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:

• “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!

IndieNewsIndieNews DE

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.)

IndieNews

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:

• 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:

• 2025-04-27
• 2025-04-28
• 2025-04-29

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.

I never listened to Destruction all that much. But I had a great evening at this premier at the cinema with friends, the film crew and a few beers (and a whole bunch of other metalheads). Entertaining movie about a sympathetic band and how difficult it was during the pandemic for a band that usually plays around 150 gigs per year.

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.

I cut a little 2 minute video from a handful of phone recordings from our gig last saturday.