FeedCity: Björn Stierand

Björn Stierand
15 Apr 00:00 • Björn Stierand

Events

I will be present at the following events. If you'd like to meet me, just hit me up before the event by email or on Mastodon. Otherwise, just contact me there! I'm always up for a chat and a cup of coffee. Upcoming 2026-04-25/26: IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf, Sia Consulting, Düs...

Björn Stierand
08 Nov 00:00 • Björn Stierand

Review Beyond Tellerrand Berlin 2025

This was my third time at Beyond Tellerrand after Munich in 2018 and Düsseldorf in 2024, and once again it was an awesome experience (although this time there sadly was no Stefan Sagmeister on stage). :) I took the chance to take my family with me to Berlin, because there i...

Björn Stierand
12 Aug 00:00 • Björn Stierand

Add Open Graph support for link previews

Some (social media) sites render link previews if you paste an URL when creating content. If you don't add the proper tags to your website, most parsers try create some on the fly and fail horribly. So, why not configure your website accordingly in the first place? The key t...

Björn Stierand
04 Jul 00:00 • Björn Stierand

Using Webfinger to create custom Mastodon addresses

If you don't want to run your own Mastodon instance to get a Mastodon account with your domain name, using Webfinger maybe an option for you. Mastodon uses Webfinger to discover Infos about the user account. This allows you to use a Mastodon account with your own domain (in ...

Björn Stierand
04 Jul 00:00 • Björn Stierand

Adding Atom support to this website

Fixing link tags in the Nunjucks template of the Digital Garden plugin Running into issues with dates Adding an 'updated' property to all posts Fixing link tags in the Nunjucks template of the Digital Garden plugin This site runs the Digital Garden 4-Archive/Obsidian Set...

Björn Stierand
01 Jul 00:00 • Björn Stierand

What I’m doing now

Sports I'm running, cycling and swimming on most days of the week if time allows it. I managed to get back into racing as well as I took part in the Weltkulturerbelauf Bamberg half marathon in May and the B2Run Nürnberg in July. I'm currently planning my 2026 season, but don...

Björn Stierand
11 Jun 00:00 • Björn Stierand

Obsidian

Obsidian is my personal knowledge management (PKM) system of choice. I had it already in use since its alpha period, but rediscovered it again in 2023. In the meantime, cool features had been added, such as live synchronization across multiple devices via a free plugin (so you don't have to rely on the paid service Obsidian offers itself).

Nowadays Obsidian is the daily driver for my knowledge collection, gathering inputs from various sources such as Readwise, Goodreads, Snipd as well as manual input. It has replaced Evernote in this regard which I used for many years.

Obsidian also powers this website via its digital garden plugin. For now, I couldn't be happier with the workflow that allows me to publish notes from my Obsidian vault to the website with three clicks.

Björn Stierand
07 Jun 00:00 • Björn Stierand

Access JSON data from Obsidian

If you want to access a JSON file from a remote server in Obsidian, DataviewJS is your friend. You have to rely on the requestUrl() method, though, as a classic fetch() fails because of CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing). Another option, dv.io.load() from Dataview, can onl...

Björn Stierand
05 May 00:00 • Björn Stierand

Read Articles

As I'm interested in a lot of things I read a lot online. I usually save everything first to Readwise Reader. Then I triage the articles when I find the time, either to read and/or highlight them or to throw them away if I don't deem it worthy to read them after some time. A...

Björn Stierand
26 Apr 00:00 • Björn Stierand

Website Home

Who am I? I'm a triathlete, nerd and avid traveller living in lovely Nuremberg, Germany. I like board games, comics and retro games and I'm a proud member of the IndieWeb community. Find out even more about me and what I do at the moment. What is this site? This is my digit...

Björn Stierand
06 Mar 2025 • Björn Stierand

Setting up your own GoToSocial instance

Up until now I had a Mastodon account on mastodon.social that I created in 2017. If you, as I do, want to own all your content IndieWeb-style, ideally it should live under a domain I own and control. ! center That left me with three options. I could either integrate all the...

Björn Stierand
01 Jan 2025 • Björn Stierand

Overview

Here you can find all currently published notes in this Digital Garden. 2023-11-15 Homebrew Website Club Nürnberg About Me About this Digital Garden Access JSON data from Obsidian Add Open Graph support for link previews Add static HTML sites to Digital Garden Add static pr...

Björn Stierand
17 Nov 2024 • Björn Stierand

Normal und die Zero Heroes (2024)

Keine Spoiler, nur Infos vom Covertext: Marc-Uwe-Kling (Känguru, Neinhorn, Qualityland und Co.) und Jan Cronauer (in der Brettspielbubble als 'Cron' bekannt, Drehbuchautor auch für den Känrugu-Film) mit einem Comic über eine Welt, in der alle Superkräfte haben, außer einer -...

Björn Stierand
12 Nov 2024 • Björn Stierand

Social Media

Once there were manifold reasons to use Social Media for me. It was either to get or stay in contact with people (Facebook), get inspired (Instagram) or get the latest news and spend some time browsing the stream (Twitter). This era of Social Media is gone. Consumerism took ...

Björn Stierand
06 Oct 2024 • Björn Stierand

Migration of a DNS setup from Hover to Cloudflare

I used Hover for all things DNS-related (domain registration and handling of all DNS entries) up until now. But when I wanted to setup DKIM I stumbled on a limitation - Hover only lets you add TXT records to your DNS up to 255 characters. For 2048-bit DKIM this is not enough...

Björn Stierand
12 Sep 2024 • Björn Stierand

About Me

I was born in East Germany in 1978, so it seems I'm officially a part of Generation X. Inside I feel more like Gen Y, though. :) I lived in (what is now) the Free State of Thuringia/Germany in a small village called Tautenhain until I was 18 years old. I did cross-country sk...

Björn Stierand
17 Aug 2024 • Björn Stierand

Display dynamic JSON data in the Obsidian Digital Garden

To include dynamic content in my digital garden I used to rely on HTML Inline Frames (IFrames). To display data from a JSON file data.json { "artist": "Luude", "title": "Down Under - feat. Colin Hay" } stored on a server I used the following HTML code. <!DOCTYPE html...

Björn Stierand
17 Aug 2024 • Björn Stierand

Add static prefix to title of your Obsidian Digital Garden pages

If you want to have a static prefix in front of all pages/notes in your Obsidian digital garden, just add a Javascript file to your Git repository at src/site/_data/metadata.js. In there you can define the prefix (in my case 'Björn Stierand - ') as seen in the code below. mo...

Björn Stierand
17 Aug 2024 • Björn Stierand

Add static HTML sites to Digital Garden

To add static HTML sites (i.e. notes which are not in your Obsidian vault) to your digital garden, create a directory in the Git repository of your garden under src/site (e.g. src/site/components). Place your static HTML sites there using the suffix .html.

Afterwards, change .eleventy.js in the root directory so the templateFormats directive also includes html.

  [..]
  
  return {
    dir: {
      input: "src/site",
      output: "dist",
      data: `_data`,
    },
    templateFormats: ["njk", "html", "md", "11ty.js"],
    htmlTemplateEngine: "njk",
    markdownTemplateEngine: false,
    passthroughFileCopy: true,
  };

After the next Eleventy run (either triggered by deploying a note from within 4-Archive/Obsidian Setup/Obsidian or from the hosting provider, e.g. Vercel), the static site will be available at https://your-domain/components/html-file-name.

Björn Stierand
15 Aug 2024 • Björn Stierand

How I handle podcasts in Obsidian

Just Listening vs. Retaining Information I used to use Pocket Casts for ages. According to the stats feature in the app, I started using it in March 2015 and listened to 147 days(!) of podcasts up until 2024. However, I then realized that I just listen. I usually don't take ...

Björn Stierand
15 Aug 2024 • Björn Stierand

About this site

This site is a digital garden. There is no 'stream' of regular updates on this site, neither are there created/updated dates. It (only) consists of interlinked notes which live in my PKM (personal knowledge management) system which is powered by Obsidian. This is on purpose....

Björn Stierand
15 Aug 2024 • Björn Stierand

What is a Digital Garden

[!quote] Maggie Appleton An open collection of notes, resources, sketches, and explorations I'm currently cultivating. Some notes are Seedlings, some are budding, and some are fully grown Evergreen. Publishing notes on the web in a digital garden differs from a blog in tha...

Björn Stierand
15 Aug 2024 • Björn Stierand

Make your Digital Garden IndieWeb-ready

After you have set up your Digital Garden and maybe customized your content, now it's time to add some IndieWeb features. How to set up IndieAuth To set up IndieAuth, it is necessary to include rel="me" links in the website header. The Digital Garden template can be customiz...

Björn Stierand
15 Aug 2024 • Björn Stierand

How to set up a Digital Garden in Obsidian

This is a short description on how to set up a digital garden in Obsidian using the community plugin by Ole Eskild Skeensen. I started this during the IndieWebCamp 2023 in Nuremberg/Germany to replace my old website which was based on Known-. Setup of the Digital Garden To s...

Björn Stierand
15 Aug 2024 • Björn Stierand

Customize your Obsidian Digital Garden installation

Adjust the domain To adjust the domain of your website, you first need to set a CNAME in your DNS system for the address you want (in my case bjoern.stierand.org). Then, enter the new domain in the Vercel frontend under Settings/Domains. Vercel will automatically handle the ...

Björn Stierand
14 Aug 2024 • Björn Stierand

IndieWebCamp 2023 Nuremberg

Hello from IndieWebCamp 2023 Nuremberg.
This site was created live during the demo of my What is a Digital Garden.

Björn Stierand
04 Jul 2024 • Björn Stierand

Board Gaming

Most people got back into board games during the COVID-19 pandemic or were board gamers before. That's not my story. I played games when I was a kid. I was obsessed with a (from today's view quite simple) racing game called 'Autorennen wie noch nie' my grandpa owned. It was ...

Björn Stierand
18 Mar 2024 • Björn Stierand

2023-11-15 Homebrew Website Club Nürnberg

Meeting Notes These notes can also be found in the IndieWeb Wiki. Participants and their websites Björn Stierand - https://bjoern.stierand.org Sebastian Feldmann - https://make.sfeld.eu Tilman Zitzmann - https://tilman.me Max Häßlein - https://www.maxhaesslein.de Alex ...

Björn Stierand
16 Nov 2023 • Björn Stierand

Minimalism

[!quote] Break the Twitch ...a lifestyle practice focused on minimizing distractions that keep you from doing what matters to you. In a world full of consumerism, content and distraction minimalism is a movement to concentrate on the essentials and cut out the rest. It tri...

Björn Stierand
16 Nov 2023 • Björn Stierand

Homebrew Website Club

Homebrew Website Club is a meetup for anyone interested in personal websites and a distributed web. Whether you’re a blogger, coder, designer, or just someone who wants to improve their presence on the web, this meetup is for you. Topics of conversation include:

Demos of personal website breakthroughs
Discussion around the independent web
Get to know other members of the IndieWeb!

Nuremberg is - after the restart on 2023-11-15 — the longest running in-person HWC meetup. Shout-out to the other meetups in Düsseldorf and Edinburgh!

We meet once a month, the dates can be found on the IndieWeb Events Page. You can find us at "Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm" in room WG.110 usually on the 2nd Wednesday of every month.