Yesterday, me and Florian participated in a photo walk, organised by the new Fujifilm X-Den space here in Düsseldorf. One could try out their (newest) camera gear, and so I had took the chance to try the X half.
Had a great time walking around the Altstadt, taking photos, and chatting with Florian, Lou and the friendly Fuji staff. → Florian’s post.
Notes – Daniel Pietzsch
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This week, the second Homebrew Website Club Düsseldorf took place. This time, 5 people attended. After a round of introducing each other including website, we once more had a good chat about a variety of IndieWeb topics. And this time, we all did some coding, too. For example, Jochen made some commits to his django-indieweb project, Mark added some rel=me links and Microformats markup, and I fixed my Atom feed’s updated date to truly show the date they have been updated (which is quite relevant for example when sending WebSub notifications).
You know the problem when you accidentally or naively committed on the main Git branch, but then you’re too far coding something that turns out to need more and more (unexpected) work, and you find yourself not able to deploy to production? Yep, happened to me today (again).
Florian asks everyone to please add their email address to their RSS feeds. Because then, FeedCity lets you directly reply to any of that feed’s posts via email (it’s a simple mailto: link).
Of course, I want you to do this, too! It’s one of those many underutilised data from a feed that can be really useful.
One thing to note is, that FeedCity won’t show the email reply button publicly (in FeedCity, all feeds have a public page) – it’s only shown for logged in users (or “citizens” as I call them). Prevents any email harvesting bots from gathering those addresses from the site.
Oh, I never linked to Florian’s full gallery of Beyond Tellerrand 2025 photos. You might spot me in those!
As someone who has been using their iPad for most of their mobile computing tasks, I very much welcome all those new updates coming with iPadOS 26.
I started the FeedCity blog with a first blog post.
Well, good luck debugging something in production, when your logging statements put out to debug, but your Rails.logger.level is set to info. Thanks for nothing, past-Daniel.
Had a handful of new FeedCity signups in the last 24 hours. Need to fix some code for the OPML imports (and still need to fix some bugs related to this). But from what I can see, it worked for most people. And they seemed to have tolerated my still very basic onboarding.
Lots more feeds in the DB now. For now, the feed-fetching still seems to cope.
But I need to adjust the workflow for validating feeds: I use the W3C Feed Validation Service, but you only get a very limited amount of validation requests (per day, I believe). I ran way past this limit in the last 24 hours, and - rightfully - get a lot of 429 responses. Really need to behave better, or run the validation process myself.
The first Homebrew Website Club Düsseldorf Schepp and I co-organised turned out well. We gathered at Düsseldorf’s central library inside its “Xafé” café. We had 7 participating adults and 2 children. ;)
The meetup was more exchange and discussions than actual work on one’s websites. Discussed topics included:
- “I want to build my own website”
- Opinions on tooling
- RelMeAuth
- Podcast metric aggregation
- WebSub
- Personal publishing workflows and tools
- Image hosting
- RSS feeds
- …and probably even a few more.
Very enjoyable evening!
Honestly, the new Fujifilm X half looks really appealing. I think there should be way more playful digital cameras, too - like this one.
Florian made a public “Photography Channels” list on FeedCity. Already (re-)discovered some great YouTube channels and bookmarked a bunch of videos.
Next Thursday, May 22nd at 6 pm, there’s going to be a Homebrew Website Club Düsseldorf. Co-organised by Schepp and myself, we plan this to be the first HWC event in a series of regular events.
I quote from the IndieWeb wiki page to explain what an HWC is:
Homebrew Website Club is a growing world-wide network of meetups for everyone who wants to take back their web experience from social media silos, and own their online identities & content, or just want support with blogging!
So, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, and can make it to Düsseldorf, you’d be very welcome to join. (We still have to confirm the location, and will update the event page as soon as possible.)
The email delivery problems seem to have eased and from what I can see, emails seem to get delivered again phew. I’ve also now improved the look and content of said emails. And for every list’s feeds - such as IndieWeb feeds - there’s now an OPML version/export available.
After four days of events, I’m feeling energized and exhausted at the same time. Had lots of great conversations and a fantastic time at both IndieWebCamp and Beyond Tellerrand! 👉 Florian’s photos: Monday, Tuesday. 👈
Already made the mistake of accidentally keeping the sign-up form for FeedCity live for a little too long without sufficient spam protection. Emails getting delivered to spam folders now. grrrr
IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo IWC Demo
Ok, one more time testing WebSub.
This is another test post for WebSub notifications.
It’s create day at IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf, and I’m trying to make WebSub updates work for my site (and this is an update).
Quite a few exciting days lie ahead of me:
- There’s the IndieWebCamp on the weekend.
- There’s Beyond Tellerrand on Monday and Tuesday.
- And I’m going to launch the product I’ve been working on alongside those event.
😅
Last Sunday, I’ve been on another photo trip with Florian. We had a great time in fantastic weather at the Tetraeder in Bottrop. He took some fabulous photos:
I made a thing using CSS to display a four-image slideshow at the top of the Forkalyst homepage. I was (and still am) experimenting with positioning, gradients and animation. It took me longer than I thought it would and I’m still not 100% happy. But I reckon it’s good enough for now.
Photography-wise I’ve been fairly unmotivated recently: no posting, no development, no scanning and only taking few photos. But today was finally a good day again: I spent the whole day outside in the sun with the family and friends while shooting two rolls of Foma 100 with my Lomo LC-A.
A (command line) utility I’ve been using a lot lately is GitUI. It makes all my day-to-day git-related work easy and enjoyable.
Here’s Terry B’s highlights following Monstertrack 2025 winner Emma Missale on her fixed-gear no-breakes bike through New York. You can also watch the full race, if you have two hours to spare.
I started sorting out my blog posting workflow again. Ever since the Git-based CMSes stopped working, I posted considerably less. I’m using Jekyll to build this site; and creating a file, adding all the frontmatter, making a Git commit and pushing the repo is just too much overhead for me.
So now I have started to automate all those above steps. For now, this works on iOS/iPadOS for my Notes. I currently start writing in the Drafts app; then I can trigger one Shortcut which handles everything else for me via the Working Copy app. And Gitlab CI builds the page as usual.
Played a very good sounding and good looking gig with Forkalyst at the Sojus7 in Monheim last Saturday.
Ok, I took one digital photo at our Landschaftspark outing.
