🎉 Happy New Year everyone!
I hope you all had a nice Christmas time. Originally I planned to spend some of the time away from work to update and tinker with some ideas I had for my own website here. I ended up spending the last two weeks pretty much off the computer with my family, cooking ridiculously time-consuming meals and baking bread. Was definitely worth it and I feel very motivated to kick things off this year.
This week I implemented a way to post to mastodon from my own site (thanks Florian for the inspiration) and posted another short post about how to install phpmyadmin on a Valet+ installation. Also, I finally found some time to work on my photos section which I’ll launch next week and where I plan to post some of my photos going forward.
Frontend Development
🕊 HTTPS explained with carrier pigeons
If you need a high-level explanation of how HTTPS encryption works, this is your post. Andrea does a great job of abstracting the complex things by using carrier pigeons as an example for how HTTPS works.
Baida.dev – HTTPS explained with carrier pigeons
WordPress
✨ The Syntax Highlighting Plugin I was looking for
I wanted a better way to display code examples for a long time, but never found the perfect solution. Usually I got frustrated because most solutions I found either need you to use a custom block in WordPress, configure a ton of things manually (like code language used) for each and every code-block, rely heavily on JavaScript to function, or a combination of those.
Thanks to this blogpost by Chris Coyier, I first heard of this wonderful Syntax Highlighter Code Block Plugin by Weston Ruter and my search seems to be over.
Uses/extends the native/default WordPress Code Blocks, auto-detects the code language in use, renders everything right on the server without any JS at all. Oh and it loads the needed styles responsibly, only if a code block is present on a page.
So far, I just activated and added a little bit of custom styling to it and it works like a charm. Love it so far!
WordPress.org – Syntax-highlighting Code Block (with Server-side Rendering)
Github – syntax-hightlighting-code-block
😵 When sharing on Mastodon kills your server
Donncha O Caoimh wrote about how sharing a link on Mastodon can kill your server, at least temporarily, because all the instances try to fetch a preview of a post. This probably won’t be a big problem for anyone without thousands of followers, but still an interesting read with some ideas on what you can do to mitigate this from happening.
off.blog – The Mastodon Onslaught on your blog
Other / Random
🤖 The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
Maggie Appleton explores what will happen (or already happens) when the web gets flooded with AI generated content, be it text, graphics or even videos and what we people can (need?) to do, to prove we are in fact human. An interesting read and definitely something that is coming sooner than most people think.
Maggie Appleton – The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
📜 Bring Back Blogging
Apart from the surge in new users on mastodon in the last few months, the changes at twitter also made many people realize how important it is to own their content – me included. I appreciate initiatives like these to motivate people to blog more and to connect outside of social media and just submitted my own feed.
🗒 Obsidian Canvas
I started using Obsidian for note-taking just a few weeks ago, and even though I’m still using only a tiny bit of its functionality it feels perfect. Now they have launched a new core plugin, called “canvas”, which looks like a very interesting concept to develop and formulate ideas on a blank space and to interconnect those notes and ideas in one space.
Ok, that was it. Hope you have a good start into 2023 ✌️