Category: web

I am working on bringing Matrix to the WordPress community (see also the WP Tavern post) and part of this is also to explain what Matrix actually is, so I wrote up a few paragraphs that I’d like to share here: Matrix is an internet-based chat system like Slack or Microsoft Teams with a few…

Loving this alias (requires brew install gh): It will switch to the right git branch based on the PR number like this: pr 45 will switch to the branch of pull request 45 of that github repo

One thing that I like very much about my family is the anecdotes and stories. One thing that I am bad at, is reciting them. So I had this idea to create something like a private Wikipedia for my family, where each person has their own page and family members can contribute to the stories,…

Recently I wanted to use a Jetpack block for the WordPress Gutenberg editor, specifically the Slideshow Block, which I think is very slim and elegant compared to other Slideshow blocks on the WordPress.org plugin directory. The one thing I didn’t want to do, though, is to connect my site to WordPress.com. For the most part…

There is something that I feel is not right with today’s web structure. We, as the population of the web, create so much content that ends up on servers of large companies. We could own our data. Therefore, I’d like to help reduce everyone’s dependency on third party platforms for their online activity. Vision You…

I read a lot of web articles on my e-reader (often using Push to Kindle which is fantastic). I left the Kindle ecosystem a while ago and Pocketbook (a TouchHD 3) has been a good home so far. Since my content is often a mix of text and non-text, I was appealed by a color…

This is the presentation I held yesterday, November 7, 2018, at the WordPress Meetup Vienna about the Friends Plugin. I created this presentation with Deckset which allows to generate the presentation from a Markdown file.

Over the past year, I’ve been working on the side on a WordPress plugin that implements an idea that has been growing in me over the last couple of years. Decentralized Social Networking. The plugin that does it is called Friends. Starting with the frustration that there are few alternatives for people who use Facebook: if…

Recently I've had the issue to have a completely unsorted Photo Library in Android after migrating to a new phone. The reason is that WhatsApp images are copied into internal storage and end up with the last modification date when they were copied, thus conglomerating together when they should be spread out over time. The…

This year, 2016, the Vienna WordCamp team (which includes me) was able to get WordCamp Europe to come to Vienna. So may I present to you: WordCamp Europe 2016 in Vienna from June 24-26 Unfortunately it is constantly sold out, but there is a waiting list, should you still decide to come. Looking forward to…

Amongst other things, this is something that I have been working on in the last months: Web Publishing for All! Introducing Community Translator Tools

A quick one: If you need a website text for copying it as plaintext, you can prepare this by using this bookmarklet: add URL to links (drag to your bookmarks bar) add URL to links with CSS: text cannot be copied (drag to your bookmarks bar)

This is in response to the Stack Overflow Meta question: Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late? In my opinion the problem that Stack Overflow is currently facing is caused by a lot of new users that are characterized by user Mysticial as "help vampires". They care nothing for the site and just want…

When updating a blog of mine to WordPress 3.9 the page wouldn’t load anymore because of qTranslate not able to cope with the update. In the error log it says: PHP Catchable fatal error: Object of class WP_Post could not be converted to string in ../wp-content/plugins/qtranslate/qtranslate_core.php on line 455 The error is caused by this…

Just a quick note, we made the Thinkery API public. If you don’t know thinkery.me, it is a simple yet powerful tool for storing both notes and bookmarks. The contents of the saved page is stored in your Thinkery which you can keep even if the webpage goes down. With #hashtags you can easily categorize…

Zur Abwechslung mal ein Post auf deutsch. Ich bin Fan der (inzwischen abgesetzten) Fernsehsendung Genial daneben. Es gibt da eine Genial Daneben Datenbank mit (nahezu) allen Fragen, die in den Sendungen vorkamen. Ohne konkreten Nutzen habe ich diese Daten aus der Text-Form in eine echte Datenbank konviertiert (Script hier) und bin zu folgender Tabelle gekommen.…

Just a quick note in order to save someone else searching for a solution to this problem. When you want to display HTML content in an Android WebView do it like this: String html = “my >b<HTML content>/b<. 100% cool.”; WebView webView = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.myWebView); webView.loadData(“>?xml version=\”1.0\” encoding=\”UTF-8\” ?<” + html.replace(“%”,”%25″), “text/html”, “UTF-8”); If you…

It happens quite often to me that I start committing things and only afterwards decide I should have created a new branch. So git status says something like: Your branch is ahead of ‘origin/master’ by 4 commits. but I don’t want to push to origin/master but rather create a new branch. (Of course this works…

Just wanted to point you all to Wayne Larsen’s alternate interface to Hackernews, called hckr news. I really like the clean and fast interface, compared to the everlasting old interface on the original page (even though you can of course use User CSS to pep it up a little). Wayne also created browser extensions that…

You currently can’t subscribe to an authenticated feed (for example in Basecamp) in Google Reader. If you want to do it nonetheless you can use this script of mine which will talk to the server that needs authentication, passing through all the headers (so that also cookies and “not modified” requests will come through): download…

I have added a feature to the HN Collapsible Threads bookmarklet that enables you to close a whole thread from any point within the thread: This is useful when you are reading a thread and decided that you are having enough of it and want to move on to the next thread. Before you had…

I have been picking up and developing a fork of Grant Heaslip’s Safari extension URL clenser which removes all sorts of un-necessary junk for the URL so that you can easily pass on a clean URL to someone else. Things being removed include: Google Analytics parameters (utm_source=, utm_medium, etc.) Youtube related parameters (feature=) Partner tracking…

There is some back and forth by John Gruber and others, about HTML <title> tags, with Gruber complaining (and rightly so) that for SEO reasons the titles are filled up with junk having little to do with the real page content. The writers of cam.ly suggest to use the SEO title in the HTML and…

I enjoy consuming and participating at Hacker News by Y Combinator resp. Paul Graham. One thing that needs improvement is the reading comments there. At times it happens that the first comment develops into a huge thread, and then the second top-level comment (which might also be well worth reading) disappears somewhere down into the…

Steve Souders has recently released something like a sequel to his previous book “High Performance Web Sites” (HPWS) which I have already reviewed earlier. With Even Faster Web Sites he and his co-authors (specialists in their fields, such as Doug Crockford (JavaScript: The Good Parts) on Javascript) elaborate on some of the rules Steve postulated…