenbohm@mastodon.social vom 12. Januar.

Moin. Der Tag und die Woche begann mit mehreren hysterischen Wutausbrüchen der jüngeren Tochter. Fun times. Jetzt endlich arbeiten 😅

Training ✅

Tonight we’ll have freshly made pitas with homemade fresh Tzaziki 😋😋😋

UTILITY TOOL TO HELP MIGRATION FROM GATSBY TO MICRO.BLOG

I wrote a little tool yesterday to help me normalize my markdown files from the Gatsby site to be able to import them into Micro.blog properly. Especially I wanted to have redirects setup automatically for all the old posts. My site had simple slugs like holgerfrohloff.de/power-laws. Micro.blog sets up the posts using the dates => https://holgerfrohloff.de/2019/03/01/power-laws.html

For that to work, I needed to have the permalink added to the frontmatter. That wasn’t the case for the majority of posts. I didn’t want to change this manually, so I wrote a script thingy to do it for me. https://github.com/5minpause/postsnormalizer

So maybe this could be helpful if you want to migrate a GatsbyJS site to Micro.blog. /cc @manton

After four days of drinking regular coffee the new espresso beans finally arrived. I’m surprised to see that the packaging doesn’t have the little valve anymore. Maybe this is for saving on packaging reasons? I don’t know. 

FINALLY MADE THE MIGRATION

I finally made the migration to micro.blog with my personal site https://holgerfrohloff.de All the posts and newsletters I’ve written are migrated. They are still being published so they are not styled, yet. Have to migrate all pages as well. And then the overal design of the site. I want it to look a little bit different and also showcase some of the functionality that microblog offers me now. Overall I am happy to be even more part of the IndieWeb now.

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

Dear @heymichellemac@pkm.social is there an RSS feed for your website/articles? I couldn’t find one.

Oh I am beyond happy! My copy of The new Walden by Steelbrothers just arrived. Let’s put this on my MB bookshelf!

Moin. Erste Meeting des Tages ist fertig. Jetzt Fokuszeit!

Back to using Firefox as a default browser! My brief stint with Arc is over. I liked it for the split view feature. I disliked it for disappearing tabs, confusing bookmarking functionality, too much visual distance (read ux) between active tabs and missing compartmentalization.

Last week on Hacker Newsletter I found this article about a better way to use your function keys on Mac. I am on the third day trying this out and probably it will stick. I really like to get used to this.