Blog

Today I stumbled upon the Junited action, which, if I understood correctly, took place for the first time last year. The idea behind it is as simple as it is sympathetic.

To join this June activity, create a blog post (or a page, if you prefer) titled “Junited 2025.” Throughout the month, update it with links to blog posts or blogs that you feel deserve some extra love.

Two pictures, a lot of money, and some questions. Why I received a warning letter and you might receive one too.

One thing that always makes me nervous: a spike in visits on the legal notice page of this website. What are people looking for there? It can't be good!

In Germany, we have something that makes people like me nervous: cease-and-desist letters ("Abmahnungen"). A cease-and-desist letter is a "friendly" notice that something has gone wrong, but legal action or similar would be waived if a certain amount of money is paid and the issue is resolved.

I've already had the pleasure twice.

I always take care not to step on anyone's toes on my site. I avoid cookies wherever possible, no nasty pop-ups, and of course, I don't just use other people's images on my site, paying attention to copyright.

You see me here, sitting at the keyboard with red and blue fingers. I just gave myself a good slap on the fingers.

I was already on the verge, the branch feature/redesign had long been created, the stylesheet already opened, and I wanted to "just" expand my existing design with a small feature. This would probably have cost me days, if not a few weeks, again.

A long time ago, I started filling a folder with screenshots and downloads of designs that I particularly liked. For some reason, I rummaged through this folder again a few days ago. I came across a screen that immediately excited me again and would make the website look like an open book. The typography and text layout were already similar to my site, so it just needed this split view and a bit of CSS…

And suddenly, I was moving things around and destroying layouts, compressing grids, and then sat there looking at my… well… work. "No!" I monologued in my head, "No, no, no! You have enough things that need to be programmed. You can now adjust your design and probably need a whole while for it, during which you will most likely write nothing again!"

Thomas has launched a nice new service, he calls it Bloggerrolle, and I just had to write a Kirby plugin for it.

Maybe you already know uberblogr.de, one of, if not the most well-known German web rings. It now hosts over two hundred German blogs, which is really great!

At some point, uberblogr offered the option to send a ping to inform the web ring about new updates on your own site. This led to the idea of implementing something like that as an independent service.

Thomas recently did this, and it’s called Bloggerrolle. The name already includes "blogroll," and it’s not about displaying the latest posts, but rather a list of blogs that have just reported an update.

A few days ago, I wrote on Mastodon about problems with the IndieConnector and brid.gy.

There I mentioned that I have long been planning to fetch external replies, likes, and reposts myself. However, this is not as trivial as it seems at first glance.

Unfortunately, I haven't figured out why collecting replies via brid.gy is no longer working as it used to. I can't view the current logs because they end with error messages before a Webmention is sent.

So it is indeed time to tackle this feature and remove it from the upcoming-features list on GitHub. And that's exactly what I am doing.

When posting automatically to Mastodon or Bluesky, the IndieConnector plugin (IC) already saves the URLs to the posts. In the case of Mastodon, you can also manually provide a URL (this will also be available for Bluesky).