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I’m a web developer based in Düsseldorf, Germany. I make a RSS feed reader called FeedCity. I co-organise the local Homebrew Website Club. I’m also a passionate film photographer, a husband and father, a bass player and guitarist, metalhead, and movie fan.
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I’ve had this album on my radar already. But it needed their fantastic live gig at this year’s Rock Hard festival to remind me to give it another listen. And I missed out! Great melodies, all the instruments deserve being listened to, and above all is this great emotional voice.
Amenra does an acoustic guitar cover version of maybe my favourite Portishead song. So good! Love how the guitar is recorded and you hear all sorts of background sounds, as well as the player doing the percussion probably live while playing guitar.
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.
During IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf this year, I implemented sending WebSub notifications, to immediately notify potential subscribers, whenever my feeds update. Here's how I implemented this.
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:
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
I made a new thing: a feed reader called FeedCity, available at https://feed.city. The main reason for adding yet another feed reader to the already huge pile, is that I couldn’t find an existing one with the features I’d like to have. Here’s how FeedCity is different, I believe:
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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:
😅
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.
This might be the most disgusting film I've ever seen. And it's not "just" all the guts and gore; it's all the food stuff, too. And all those close-up and wide-angle shots really emphasise it all. It's quite remarkable how this movie made me feel. And those makeup and "costumes": so good! I really wonder how this got so mainstream. Anyway, it's really a courageous piece, directing- and acting-wise. And it's funny, too. It's so over the top, it could not not be funny. The society criticism is not subtle at all, and I found this rather fitting. Writing all this, I kind of want to watch another round. But I'm not quite sure, if I'm courageous enough.
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.
Today I’m making public my little film development web app: https://dt.danielpietzsch.com.
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.
For two years now, I have been buying music again. Opposed to streaming that is. There is a variety of reasons for this.
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.
Not too much gore here - although the ending is hilariously excessive in that regard. It's more of a murder mystery. And it has indeed quite a lot of great ideas and encourages you to solve it yourself. Good one. But: Catholics again 🙄. And what's up with that slow-motion water in that aquarium?
A mystery thriller set in the Vatican. And all the gossiping cardinals are no better than ordinary men. Well, apart from the newly elected pope. And then this ending. Catholics 🙄.
