Blog

As I embarked on building websites, layouts were still being created with tables, and design possibilities were limited. Animated GIFs were the highlight of every website. If one wanted a button to change color when hovered over, two images would be created and swapped - that was then.

I worked as a traditional web freelancer for many years, creating countless websites for agencies and private clients. Don't worry; I no longer used tables back then, but instead opted for CSS.

The main goal of this version was to make IndieConnector independent from external services. Therefore, I wanted to start by detaching IndieConnector from webmention.io in the first step.

I quickly fell down the rabbit hole into Webmentions, as one might expect. Unlike what I initially thought, receiving Webmentions is not just about listening for a request and processing it.

A few months ago, I published an article on crossposting from Mastodon to Bluesky in the Hub. Since then, it's been the most frequently visited article.

Crossposting is about posting something on Mastodon and having that post automatically published on Bluesky as well. Because Bluesky has another character limit than Mastodon, the tool will split up long posts and create threads on Bluesky. The tool was built as a NodeJs script.

For many people, implementing this is too complicated or they don't have the possibility of running a NodeJs scripts or Docker images. Very few hosters offer these possibilities.

I've been thinking about this topic for some time now and, aside from other features that would be great, I've had my eye on the central goal of making it even easier to use. This includes signing up via Mastodon, entering Bluesky credentials without a .env file, etc.

While cleaning up and reorganizing old data, I stumbled upon a few screenshots of my old website. Back then, I had a Linux news site - today, one would probably call it a blog. At that time, I still used my own CMS, and if I look at these screens, it was likely with a classic table-based layout.

I'm not even sure what the state of the website was back then, but if I take a look at the Web Archive, the structure of the page looks different. But who knows what I was working on locally at the time. Anyway, I spent a lot of time tweaking my CMS back then.

To be honest, not much has changed. I don't have my own CMS anymore, but I still tinker with my website and especially my Kirby plugins. And this is how it looks today:

I still like to try out new things and love to repurpose functions and services, but the time for that has become much less (and my frustration threshold has shifted significantly over the years).

I'm actually quite grateful that Kirby takes a lot of work off my hands compared to back then. Do you have any old screenshots lying around? Please post them!

In recent days, I've noticed a surge in posts on my timeline complaining about bots and crawlers, wondering how to block them. A good opportunity to bring attention to the latest update of the Darkvisitors plugin.

I published this small plugin a few months ago. It delivers a robots.txt that can be used for various purposes: