It was annoying me for a while now that my chosen theme PaperMod didn’t also support some kind of all-in-one RSS feed with all main sections. And also that the feeds were called index.xml instead of feed.xml, confusing me every time I wanted to check something on them manually. Also, the feed link title just being rss didn’t exactly help in a feed reader either.

So just now I’ve done some long overdue spring cleaning on this page:

1. I updated PaperMod¹ & adjusted my overwrites as necessary
2. I implemented my custom rss feed template with some more logic to render it with all main sections on home
3. I disabled the automatic inclusion of the section feeds and created my own with proper title attributes ("(All|Blog|TIL) posts on foosel.net"), put into the head of all pages
4. I overrode the default name of the generated feeds to be feed.xml & added the necessary redirects (hopefully…)
5. I also added links to the main RSS feed at two prominent places: in the social icons on the home page as well as in the main navigation next to the search button. While the feeds were always discoverable through the related link tags in the HTML page itself, and there were also specific links on the section main pages, I still got some questions here and there on whether there was a feed, so I hope this makes things easier to discover now.

If you want a look behind the scenes on how I did that, this page’s source is on a public repo, so feel free to take a look 😊

All that’s left to say is: I’m sorry should I have broken something there or caused your RSS reader to push all old posts into your face 😬

human.json is a lightweight protocol for humans to assert authorship of their site content and vouch for the humanity of others. It uses URL ownership as identity, and trust propagates through a crawlable web of vouches between sites.

Basically, a web of trust to confirm that pages are written by actual human beings vs just LLM generated slop.

That idea certainly clicked with me and so I quickly threw together a basic human.json in this page’s static folder and linked to it from the layouts/partials/extend_head.html override file. That will get filled more over time 😊

And as reading through the spec of human.json also made me learn about the /ai slashpage I added that as well and linked it from the footer.

Those slashpages are a fun idea I’ll have to investigate further too!

Two years ago I was into learning React, since that is what I’m planning to use for a future OctoPrint UI. And when I decided to reboot this webpage, I also figured I would use that as a reason for experimenting with new build tools and techstacks. So I built this site with next.js, Tailwind CSS and a bunch of other stuff, and spent a lot of time implementing basic content management tooling and rendering.

However, once that was done, I realized that while I had learned a lot about React and next.js in the process, I had not really created something that is fun to use, which reflected in my reluctance to actually use it. Writing the post about my custom SteamDeck buttons, yesterday really drove that point home again, and in fact kinda broke the camel’s back for good 😅

So I decided to do what I’d been meaning to do for a long time and finally took a look at Hugo, which I had seen used a lot by others for their blogs over the past years, and also its PaperMod theme that I had seen on Jürgen Gmach’s website (👋).

Color me extremely surprised when I had my page rebuilt within a couple of hours, with all the features I wanted and more, and a way nicer experience for me as the content creator. I didn’t even have to touch my posts that much, mostly some small changes on the frontmatter and boom, done.

So I went down the rabbit hole further, fine tuned some things, customized some others, and now I’m really happy with the result.

And thus, please say hello to a new version of foosel.net, now powered by Hugo and PaperMod.

It’s been a couple years since I last tried to maintain a blog. Back then I was still living life as a corporate drone, employed as a Software Architect to consult other people on their IT problems. I rarely had anything I could blog about – either things were under NDA, or they were simply uninteresting. Since then my life has been turned completely on its head. In late 2012 I got myself a 3d printer, spent my Christmas break to develop a small web interface for it, that grew into a full sized Open Source project called OctoPrint and these days I work full time on it.

I’ve learned a lot not only on 3d printers & Python, but also on Open Source development, crowdfunding, the challenges of community management, but also on work life balance, workplace ergonomics, home office life and stress management. And that’s just from my job! In my personal life I’ve also spent a lot of time tinkering with electronics, learned how to bake bread, discovered cooking and went completely down the home automation rabbit hole.

I don’t know about you, but I think that should hopefully make for some good opportunities to blog again, and save some of my learnings in a more persistent way than the ephemeral nature of twitter threads. So I did what apparently every dev seems to do in such a case and spent way too much time on a webpage reboot with some new tooling that I wanted to try anyway, and this is the result. This whole page is still a static page, but I’ve switched it from Jekyll to next.js. Why? I wanted to get some more hands-on experience with React since I’m evaluating it for a new UI for OctoPrint, and I also never really warmed up to Ruby but know JS, so with expandability in mind this just feels like a better fit. If you want to study the source, you can find that here (but please don’t look too closely, I’m still learning and things are probably not even remotely optimally implemented).

So here we are, and it’s time to fill this up a bit more. Thankfully I already got some ideas…