This spring, once again, there was plenty of cleanup work to do. What was part of the spring cleaning 2026?
Organizational
Perhaps first, something that has little to do with technology: I write differently now. I no longer write only technical content. But you’ve probably already noticed that. In the past, I often published articles too early and only corrected them later, if at all. I now force myself to let every article mature for a few days. Multiple proofreads. Automated spell-checking. I hope this will benefit the quality. On the technical side, this is supported by setting a publication date three days in the future. Sure, I can bypass that, but so far it’s been working quite well.
Major Changes
- I’ve built in a Mastodon-based comment system. Server-side. You can find the full origin story here.
- I’ve switched from Ulysses to Obsidian for writing. I simply like the tool, and for my purposes it’s free. I didn’t want to spend almost 50 euros again for a year of Ulysses. I find the handling of footnotes alone very elegant. I’m still experimenting with the Canvas feature.
- There’s a Markdown preprocessor. It handles things like auto-tagging and in the process also corrects an error I had made in all Markdown files 1. For example, all texts that mention Solaris are also tagged with the Solaris tag — even if I forgot to do it myself.
- The HTML files that Jekyll produces are processed by a postprocessor script. Currently, it only adds the timestamp of the postprocessor run and a hash of the HTML file (combined with a secret). This is intended as a kind of integrity check and is used by me through a script.
- I’ve also experimentally enabled digital signing of blog posts with GnuPG. I’m far from sure whether I want this and, above all, whether I actually need it.
Minor Changes
- Lots of small tweaks in the HTML code (for example, there was still a font being loaded externally — I’ve fixed that).
- The Docker container was regenerated after quite some time.
- The long text about the surgery is now in the menu. That text is very important to me. I think it deserves a special position on the website.
- There’s now a Subblogs menu to have thematically separated article overviews. There are three topic areas: “Solaris/IT,” “Personal,” and “Cycling.”
- There are now thematically separated RSS feeds. The topics are the same as in the Subblogs menu. You can find the individual feeds here.
- RSS links in the blog now redirect to a page that distributes across the different feeds. The default is still the full feed.
- Finally, a proper 404 page. I don’t know why I didn’t take care of this much sooner.
- Caching directives for a variety of files.
- During some migration, two files went missing. It never had any externally visible effect, but it kept filling up my log files.
- The entire build server has now moved to its own dedicated system. This means the HP EliteDesk 800 G5, which was originally supposed to become a NAS, has finally found its purpose.
- In the past, I’ve repeatedly come across a webring 2 that collects other German-language blogs. Since my personal texts are now exclusively in German, I’ve registered that part of the blog there as well. Let’s see if they’ll accept me.
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