Week 1/2025

Happy New Year! It’s been a long while since my weekly posting of the Weekender. Looking through this blog’s archive, the last one was back in July 10, 2023. At the time, I was pretty overwhelmed from the personal projects I had gotten myself into and decided it was okay to just take a break.

During that time, I had also just completed migration of all the blogs I’m responsible for to a new hosting service. Shortly after that, I noticed that micro.blog would occasionally not be able to connect to my blog’s RSS feeds. This was problematic as I used the service to cross-post from my blog to Twitter, Mastodon and Bluesky. After some investigation and troubleshooting, I was able to narrow the issue down to Cloudflare and my webhost using Imunify360. Disabling Cloudflare caching would intermittently fix the issue, so I’d disable it whenever I was ready to post. But that work around was kind of a pain.

Unfortunately, even with the help of friends over at micro.blog, there’s never been a workable solution for getting around this so that I could consistently post from my blog to the service. So after almost 2 years of trying to figure out a solution, I decided it was time to let it go and move on. This isn’t a decision I take lightly as I really do love the micro.blog community, but this issue makes it untenable to be an active member, at least from my personal blog. That said, if my posts make it through to micro.blog because they’re not being blocked by Cloudflare or Imunify360, great!

While looking for a cross-posting alternative, I found Echofeed, a service that can cross-post from any RSS feed to Mastodon and Bluesky. It works well enough for my needs and removes the constant checking and troubleshooting I had to do with micro.blog before posting from my blog. Hopefully, with this setup, I can get back to posting here on a more regular basis.

I’m changing things up from my previous Weekender format and will just post about things that I found interesting during the week.

• One of the casualties of 2024 was Omnivore, the read later app/service. They quickly shut down last Novemeber and I haven’t really found a good replacement that I like. I settled on Omnivore after searching for a bookmarking replacement for pinboard.in. I mainly used it as a way to quickly bookmark stuff for reading/reviewing at a later time. For now, I’m back to using Safari’s built in Reading List.

• I’ve been contemplating some changes for the blog, so I need to brush up on my CSS soon. Hacker News surfaced an interactive CSS Flexbox Playground today which will come in handy. If you’re new to Flexbox, I highly recommend Josh W. Comeau’s Interactive Guide to Flexbox in CSS.

• tahti is a groove box with a lot of cool ideas. If the Elektron Digitakt had a web counterpart, this might be it.

• Robb Knight (developer of Echofeed) created Lens, a handy web page to check your meta tags, icons, and rss feeds are formatted correctly.

• I couldn’t help but nod my head while reading Ars Technica’s senior security editor Dan Goodin’s take on passkeys. I see how promising this could be, but there are still many too many shortcomings. Until sync and portability are worked out, I can’t really recommend them over a password manager.

• Whether or not you utilize or appreciate LLMs, they were unavoidable in 2024. I highly recommend reading Simon Willison’s summary of the developments surrounding LLMs in 2024. He showcases, the good, bad, amazing and the ugly sides of this emerging technology.

• At the start of each new year, my wife and I go to two different temples and draw our omikuji. Omikuji are paper strips with fortunes written on them regarding health, work, love, travel and more. It’s a fun tradition that you can try as well via this Hobonichi Techo webpage.