Last week I added a feature using Hugo’s data/ folder to store cached Mastodon post data as .json files for my Mastodon embeds. When Hugo builds the site, it doesn’t have to connect to the internet to fetch each post’s details. 👍

I created a new /⁠style-guide page last week which received some positive feedback from my readers on Mastodon. I’m hoping to further iterate on it once I start merging my new theme changes to my live site (it’s on the back burner at the moment), and include some editorial conventions (i.e. written English) in the future.

Closing Tabs

One horrible habit I have is having a zillion tabs opened. I closed about 100 while writing this weeknote. Small win!

Deleting Old Accounts

I went on an account deleting spree going through old entries in my password manager, trying to delete old accounts. It was either:

1. Very simple; an option was there in the account settings page to delete your account.
2. Slightly annoying; no visible option to delete/terminate/close your account, but there are ways to reach out to customer service either with a chatbot (“we’ll get back to you”), or an email.
3. Very difficult; no option seen anywhere or in the FAQ, no obvious email for customer service, maybe some form link offered in the privacy policy page (which I’m not sure if I will get any response).

Then there’s the “forgot password” situation. Some of these accounts I have are inactivated due to lack of activity. It either tells me that I have to reset the password to enter, or if it just fails (without “this account doesn’t exist” / “there is no account under this email” message), I will manually reset the password. But funnily enough, a few sites actually created a new account when I used the “forgot password” link. Madness.

IRL

I attended my first in-person tech event last weekend—Hong Kong Open Source Conference 2026—and I’m not sure what to think of it. The overall organization and logistics was underwhelming to say the very least, leaving a lot of space for improvement. I’ll probably go into more detail in a dedicated post.

Looking forward to next week (well this week since this weeknote is getting fairly late again) as I start my first driving lesson in Hong Kong! 🚗

Link Roundup

Here are some links I found interesting last week.

• Build Your Own Decentralized Dropbox with Syncthing | マリウス — I personally love Syncthing.
• http://joaopedroalmeida.com/en/ | João Pedro Almeida — A photographer’s site.
• My 2026 Hugo Workflow | Chris Wiegman — I love reading other people’s blogging workflow.
• A THOUSAND CRANES: Why I Write Every Day | Brennan — Don’t think I could write every day, but I should write more.
• Zsh: Clear The “You Have Mail” Message| Adam Johnson — Last week I suddenly noticed this mail message in my terminal. It was so strange I’ve never seen it before. Found out it was because of a cron job that failed!
• ColoRosetta: A color translation tool — Cool tool to translate between different colour syntaxes by Chip Cullen
• Poor Man’s Style Guide | Bryan Braun — If you wanted a template to get started for your own style-guide page!
• Privacy. Trust. Safety. (Terms Apply.) | ByteHaven — Apple’s latest.
• Why I email complete strangers | Good Internet Magazine — Nice post by Zachary.
• Splitting the Web | Ploum — Just came across this older post but still very relevant in 2026.
• What do you suggest? — Interesting page that auto-completes what you type like search engines, by Simon.
• Good Internet - Important Announcement — Sad to see this close. I wish the maintainer, Alexandra, all the best!

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An IndieWeb blogger I followed for a long time, Brennan, followed me on Mastodon! What’s even cooler was having him join the Homebrew Website Club: Pacific last week! His blog and writing are often mentioned in the IndieWeb chats and meetups. During the meeting he shared a useful IndieWeb checker/tool called Scan.fyi and his homelab dashboard; Brennan Café.

Naty S @eclecticpassions@fosstodon.org
2026-05-27, 11:55

*Fan-girl moment* when one of your favourite bloggers follows you!! @brennan 🫶

Definitely check out Brennan's site if you haven't already! https://brennan.day/

#blogs #PersonalSites

0 5 1

Website Updates

I added some new features to my site last week, like an improved /⁠firehose, a new section on the homepage for my latest Notes, much improved coverage of Mastodon comments and syndication, and other bits and bobs you can read about in the /⁠changelog.

In Progress

A new post about another script I created is coming soon (I hope to write it while it’s still fresh in my mind). It is to prevent any repeated accidental publishing of drafts which I mentioned last week.

After a recent Bitwarden update, the macOS client is completely unusable… I am seriously reconsidering changing my password manager—it’s a shame as I used to be a huge fan. KeePass is on the top of my Bitwarden alternative list, but I need to do more research.

While reading about alternatives I came across “I Do Not Recommend Bitwarden”, from a personal site called マリウス.com. They have the content, layout, style/vibes I envisioned of having; minimal/brutalist with a hint of geek. I’m not sure what their name is; maybe Marius? It’s a really neat site—also built with Hugo—that’s worth checking out.

Link Roundup

I’m a bit busy so it’s a very short weeknote this week, but as usual, here are some links I found interesting last week.

• Can you teach an old design system new colours? | Chris Burnell
• Thoughts on starting a digital garden | Spudart
• The Slow Collapse of MkDocs | Florian Maas
• Why I Blog. You Should Too! | Shellsharks
• Thought Eddies | Daniel Corin
• Big Tech’s War on Users | ByteHaven
• Why I’m Building a Digital Garden | Flower Xu
• Hugo Release v0.162.0 | Github

Tools / Services

• Minijinja
• Wiretext

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Last week I caught up with my college classmate for dinner. It was really lovely as it reminded me of all the good times in Ireland! One thing we chatted about was the recent rise of popularity (and value!) of Pokémon trading cards.

I grew up with Pokémon and 2026 is their 30th anniversary. I still remember my childhood bedroom is full of Pokémon; my bedsheets, posters, tees, stickers, physical toys, trading cards… the list goes on. Haven’t looked at my card collection for over a decade—trying to find it now but no luck yet. It’ll be awesome if it is worth some cash! My friend told me to sell them this year as the prices are quite high now.

Hugo Draft Blunder

So it finally happened to me—accidentally publishing draft content which got pushed to whoever subscribed to my XML feeds. It was live for 3+ hours and I only realized because my friend, told me about it (thanks Chris!) Luckily it was just a draft of an /elsewhere page I’m working on that has some links. I’d feel much worse if it was like messy bullet points and random pre-post notes!

It was caused by me highlighting an extra line in the front matter when editing one of the parameters. I deleted the line that says draft = true while editing the line above without realizing it. Hugo will build all content that doesn’t have draft = true. This means content with draft = false or no draft parameter will be built.

I don’t write my drafts in a separate section / directory, so I’m completely reliant on the draft = true line in the front matter. While researching how to prevent this from happening, I came across a guide by Zachary on Discreet Drafts in Hugo. It is not exactly relevant to my scenario but useful for those interesting in managing drafts better in Hugo. This Discourse post is more relevant, but I don’t think it will work on my drafts in different sections, e.g. pages or posts.

An idea I have to fix my issue is to add a pre-deploy check in the build / CI process. If there is no draft parameter (or a typo that is not true or false) in between the +++ front matter delimiters, then treat the content as draft = true by default.

I’m not good with sed/awk so it might take a bit of tweaking or help from Qwen. It should be well worth the time because I really don’t like the idea of having this happen a second time.

Converting WordPress Content to Markdown

I’m starting to extract the content from my secondary blog EclecticPassion.net to Markdown. It’s messy but necessary—I’ve made the decision to stop using WordPress and that includes forks like ClassicPress going forward. The latest v7.0 made the decision rather quick when it started pushing “AI Features”.

After converting one post manually, I knew there had to be a better way.Wordpress-export-to-markdown is probably one worth trying. A quick way would be to use online tools—I came across one from Brett Terpstra (I used his app, nvALT 2, a long time ago) called Heck Yes Markdown.

I’m trying out a new SSG actually to see if it’s a viable backend of my secondary blog… more about it soon!

Fresh Tech Finds

Legend: 🧪 Experimenting | 📌 Bookmarked | 💛 Liked

• 💛 Decap CMS — While I have grown to like the non-CMS way of managing my blog (i.e. in the IDE), sometimes I do miss having a simple user interface. I don’t think I’ll try this but I like the idea of it.
• 📌 Hatsu: Self-hosted ActivityPub Bridge for Static Sites — This tool intrigues me! I currently have this Hugo blog syndicating content to Mastodon semi-automatically with Indiekit (short-form content)and also manually when I post new long-form content. A proper ActivityPub bridge will be very cool indeed; but I have no idea if I’m capable, technically, of implementing it!

New Content You May Have Missed

Last week I published a new post about a Python script that converts a list of URLs into a Markdown list of links, with title and site/author name auto fetched. It’s not foolproof but makes my weekly Link Roundups way simpler!

And while working on said post, I decided to start a new Gist repo on Codeberg. It’s still at its infancy, but I thought I’d go ahead and start it because it’s been on my mind for a while. I ended up learning how to sign Git commits with SSH too!

Link Roundup

Here are some links I found interesting last week.

• Digital Gardeners | Maggie Appleton — Great resource for those interested in maintaining a digital note garden.
• Differentiating online variations of the Commonplace Book | Chris Aldrich — I’m investigating if I should start a digital garden… This post by Chris is very detailed and explores all the possible variations of the idea.
• My blog is a digital garden, not a blog | Joel Hooks — Another post about it.
• Scientists go on a quest for the ‘right’ way to cook pasta | National Geographic — Jeremy is an IndieWeb blogger I follow. In his latest newsletter he has a section about cooking pasta. I never knew there’s a so many scientific discussions about making pasta! I always thought it was a waste of water actually; which is why I often cook it with less water than suggested. But alas, I’m more of a rice person!
• Japan’s Tourism Troubles Are Being Fuelled By Social Media Assholes | Aftermath — I had similar experiences when visiting Osaka last year. It was quite obnoxious and I feel bad for the locals. Social media has really created a new species of toxic travellers who are there only to capture that video or photo without any care about others around them or the environment. The situation is rampant in Hong Kong too. Travelling used to be fun and rewarding, exploring a place without much guidance and in peace.
• How much ActivityPub can a Static Site Generator implement? | s3lph made — For those interested in learning more about ActivityPub / Fediverse.
• A guide to implement ActivityPub in a static site (or any website) | Maho Pacheco — Multi-part series that I’m bookmarking. It is getting a bit outdated though…

[For up-to-date content, visit burgeonlab.com directly (XML feeds don't fetch updates in real-time). For other feeds, visit the subscribe page. Thanks for reading my weeknotes using a RSS reader!]

• I’m officially migrating over from Tuta to Mailbox.org! I’ve paid for a year of the Standard tier (€30 annually). Hope the experience will be an upgrade from Tuta. It took roughly 18 hours for the new DNS rules to propagate for my custom domain to work at Mailbox.org (patience is key!)
  • I’ve already migrated my calendar and contacts over, just pending the export of emails at Tuta—I vaguely remember it is not that straight forward due to the encryption, but I may be misremembering.
  • MXToolbox was useful while setting the custom domain, and also dig (dig man page).
• Last week, I decided to update my CV. As someone with a career gap, I am finding it difficult to justify the situation… I never used (and don’t want to start using) LinkedIn, but it seems every recruiter expects it.
  • I’ve always done my CV manually, but I am testing out this modern resume builder called Reactive Resume. The layout and UI seems quite user-friendly, but not sure if it’s any good yet. I also might give Typst a try—there are a lot of existing CV templates.

Fresh Tech Finds

Haven’t done one of these for a while. This week is an Android edition.

Legend: 🧪 Experimenting now | 📌 To-try list

• 🧪 DAVx⁵ and ICSx⁵ — Mailbox.org uses CalDAV, WebCal, CardDAV for contacts and calendar. These two indispensable apps provide the bridge between the provider (Mailbox.org in my case) and the Android calendar / contact app.
• 🧪 Etar — A great FOSS calendar which I have used before for local calendars. Now I’m using it full-time. It automatically picked up the calendars from Mailbox.org without intervention via DAVx⁵. The Etar widget is a million times better than Tuta’s implementation (it was technically not usable as half the time it wouldn’t load/not synced/required manual updating).
• 🧪 DroidDock — I used to use OpenMTP but that has stopped working on Sequoia 15.7.5 with my Nothing Phone 3a (Android 15). DroidDock is an alternative that works! It requires installing ADB (Android Debug Bridge), brew install android-platform-tools and on my phone, instead of selecting File Transfer in the “Use USB for” list, select PTP.
  • So far, it looks to be less buggy than OpenMTP; I’m so happy there’s a similar alternative. I do not want to go back to using Android File Transfer (oh it’s actually no longer available since 2024).
  • If you don’t need a GUI, I found a post from WebNiraj that uses a script to adb pullfiles from the device to destination that ignores existing files making it less time-consuming.
• 📌 AliasVault — If you read the post about Bitwarden in the Link Roundup below, this might be of interest. I haven’t checked it out yet; I came across it in the Privacy Guide forums.

Link Roundup

Here are some links I found interesting last week.

• The Quiet Renovation at Bitwarden | ByteHaven — Quite an important read for anyone using Bitwarden. It is a shame that enshittification is coming.

• “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI | Molly White — A great read by Molly (who inspired me to become a Wikipedian).

• Using Jupyter Notebooks with Hugo | Race Dorsey — I was reading about how to improve my code-heavy articles and how to present them better. Still haven’t decided on how to host my code snippets though.

• How to Fix the Internet | Time — Pertinent post in today’s world by Hank Green.

• Game of Trees — Nathanael introduced me to a new version control software I wasn’t aware of. I only knew of Git and Mercurial.

• clamp() Calculator | Chris Burnell — Chris is really into CSS, he has this cool calculator tool on his site that helps calculate clamp values! He also told me about Utopia.

• Ghostty Is Now Non-Profit | Mitchel LH — I don’t use Ghostty, but I am always happy to read FOSS becoming a non-profit. My favourite D2 Lang project is also going to the same non-profit.

• Running local models on an M4 with 24GB memory | Jola.dev — While I am against AI slop culture, I do find some use of LLMs when self-learning tech stuff and experimenting by trial and error.

  • I don’t like the notion of using cloud models in regard to privacy and environmental factors, so I only have experience with using local models available on Ollama. My 2020 M1 Mac Mini has the max. 16GB RAM, which is a limiting factor. When I next upgrade my computer, I hope to get at least 32/48GB (if I can even afford it then…)

• CSS Animation Performance: GPU Transforms & will-change | Unwired Learning — At the last Homebrew Website Club: Pacific, after Tantek shared his new arrow Unicode symbol for his links, I thought I’d share my SVG external link icon; but instead, my link hover underline animation became the highlight.

  • I have messed with it in the past a few times, right now, it’s the version that doesn’t affect page performance. My CSS is all over the place and I really hope I can get to it soon (have been bogged down by other life stuff). Anyway, this post explains how it all works behind the scenes.
  • Shout-out to Joe who explained how my CSS actually works and to Pierre for demoing how to fix the limitation of not being to show the underline animation for wrapped text.

• And three more links about the recent security vulnerabilities…

  • Cache-poisoning caper turns TanStack npm packages toxic | The Register
  • Three Linux Exploits, ICE’s 20M | Techlore
  • GrapheneOS: Fixing Android’s VPN Vulnerabilities | The Coders Blog

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Completed

• Finally caught up with my /⁠changelog page. I haven’t updated it since February as I was busy working on the redesign branch; which I haven’t touched for two months!
  • Made some stylistic improvements to the changelog—the subheadings have a much smaller font-size now to improve readability (using a custom class name).
  • The latest updates are code block styles (which I am quite pleased about, see it in the last post with code) and minor changes to the top of my home page.
  • While working on the floating element (profile picture) I had trouble getting the heading below the picture to align properly to the left. Apparently, I needed to “clear” the float!
• Two major Linux CVEs last week, CopyFail and DirtyFrag. The Raspberry Pi kernel still isn’t patched yet. Luckily the mitigations for both vulnerabilities was not that difficult.
  • I found the articles and instructions by Sam James quite easy to understand (CopyFail and DirtyFrag).
• Published a new technical post last week about my Feather Wiki usage. I seemed to be quite a popular post and I even got to connect with Robbie (the dev behind the project) for a bit which was really cool. He also merged my PR of the pt-PT translation (with the help of Randal)!

Naty S @eclecticpassions@fosstodon.org
2026-05-04, 07:07

New #blog on #BurgeonLab ✍️

➡️ https://burgeonlab.com/blog/feather-wiki-brain-dump-app/

I wrote about a new app I'm using and my note-taking setup! It's a tool used for non-linear notebooks and #wikis called Feather Wiki @FeatherWiki.

This is post 38 of #100DaysToOffload
📈 https://burgeonlab.com/tags/100daystooffload/

@tiddlywiki@a.gup.pe @TiddlyWiki

#blogging #blogs #guides #newpost #blogpost #smolweb #techblog #techguides #termux #android #obsidian #pkm #syncthing #httpd #busybox #braindump #privacy #wiki #featherwiki #tiddlywiki #selfhosting

How I Use Feather Wiki as a Private Brain Dump Tool

Discover Feather Wiki, a FOSS lightweight and customizable personal private web notebook, with multi-device sync via Syncthing and Android support using Termux.

7 18 3

In Progress

• My Tuta account is due for renewal next month. I’m thinking of migrating after being with them for a couple of years because the Android apps are still quite sluggish, and I am not getting notifications reliably for some reason despite usual troubleshooting. Inability to use third-party email clients and lack of PGP/GPG support is making me consider alternatives. I’m looking at mailbox.org currently.
• Talking about my blog redesign, I made a big mistake of writing too many commits on this new branch when I began—new features, design changes, style updates. Being the Git newbie that I still am, I failed to do small feature branches to keep things tidy so I could merge/rebase back to Main bit by bit.
  • Instead of doing a huge merge/rebase now (there will be so many conflicts that I’m not confident of fixing), I am trying to learn how to use interactive rebase and cherry-pick. But I still need to understand more before I begin the “surgery” to fix the Git mess I’ve created!
  • I think I’m leaning towards making small feature-branches from my current Main branch HEAD, then cherry-picking (with -x) the relevant commits from Redesign branch, ± squash if necessary, merge/rebase into Main.
  • To see what remaining unpicked commits, something like this can be run (I think?): git log redesign-branch ^main --oneline which can help track my progress.
  • Still uncertain if rebase or merge is cleaner in the long run for a single user project… leaning towards rebasing for a cleaner history.
• My M1 Mac Mini (2020) started crashing the Dictionary app (I go into more details here). Adam (from Adam’s Desk) kindly sent over a few extra troubleshooting links like this Apple Discussions thread about the xattrerror message I also have. I think a reinstallation of the system is required…

Mother’s Day

I am lucky to still have my mom with me. We did her favourite things today and celebrated Mother’s Day together. I want to take this moment to express my gratitude for everything she’s done and sacrificed for me, in order to give me the best of everything. She’s the best—my constant supporter, teacher of many things, and my rock. To all mothers out there, including my awesome mom, I hope you feel appreciated, celebrated, and loved as you deserve to be; every single day.

Link Roundup

Here are some links I found interesting in the last two weeks.

Small Web

• Start writing | Robert Birming — I should learn from Robert.
• The internet used to be fun | Kwon — Found this great post by Kwon that is a directory of articles that cover the question “Why have a personal website?” Definitely worth checking out.
• IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2026 | James — I have been busy and unfortunately still haven’t written up my summary/thought post on IWC: DUS 2026, but check out James’s post if you want to see what he did!
• Webmentions for your Static Site | Rowan Manning — One day, I want to have a page or section on my site to show who and what was mentioned from my site. I tried manually including some in a weeknote a few weeks ago but I realized a problem—if I set up auto webmention sending one day, that will result in duplicate/looped mentions which I don’t want.
  • The webmention storage part is what confused me when I first got into all this. I should investigate this more thoroughly…
• IndieWeb Directories | Paul Tibbetts — A great resource by Paul on where to find good Internet content.
• Unfriending Facebook, Instagram and Goodreads | Angelique Weger — An older article but still stands.
• Speed! Formula 1 Feed | Tekphloyd — I follow @tekphloyd on Mastodon and recently found out he’s into F1 like me! He has this feed all about F1, and it’s quite nice to get all the news during race weekends in one central place. It’s created using surf.social, which allows users to combine various sources into one feed.
• Journaling Slump | Coriander in Pho — I used to have slumps in journalling too (also used the Hobonichi). Unused pages ended being “date free” note pages or mental scratch pads for the day, so I never felt like I “wasted” pages.
• Scroll quadrāgintā | Shellsharks — Mike has gathered a group of female Fediverse and IndieWeb authors and creators for last week’s Scrolls newsletter. I am honoured to be included, and this is certainly appreciated as the gender skew on the blogs I follow is quite severe!

Corporate

• Google Just Patented The End Of Your Website | Forbes — What a horrible time it is for Internet users. I suggest using alternative search engines.
• SXSW Used AI-Powered Trademark Tool To Censor Dissent on Instagram | 404 Media — Another example of censorship on the rotten platform that is Instagram.
• Ask.com, aka Ask Jeeves, has officially shut down after nearly 30 years online | AlternativeTo — Wow, an end of an era… still remember using it as a kid.
• Copy Fail | xint.io — I took the chance to update my Macbook Air 2012 running Linux Mint from 21.3 to the latest 22.3 Zena following the Copy Fail CVE. Unfortunately, Raspberry Pi’s kernel is still not updated so I’m using the temporary mitigation for now.
• Popular WordPress redirect plugin hid dormant backdoor for years | Bleeping Computer — WordPress news like these just make me feel like WP sites are a ticking time bomb! I will be converting mine to a static version soon, like what Dave has written here.
• Novel Campaign Abuses Obsidian Note-Taking App to Target Finance and Crypto Professionals with PHANTOMPULSE RAT | Netsecops — Dangers of plugins…
• The 2026 CP+ Photo Expo Solidified Its Importance to the Industry | PetaPixel — I haven’t been paying attention to the photography scene… I actually didn’t know Photokina dissolved in 2020. I hope the CP+ Show will be more international-friendly in the future!
• Study Finds A Third of New Websites are AI-Generated | 404 Media — I just want to read some human content. That’s all…

Projects

• We Love 88x31 —Really cute and retro page counter with no cookies, JavaScript or tracking. Will probably add one to my site soon!
• Madblog: A Markdown Folder That Federates Everywhere | Fabio Manganiello — For those interested in creating site with Markdown + Federation + IndieWeb support.
• Bad Website Club — Really awesome boot-camp for those who want to learn responsive web design for free, taught by Carmen, Eda, and Jess.
• Little Pixel Library — Are you into pixel art and books? Check this out! I came across it via Chris’s site.
• Taken Since You Arrived — A good wake-up call.
• Is the project still alive? · terrastruct/d2 | GitHub — I’m more than thrilled that the creator of D2 Lang (the diagram tool I rely on heavily) is moving the project to the Non-Profit, Hack Club (similar to what Ghostty did).
• ai.robots | GitHub — I updated my robots.txt last week, maybe you should have a look too? Hope to get Anubis or some bot/scraper checker in the future, but this will do for now.
• Introducing Zapp | ZSA — Flashing ZSA keyboards now supported over the terminal instead of your browser or ZSA Keymapp.

[For up-to-date content, visit burgeonlab.com directly (XML feeds don't fetch updates in real-time). For other feeds, visit the subscribe page. Thanks for reading my weeknotes using a RSS reader!]

Last weekend was an absolute blast! I attended my first ever IndieWebCamp remotely, held at Düsseldorf. For those who are not familiar with it, it’s a two-day in person BarCamp (aka unconference) where anyone interested in independent, personal websites (i.e. IndieWeb) meet to share ideas, be inspired, and collaborate on IndieWeb building blocks.

I have been bogged down with some family errands for the whole of Monday and Tuesday (this weeknote is already running late—it’s already Tuesday evening), so I’ll be writing a separate blog on my experience of attending the IWC, and all the cool people, tools, and sites I discovered later this week. Spoiler: it was such a fun experience, I highly recommend anyone who runs a personal site to attend. The next one is in Nuremberg on June 27–28, 2026.

Site Updates

I haven’t been keeping my /⁠changelog up to date. I will get to it soon! 🤞 In the meantime, here’s some new frontend features on my site:

• Added a GeekCode section to /⁠about
• New XMPP contact method on /⁠contact
• Converted the Firehose Atom feed from summary-only to full-text (sorry if it triggered a fresh pull of all the entries in your reader!)
• Testing an XSLT (stylesheet for XML) for the Notes Atom feed in a retro terminal console style; and I really like the blinking typing cursor (might use that on my blog title in the header…) I am aware of XSLT being deprecated soon in the future, but it was still a fun experience. Might apply it to all feeds or leave it as a temporary experiment. Check Joel’s guide on how to use XSLT.
• Sparklines are now available! It’s on the bottom of every section (i.e. post type) index page. To see what sections are available on my blog, check /⁠sitemap, or learn more about this type of data visualization on the /⁠stats page. Check Chris’s guide on creating sparklines with a twist!

Webmention Digest

Since I won’t be implementing site-wide public displays of webmentions in the near future, I think a new section like this in my weeknotes would be a nice way for me to keep track (and search) for the mentions I’ve received from fellow bloggers. It’s a nice way to share with you all the interesting sites from the small web too!

Update: On second thought, this is not a good idea as it will result in a loop? or repeated webmentions if I implement an automated process one day.

This list is in reverse chronological order.

• My IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf Demo | Paul Tibbetts
• IndieWeb Deep Diving | Massimo Scagliola
• Liked | Massimo Scagliola
• Fellow Travelers, Friends’ Sites, and other related links | Michael Kupietz
• Weeknote 2026 | Ink.V1Sta
• Liked | Robida
• HWC | CrowderSoup

Link Roundup

Here are some links I found interesting last week. The link styling has changed slightly, where in the past I would use a format like - Author: [Title](URL) — <insert comment>. This week I’m starting to use my new “URL to Markdown link converter” Python script which makes the whole process much easier as I don’t have to manually (1) copy the title, (2) copy the site/author name, and (3) do the Markdown link syntax.

• Baking webmentions into the build | Max Glenister — I discovered Max because he was the one who answered my question in the Over/Under interview (where each interviewee gets to ask the next blogger a question). Check out his interview—Issue 61 on Hyde’s site (and mine was Issue 60 if you missed it)!
• April this and that | Marco — I have been a big fan of MG’s, aka @solariz, blog. And even if he says this post only covers “several small topics each not viable for a full post…”, I still like his discoveries and sharing.
• Pangolin on a Pi | Paul Tibbetts — I read about Pangolin actually before starting to use Tailscale Funnel last week; reading Paul’s article makes me understand all this networking business a bit more.¹
• How this site works now | Cassie — I love the rundown on how Cassie’s site works. I keep meaning to do one of these posts, but it keeps changing before I get time to finish it…
• 100 Days To Offload — Revamped project website by Kev, I surely hope I can make it this year! 🤞
• Tangible Life | Steve — New personal site I discovered with a smattering of techy/personal content that’s right up my alleyway!
• Node.js | Eloquent JavaScript — Eloquent JavaScript is a book about JS by Marijn Haverbeke. I’m still not comfortable with it (probably never will) and I don’t like adding it to my site (I try to reduce the amount used as much as possible—I try not to use external libraries and rely on vanilla / pure JS). I think this is quite a good resource. If you’re also trying to learn some JS like me for Node.js (in my case, for Indiekit), then check it out!
• Introducing Vanishing Culture | Internet Archive Blogs — A good e-book recommendation by April (another new IndieWeb fellow I met last week at the IWC event).
• Trump fires the entire National Science Board | The Verge — Feeling incredibly frustrated, disappointed, and despondent.
• Why Your Decaf Now Costs as Much as the “Good Stuff” | Coffee Geek — As a caffeine sensitive person (i.e. drinking caffeine after 11/12 noon or having more than one cup a day will cause sleep disturbance), I always like to have decaf in the freezer (yes I’m one of those coffee home brewing nerds who stash their coffee in the freezer—it’s great!) for when the mood strikes to have a coffee in the late afternoon. Everything is getting more expensive, and I guess decaf beans is one of them.

[For up-to-date content, visit burgeonlab.com directly (XML feeds don't fetch updates in real-time). For other feeds, visit the subscribe page. Thanks for reading my weeknotes using a RSS reader!]

Disclaimer

Technical information on this page is merely a log of my amateurish self-hosting experiences.

I have no professional training in networking or self-hosting security. Allowing public access into your home network is risky—please make sure you know what you’re doing before exposing ports, using reverse proxies, etc. Learn more from the Resources section at the end.

If you are knowledgeable in this area and spotted a mistake, I’d be forever grateful if you can reach out so I can correct it! Thank you.

A Breakthrough Self-Hosting Moment

Words can’t express how I feel after miraculously managing to get my first public facing, self-hosted app—Indiekit, a Micropub Node.js server—working on my refreshed Raspberry Pi 4B homelab! It’s the first time I’m using Tailscale¹ and Docker Compose CLI, so it was a lot of trial and error for the networking bits.

My Indiekit journey went like this:²

Setup Notes

DISCLAIMER: Correct terminology may be lacking in this section.

• Lazydocker was the simplest Docker monitor I could find (alternative being Dockge). While it is a bit limited in what it can do (view only), I liked how simple it is and quickly accessible in the terminal via SSH (which is the main way I access my Pi).

• Access to the server is by default, private. It is only accessible on my devices within the Tailnet (Tailscale’s name for the network within your own cluster of devices).

• When I need to use Indiekit’s OAuth endpoints to verify my identity using this site’s domain, i.e. IndieAuth, I can turn on public, Internet-facing access by turning on Tailscale Funnel momentarily with sudo tailscale funnel --bg 80 and turn it off with sudo tailscale funnel reset.

• Caddy, from what I understand, is acting as a traffic controller, directing Tailscale Funnel to localhost:80, which handles a reverse proxy to the port defined in the Indiekit config. In local mode (no Funnel), it’s a simple reverse proxy to localhost:<indiekitPort>

• For TLS certificates, I originally tried setting that up with my custom 6-digit .xyz domain with Let’s Encrypt and letting Caddy handle it, but I couldn’t get it working. I reverted to using the MagicDNS hostname from Tailscale and used Tailscale certs:

  1sudo tailscale cert --cert-file /etc/caddy/ssl/device.tailnet-name.ts.net.crt -key-file /etc/caddy/ssl/device.tailnet-name.ts.net.key device.tailnet-name.ts.net
  2# Give permissions
  3sudo chown root:caddy  /etc/caddy/ssl/device.tailnet-name.ts.net.* && sudo chmod 640  /etc/caddy/ssl/device.tailnet-name.ts.net.*

• The last piece of the puzzle is being able to set up subdomains for my other self-hosted apps. Tailscale’s MagicDNS hostnames don’t support native subdomains (e.g. service1.pi.tailnet-name.ts.net, service2.pi.tailnet-name.ts.net). From preliminary research, it seems I could use something like caddy-tailscale plugin as a workaround, but I probably need a break before continuing!

• If I am going to try to continue refreshing my homelab with my previous self-hosted apps, I’ll go for Navidrome as I used that the most in my previous setup. I’ll just access it with the port number directly before I figure out a way to do the subdomains. Do you have a similar setup? How did you work around this limitation?

Homelab Resources

Some links I found informative:

• Excalibur’s Sheath: Securing Your Homelab: Tools, Automation, and Best Practices
• Pretty Good Security: Tailscale Personal Use Guide
• Dušan Mitrović: Self-hosting, trouble in paradise
• Debian: Caddy manpages
• Geeks For Geeks: Docker Compose
• Selfhosting.sh: Lazydocker vs Dockge

Site Updates

I do have to apologize this weeknote is sounding like a tech changelog; again. I’ll try to include some non-tech stuff in the future! Here’s what I worked on last week on my site:

• A much improved version 2.0 /⁠stats page! There are a lot more graphs (from Apache ECharts) and the stat cards are an even number now, making a perfect grid (OCD in me was trying to get two more stats in there—weeknotes and total read time was what I added). Feedback is welcome!
• Wasn’t sure when the error started, but inline loading of Mastodon comments was failing. It was due DOMPurify failing whenever the code is minified (I still don’t understand why it worked before). I relatively unfamiliar with JavaScript (compared to HTML/CSS), so I had to get ollama run qwen2.5-coder:3b to help figure out the issue. It works now (with minor improvements) and the script remains locally served (not via jsDelivr).
• All Mastodon links now on my site should open with a simple “Mastodon Helper” pop-up that helps you either copy the link or opens the link in your instance. Try it out below with the “Syndicated on Mastodon” button. No information is collected, it’s pure JS with no third party dependencies.
• Joined a new webring last week: Polyring, a webring for polymaths. Dušan, the creator of Polyring is also from Serbia (like Hyde @lazybears who interviewed me earlier this month)!

Other Tech Tinkering Updates

• Minor changes to my IndieWeb wiki page

• I finally left Apple Terminal and using Kitty! Did some basic customizations (loving the window-less look). Haven’t had time to do more though, as I want to give another zsh prompt a try, like Starship or Oh My Posh. P10k has been good but it is half-abandoned.

  

• Did a few lessons on vimtutor! It’s not too bad and I memorized how to :q! now. 🤣

• Mike @shellsharks does weeknotes he calls “Scrolls”. He’s included something from me a few times (which I’m honoured and grateful for). Here are a few links, definitely check out his site as it’s one of my favourite blogs!

  • Scrolls 37
  • Scrolls 35
  • Captain’s Log, Entry: Feb 26, 2026

Link Roundup

Here are some links I found interesting last week.

• Defining and Identifying Attention Capture Deceptive Designs in Digital Interfaces — Insightful study on the techniques used to capture attention.
• Brandon Philips: Deploying Anubis in Front of My Static Site
• Gregory Hammond: Why I Use Fediverse As My Main Social Media Platform
• Engadget: The Supreme Court doesn’t care if you want to copyright your AI-generated art
• Ars Technica: Users hate it, but age-check tech is coming. Here’s how it works
• Web Pro News: EU’s 2027 Battery Mandate Forces Smartphone Redesigns, Rattling Apple and Samsung Supply Chains
• Umami v3.1.0 release — Maybe one day I’ll self-host something like this; but right now I’m quite content with GoatCounter.
• Homebrew: How to Create and Maintain a Tap — I have eight casks installed via homebrew that will deprecated in a few months because they are not passing the macOS Gatekeeper check. I think I might have to learn how to maintain a tap…
• And a follow up regarding Google / Android sideloading saga from IzzyOnDroid:

Izzy @IzzyOnDroid@floss.social
2026-04-16, 18:20

Remember? "Sideloading" is here to stay, and won't go away, they said? Don't be afraid, they said? Something something "we heard you"? Suuuure! Who would ever doubt it!

Attached the copy of a mail developers with apps in the PlayStore CURRENTLY receive. Please, read the text in the red box carefully:

"Apps not registered by September 2026 WILL NO LONGER BE INSTALLABLE ON CERTIFIED ANDROID DEVICES in select countries."

See an exception there? I don't.

#Google #Android #DeveloperCertfication

478 381 29

Closing

This is an incredibly late weeknote. 😵 Have a good rest of the week!

---

1. In the ideal world, I’d want to be using Headscale, a open source version of Tailscale, but as a total noob, I wanted to understand how all this works with a managed service before trying the more “hands-on” approach. ↩︎

2. This is the first time I’m using D2 (instead of Mermaid.js) to create diagrams in a blog post! What do you think? No JavaScript is needed for client-side rendering as it’s exported as an .SVG. I find the arrow animation quite cool; but is it distracting? One downside is I can’t add links to the text. ↩︎

---

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2026/w15/2026-04-14T20:33:54+08:002026-06-02T21:58:22+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Jumping down rabbit holes and troubleshooting: fixing Mermaid/D2 diagrams, Render and Codeberg problems, learning new tools, Pi home server refresh, and more!

Troubleshooting Fulfilments

I don’t know about you, but I love working through and solving problems. That feeling of accomplishment, especially when it’s in a field you’re not familiar with, is awesome. What’s something you solved recently that made you feel this way?

Feel free to send me a webmention if you reply via a post on your site using the form below.

I’ve been jumping into multiple rabbit holes last week; one after another. If you’re not into tech waffle, then jump to my extensive Link Roundup instead.

Mermaid Diagrams Failing

Last week, I noticed my diagrams on the blog failed to load. After some quick tests with different diagram tools including GraphViz (which is very professional indeed), I realized I am still partial to Mermaid and D2. I’m most familiar with D2 as that’s the scripting language I use to create Open Graph images.

Mermaid seems to be pushing AI straight in your face (as seen on their homepage) which is cringe; but undoubtedly, I think the styles and flexibility is overall better than D2. D2 has easier syntax but is a much simpler tool with less customization. Sadly, the project seems to be abandoned (no updates since Oct 2025).

When I get round to it, I will likely remove the Mermaid JS client-side rendering and just create the diagram with either Mermaid or D2, export it as an SVG, and use that directly. I don’t like relying on JS for my sites, and making the ESM JS a local asset didn’t work for me on first try.

Here’s a peek at the different styles I’m trying out:

And a few articles about Hugo and diagrams:

• Bits By Me: D2 Diagram Rendering in Hugo
• Veriphor: Diagrams
• Hari Sekhon: Diagrams as code

Indiekit: Node.js Micropub Server

Note

My concurrent use of Indiekit with Hugo deserves a multipart series, or at least a detailed post, because the way I use it is probably a bit custom/hacky. I haven’t had the time to delve into it yet unfortunately—the draft so far only has an intro and a cool Mermaid flowchart. 😅

Therefore, this section might not make that much sense… Just know that the content created using Indiekit is stored separately to my Hugo content files—it’s only fetched and combined at build time.

Hosting Indiekit on Render’s free Hobby tier was all good and well for the last four months until a few days ago, when it failed to access the text content store (Markdown files on Codeberg). At first, I thought it was an access token issue, but after testing the REST API with curl commands (which is really cool by the way), it’s not the cause of failure. Long story short, the problem is not with Indiekit nor Codeberg, but with Render.

My guess is Codeberg is protecting themselves from disruption by scrapers/bots, so they blocked the AWS servers that Render uses, rendering it nonviable for me. There are workarounds like using other content stores or switching host, but I am not keen to do either right now.

My temporary fix is to run the server on my Mac. Previously, I only learnt how to deploy it to Render, but never got it working locally; but this time, with more knowledge of Node.js, I got it running! I even came across another new tool called direnv which manages the .env file with all the tokens/secrets automatically which is very handy. One big upside of running it this way means no cold starts/spin-downs like on the free tier of Render! 🥳

There was this amazing moment when I tried, for the very first time, to access a service at home via Tailscale. With ease, I could access Indiekit on my phone while I was outside my home network. 😯 The tailnet really works like magic! I think I’m finally wrapping my head around the basic principles.

This then lead me down another rabbit hole: I wonder if I could run Indiekit on my Pi?

Refreshing My Pi

The Indiekit troubleshooting session initiated me to doing a refresh on my homelab / self-hosting setup (with my little Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB that runs DietPi). I haven’t had the time to do the refresh after a drive corruption issue in October, which I shared on Mastodon.¹

Naty S @eclecticpassions@fosstodon.org
2025-10-25, 04:24

My #RaspberryPi 4B is acting up and I think it's data corruption(?) from not powering off properly when it stopped responding. I really need to buy a switch to shutdown safely...

I formatted the SSD (SMART status seems ok), flashed the latest #DietPi and slowly setting back my services.

This is a great chance for me to actually sort out the messy initial setup of experimenting with #SelfHosting I'm in the process of setting up a #cron job with #rsync, #syncthing & dietpi-backup now. 🤞#Rpi4

2 5 3

I have since bought a tiny momentary switch for the Pi!

The first thing to improve is the networking and access to the Pi. I’ll be writing about what I’m doing in the future, but the first problem to solve was the severe lag I started getting after upgrading my router a few weeks ago.

I quickly wrote up a post on how to fix it by using Ethernet directly connected the Pi from my Mac. It was really satisfying—I learnt a little bit more about networking once again!

Web Server: Nginx to Caddy

With SSH fixed, I progressed to switching from Nginx to Caddy as my main web server on the Pi. I used Homer before and want to continue with the minimalistic dashboard.

The config for Caddy, called the Caddyfile, was simple and short. Perfect for beginners like me! I like it a lot more than Nginx already. HTTPS is automatic, and I even managed to use my custom 6-digit .xyz domain with it (that costs less than $2 USD/year).

Now I don’t have to type in the unwieldy https://<device-name>.<tailnet-DNS-name>.ts.net:<port>, just <service-name>.123456.xyz. I chose a 6-digit number that I could type with one hand. 😉 Will continue my Pi setup hopefully in the coming weeks.

 1home.123456.xyz {
 2        tls internal
 3
 4        root * /var/www/homer
 5        file_server
 6
 7        header {
 8                Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000;"
 9        }
10}

SourceHut Deployment

The last thing I worked on was greatly improving how my site is deployed. It will be a separate post which I will link here when it’s up!

IndieWeb / Homebrew Website Club Titbits

Reilly was talking about Neovim, and Ross is the long standing Emacs user. I am the CLI text editor newbie who only barely manages with Nano and launches codium when possible. But I am fairly intrigued at trying out either Vi/Emacs because I want to challenge myself to see if I’m able to learn it.

Two other blogger friends, Chris and Joel, told me about CSS Naked Day. Unfortunately, I couldn’t participate this year because the whole site broke down when I tried to deactivate all styles (I’m hopeful my big redesign feature branch will fix it 🤞 so I can participate in the next year). By the way, there’s also a JS Naked Day that’s coming up later this month!

And Joe has also joined the human.json bandwagon! (I’ve mentioned it a few weeks ago.)

Webrings Update

Oh my gosh! I submitted my site to Geekring a few months ago, and I kept checking every few weeks until I totally forgot about it. While closing my zillionth tab, I saw https://geekring.net/list.txt and decided to give it a final search to see if I got added—I was! Thank you, DusteD, for managing this very cool webring.

To see what webrings I’m part of, scroll to the bottom and expand the details element, “View webrings”. The dice brings you to a random site in the respective webring! Happy exploring!

Link Roundup

This weeknote is running late; so it’s just a big link dump—some good articles in there. Hope you find something interesting from my selection!

Small Web

• The Next Wave: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing
• CybersecKyle: Microsoft’s WireGuard and VeraCrypt Lockout Is Bigger Than a Support Failure
• Edward Zitron: AI Is Really Weird
• Cory Dransfeldt: Uses and Music pages
• DusteD: How to Internet 2020 and Beyond
• Kev Quirk: Adding a Book Editor to My Pure Blog Site
• Cenotaph’s Docs: MusicBrainz and ListenBrainz - your best friends for music discovery
• Mark Wyner: I Should Have Self-Hosted to Begin With - Mark W.rites
• Max Glenister: It’s 2026, why are vendor prefixes still in your CSS?
• Rachel: The internet used to be fun
• Janik von Rotz: 100 Days to Offload

Corporate

• It’s Foss: Git Isn’t Just for Developers. It Might Be the Best Writing Tool Ever
• Forbes: Google’s Gmail Upgrade Decision—2 Billion Users Must Act Now
• Anchor: Someone Bought 30 WordPress Plugins and Planted a Backdoor in All of Them
• iA Writer: Markdown and the Slow Fade of the Formatting Fetish
• Barrack: OpenAI Codex: How a Branch Name Stole GitHub Tokens

Projects

• ZeroVer: 0-based Versioning
• Smallweb Subway
• Memos: FOSS note taking tool

---

1. This Mastodon embed was a detour in and of itself because I didn’t like the look (and third-party JavaScript injection) from the official Mastodon embed. I ended up creating my own Hugo shortcode for embedding toots using Hugo’s resources.GetRemote that fetches the data using Mastodon’s API on build. The icons are from Feather Icons. I’ll share it in a post soon! ↩︎

---

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2026/w14/2026-04-06T23:55:00+08:002026-06-02T21:58:22+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Participating in Hyde's Over/Under series, HK public library resources, new Fresh Tech Finds section exploring tools like CLI/IDE, and lots of IndieWeb links!

Writing

Last week I’ve written more than usual because Hyde has invited me to his long-standing interview series called Over/Under. I’m really honoured to be the 60th entry! Read it on Hyde’s blog and definitely check out the other entries while you’re there.

The interview consists of an assortment of topics chosen by Hyde, two book recommendations, a question from the previous blogger, and a question for me to ask the next participant. Hyde will give responses as well. This is the first time I’ve collaborated at this scale with another blogger, so I’m quite excited (and a bit nervous too).

Reading

I am proactively trying to increase the amount I read by using my Kobo Aura ONE more regularly (I’ve written about getting it a few years ago). By using the stock Kobo software that links to OverDrive for library loans, I’m able to explore different types of books easily at no cost. The Hong Kong Public Library offers a great selection of bilingual options. But I didn’t realize the Kobo OverDrive system doesn’t sync with the reading statistics when I’m reading the borrowed books on Libby (Android).

The only way to get it to sync is by using the Kobo Books app on Android as well. I’m someone who prefers to use the least possible apps as possible (PWA¹ for the win); plus, I feel the Libby app is more privacy-friendly than the Kobo app. So I guess syncing reading stats for library books is out of the question for now—unless I get an e-reader that supports Android apps, which is unlikely at the moment.

While looking at the HK Public Library site, I found out there’s free access to O’Reilly and E-Book Central ProQuest! Expecting to find some quality resources there.

Fresh Tech Finds

As a longtime tech tinkerer, I keep coming across new tools that catch my interest—but I often don’t get around to testing them. So I’ll start sharing them here with you, my dear weeknotes readers! This new section will be tools/services/apps/etc I discovered recently, where I’m either experimenting with now (🧪) or have added to my “to-try” list (📌). If you have any recommendations or preferences, let me know. I’m all ears!

• 📌 Geany — Sometimes I’m tempted to try another IDE (I’ve only ever used VS Codium).
• 📌 Micro — CLI text editor, alternative to Nano, which is what I use for quick edits in the terminal.
• 📌 Neovim — I keep seeing those cool terminal text editor setups based on Vi/Vim.² Maybe it’s worth trying to see if I can get my head around the way Vim works?
• 📌Arcane — On my Pi homelab, I use Portainer as my container manager, but I never truly enjoyed it. Maybe this modern take will be a nice upgrade?
• 🧪 Mindwtr — I’ve been a fan of SuperProductivity for years and years. But I came across this GTD alternative which looks interesting. It’s a much smaller project. I’m testing it on macOS + Android + syncing via WebDAV.
• 🧪 Kitty — I’m in the mood for upgrading my basic terminal setup from Apple Terminal + Oh My Zsh + powerlevel10k + tmux to something more sophisticated. Kitty is the first one I’m going to try (out of my shortlist of WezTerm and Ghostty). I’m starting testing next week and very excited. I expect a learning curve but I am hoping to be less trackball/mouse dependent going forward in 2026. Fun fact, did you know Kitty’s creator Kovid Goyal also created Calibre the e-book manager? I love that app so I hope I end up enjoying Kitty too.

Link Roundup

Here are some links I found interesting last week.

IndieWeb

• Angelo Gladding: W3C Social Community Group
  • Angelo mentioned at the previous HWC regarding the W3C Social Web Working Group (something I’m not familiar with) and the recent developments he has been following regarding Meta’s Threads now being the largest player in the ActivityPub protocol.
  • I really value and appreciate the decentralized nature of the Fediverse, especially Mastodon which is the main Fediverse software I use. From what I understand, having any server that is too big puts the whole equilibrium off kilter—which is why new Mastodon users should not have mastodon.social be selected as the default instance. Yes, it helps with initial on-boarding; but to be honest, it is not that difficult to explain the way the Fediverse works (federation is just like email), and allow the new user to select an instance relevant to them before creating an account.
  • Mastodon has been the best “social media network” experience I’ve had thus far. I genuinely hope it stays the way it is; no ads, no algorithms, strong on community and authenticity.
• Pablo Enoc: Discovery Tools for Independent Websites — Met Pablo at HWC (it was his first attendance 👋) and I realized we follow each other on Mastodon already actually! He is the creator of powRSS which is something I’ve been meaning to check out but haven’t yet. I wanted to write a post about finding sites from the small web too, but it hasn’t materialized (I only have a section on my /blogroll that list some tools used to find indie sites).
• Thomas Vander Wal: Weeknote - 15 March 2026 — While chatting about Webmentions at last week’s HWC, Thomas fixed his Webmention error during the meeting!³ He also restarted his weeknotes habit.
• Mike Kupietz: Fellow Travellers, Friends’ Sites and other related links — Mike is one of the regulars at HWC—he recently added me to his FOAF (friend of a friend) page (thanks Mike!) His site may seem “denser” than some others; but there’s really neat things on his blog, like a CLI mode 😮 and this funny pair of 👀 that can follow your cursor.
• Jeff Bridgeforth: Weeknotes 26:12 — Last shout-out to another IndieWeb user I met at my first FrESH meeting, two weeks ago.

Elsewhere

• Hacker News: Ask HN: How do systems (or people) detect when a text is written by an LLM — Funny how em dashes and semicolons are now “AI tells”. Authors have been using them forever, and I’ve used them since high school; if anything, the AIs just learnt/stole those habits from human writers who did it well first.
• Martin Rowan: Raspberry Pi Wi-Fi Performance Revisited — After I upgraded my router, I am finding SSH really laggy with my Pi… This article has some good info about Pi’s Wi-Fi capabilities (I’m not using Ethernet so it is quite relevant to me).
• Steph Ango: How I use Obsidian — I like reading about how others use tools, and Steph is @kepano, who’s the creator of Obsidian.
• Joan Westenberg: The Rime of the Ancient Maintainer — A nice play on title and I enjoyed the post and the concept of the maintainer.
• PHP for People — I never understood what was going on with PHP when I was using WordPress. This looks like a practical resource (it’s by Neatnik, the dev behind omg.lol).

---

1. Progressive web apps are just websites that interact like native apps. I prefer them over actual installed apps as they require a lot less data permissions. ↩︎

2. The first time I encountered Vim was when I opened the editor to change some configs, and my keyboard suddenly seemed “broken” and stopped responding normally. I was completely lost—it’s funny to think about now, not being able to quit Vim. I only have bare-bones understanding of it, and since it felt so confusing, I never explored it further. ↩︎

3. While Ross pointed out to me in the meeting that I’ve set up humans.json incorrectly in my <head>. Thanks, Ross! ↩︎

---

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2026/w13/2026-03-31T23:26:01+08:002026-06-02T21:58:22+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Tested new WP theme for my secondary blog with My WordPress. Learnt more about Git branches, merge/rebase, and cherry-pick. New router excitement becomes woes.

WordPress Playground

WordPress released my.wordpress.net earlier this month and I only got round to testing it out. An in-browser WordPress sounds great for local testing and experimentation—great for tinkerers like me! I finally tested one of the latest WordPress theme from the IndieWeb wiki but unfortunately, I didn’t quite like the theme’s limitations.

As much as I don’t like WordPress for its clunkiness (theme and database bloat), plugin overload, security vulnerabilities, etc—it was the first tool I learnt to build websites with, so there’s a sense of familiarity. By starting afresh with a lightweight theme like SemPress and using a static frontend, I think I will enjoy it a lot more—because I can skip the main bulk of plugins; Hostinger Tools, WordFence Security, LiteSpeed Cache, Updraft Backups. Happy days!

What I ended up with is SemPress (Semantic WordPress). Although it is not a full-site editor (FSE) / block theme (which I have got used to), I like the built-in microformats markup, lightweight structure, and the simplicity of using the theme. I’ve already made some custom CSS to adjust it to my liking, created my first child theme, and added some custom tweaks using functions.php; which is not something I enjoy as I can’t get my head around PHP syntax at all… Anyway, I think I will be eventually converting my existing WordPress theme (OnyxPulse) to SemPress and make the move to a headless WordPress setup with a static frontend soon.

Here’s quick demo!

New Router

Home networking is something I’m not too confident in as I’m always worried I might set something wrong resulting in security vulnerabilities. What I did learn while experimenting with my Raspberry Pi homelab is a bit of basics about ports, PiHole, firewalls, split-tunnelling/Tailscale, etc.

I’ve also come to learn that open source firmware like OpenWrt or DD-WRT are great for extending the lifespan of hardware; not to mention the security benefits, customization, and more features. I’ve decided to get the GL-iNet Flint 2 because the current ASUS router at home is almost definitely a security loophole and overdue for replacement. Fun fact: GL-iNET are based in Hong Kong (which I only just found out 😅).

Git Cherry Pick

Git branches are a relatively new addition to my Git knowledge bank, but merging/rebase is still something I’m not entirely comfortable with (especially merge conflicts).

Tip

I found video tutorials (on YouTube) by The Modern Coder, Philomatics, and freeCodeCamp to be understandable and rather useful.

While I did use a new branch (refactor/theme-redesign) to work on my Hugo theme redesign; I also added quite a lot of new features and general quality-of-life (QoL) improvements while on the redesign branch and did not use separate branches for each feature (a.k.a. feature branch).

As I can’t merge refactor/theme-redesign to my live site’s master branch (it’s not completed yet); I won’t be able to add those QoL features to the live site unless I start using Git cherry-pick. I think I need to remove the picked commits from the source branch after cherry-picking so it doesn’t duplicate the picked commits when I merge the branch later? I’m not going to do anything until I find out!

Git Notes

I guess I am learning the hard way—but here are some quick notes I made as I am learning to use Git:

Warning

I am a Git beginner, and my understanding could be wrong. Please check the official Git manual!

• Create a new branch for each new feature/change
• Rebase periodically to the main/master branch to prevent a lot of conflicts upon final merge/rebase
• Do not rebase if commits are already pushed to remote (as rebasing changes commit hashes)
• To abort rebase or merge, add the --abort flag
• After fixing rebase conflicts, git add <fixed-file> and continue with git rebase --continue (in git merge processes, use git commit -m "Fix merge conflict" to continue)
• To exit Vim, click ESC, then type :wq (colon + w + q)
• To confirm rebase process is completed, use git status
• Avoid cherry-picking from branches that will be merged back later as there will be duplication—limit use to stale or orphaned branches

Closing

This weeknote is really late as I was in a home networking muddle for the last 24-48 hours. Maybe I’ll write about it next week.

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2026/w12/2026-03-23T23:28:43+08:002026-06-02T21:58:22+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

New tech stack curiosity, Hugo theme redesign demo, setting self-hosting goals amidst Hostinger's WP expiry, and trying to meet the 100DaysToOffload challenge.

Blogging Itches

Although I’ve been exclusively blogging with Hugo on BurgeonLab in the past four months (largely putting my first blog, Eclectic Passions and photography project on the back burner); I have been getting an itch to:

• Check out a new CMS, Astro
• Investigate a static Wiki generator like FeatherWiki (a lightweight version of TiddlyWiki)
• Try Cornerstone, an IndieWeb minimalist WP theme

Hostinger Plan Expiring

My Hostinger¹ WordPress Starter plan will expire in September of this year. My original plan was to convert my first WP blog into a static site using Simply Static and migrate it to Bunny Storage¹ (where my other two static site lives) until I figure out what I want to do with that blog. Another path of diversion I want to go down is to get my first VPS and try self-hosting apps (e.g., Node.js, Docker apps, a website, etc). I could stay on Hostinger for another multi-year contract and try one of their starter KVM plans instead of web hosting.

I will try to stick to my goal of not tinkering because trying to learn a new CMS or changing WP themes are definitely not priority… but my brain often gets distracted by wanting to learn new things!

Focus on Content

If you think my “content dispersion” situation is bad enough; a blogger I follow, Jack, has even more—four blogs + a wiki! It was actually his post that got me interested in the FOSS wiki app.

Anyway, I need to put some anti-pruritic cream on all these itches and just stick with the state of affairs; or else I am certain my first attempt at the 100DaysToOffload challenge will fail! To be honest, I think I’m already failing because I’ve been spending time on refactoring and redesigning the theme on this blog (which by the way is coming along alright IMO!)

If you missed it, I posted two new posts last week:

• Set Hugo Navigation Menus with Active Class Without pageRef
• Offline LanguageTool: Free Open Source Grammarly Alternative

Redesigning a Forked Hugo Theme

As some of you might know, I’m in the process of making the forked Anubis2 theme my own by redesigning and refactoring my previous overrides into the new theme repo. Shout-out to @Junyi99, the creator of the original theme, Anubis2!

Some of my favourite changes:

• A more comfortable contrast ratio (using WCAG AAA colour contrast guidelines)
• Full-bleed top nav and footer
• Footer has a more modern design, clean when collapsed (inspired by Chris’s site)
• Made a new toggle icon switch for light/dark mode (light mode is under construction)
• Two button designs, one with an “indicator”
• Active menu styled links
• New “show summaries” button on archive pages
• Cleaner comments section
• Move share buttons and post metadata (tags, series) to the bottom of the post instead of cluttering the top (only word count + date) (inspired by Alec’s site)
• Redesigned the website carbon badge to fit into 88x31 + expandable section

Blogging Collaboration

My first ever collab post I did was with Joel; where I had to answer only one question. Last week, I was invited by another prolific blogger, Hyde, to be one of his guests to participate in an interview-style series called Over/Under.

Guests are asked to share their opinions on five topics chosen by the host, and the remaining interview consists of three other questions:

1. Imagine that ICE officers are at your door to seize all your books. You have the opportunity to save two. Which two would you pick?
2. Ask the next blogger a question of your choosing.
3. Answer the question the previous blogger asked.

He has done almost 50 (!) interviews with some well-known bloggers that I also follow and look up to, such as Ploum, Robb Knight, Joe Crawford, Derek Sivers, Shellsharks, Joelchrono, fLaMEd, and Adamsdesk.

I’m sure there are even more amazing humans in the list I have yet to discover (makes mental note to check out the rest of the interviewees)—but to be amongst one of them! Gosh, I’m deeply honoured and delighted, though I can already sense my impostor syndrome kicking in. I look forward to delving into the topics Hyde selected for me and will share my post when the time comes (thanks, Hyde, for the invite). Now go check out his blog, (he actually recently posted about getting the iine upvote button after seeing my guide!)

Link Roundup

Here are some links I found interesting last week.

• F-Droid: in case you missed an older article in Feb, An Open Letter Opposing Android Developer Verification, the latest post from Google 🤮, and a Mastodon thread on the topic by @nixCraft — I am really distraught at the thought of not being to install what I want on my Android phone. I am drafting an email to my local regulator to voice my concerns, but I really don’t feel it will do much… 😭 Please raise awareness! 🚨
• Robida.net: Human.json Protocol — Chris and I both came across this project from Beto. I’m not one for installing browser plugins, but I’ve added the JSON file to my site to show my support and vouch for my favourite human-run sites. I will also add humans.txt which I’ve had in my blog-to-do list for ages.
• Practical Betterment: Change your default date format to the least ambiguous — A couple of years ago, I realized how using a YYYY-MM-DD date format on digital files (especially my notes) is unbeatable due to the ability to sort meaningfully. But for easy reading (like on websites), I think a DD-MMM or DD-MMM-YY might be more suitable. My dates used on this blog is a mess, with inconsistent formats—it is something I need to fix in my new theme.
• 512 Pixels: Hide macOS Tahoe’s Menu Icons With This One Simple Trick — I don’t dare to imagine the day I need to install Tahoe on my M1 Mac Mini, but at least there’s a way to hide those excessive icons in the menus.

Terminal App Discoveries

• termcraft: Terminal-only 2D sandbox survival game — As a person who has come to learn the amazing ability of the CLI / terminals, this looks really cool. It’s an early alpha game played within the terminal, written in Rust.
• somafm-cli: Terminal radio player for SomaFM — Another cool terminal app!
• APTUI: APT package manager in TUI form — I only recently learnt the term TUI (terminal user interface) while learning to use Senpai (my IRC macOS client of choice).

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1. This is an affiliate link. Thank you for your support! ↩︎ ↩︎

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2026/w11/2026-03-17T22:51:38+08:002026-06-02T21:58:22+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Loving Lewis' P3 podium at Shanghai, exploring CryptPad as an open-source alternative to Google Drive, and online multiplayer games with the Nintendo Switch.

F1 Shanghai Race

As a long time Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes fan (especially Toto), seeing the podium last weekend was amazing. I’m thrilled and delighted for Lewis finally getting his first Ferrari podium. Enjoyed Kimi getting his first win too. As it stands, I think the most probable first F1 race I attend in person might be Shanghai! The track is well-designed for overtaking action and is relatively close to Hong Kong.

I am still not enjoying the fact it’s all a bit Mario-kart style in the new era, but seeing the two Ferraris fighting it out was pretty nice! I also really love the images Lewis shared of him and his mum over the race weekend.

Google Docs Alternative: CryptPad

I started a spreadsheet to track my F1 Fantasy performance this year. I am not really a spreadsheet person, I don’t think I created an online spreadsheet ever since I deleted my Google Drive. So I went ahead and created a new CryptPad account on the Disroot instance, and it’s been very straight forward. I think this is a great open source alternative to closed services like Google Drive and Dropbox. The only downside so far is the slight delay when loading the spreadsheet (probably due to the end-to-end-encryption), but I can live with that; once it has loaded, there’s no lag.

There’s all the usual apps you might see in an “office suite”, which is in collaboration with OnlyOffice. The basic like Document, Presentation, and Spreadsheet are covered, but also there’s Form, Kanban, Diagram, and Whiteboard.

If you love Markdown like me, Slides is a nice way of making presentations with only Markdown! I might also try to use CryptPad Forms to make a few polls for my future posts.

VPS and Cloud App Deployment

I was researching Render alternatives for migrating Indiekit (a Node.js serverless app) from the free tier to an alternative platform due to the cold starts after 15 minutes of inactivity. Wrote notes on the options and was going to include it here; but it got long and I couldn’t finish the research in time for this weeknote, so it’ll be in a separate post coming soon!

I don’t really want to mess with the working setup, but I am hopeful the migration shouldn’t be too painful; might have to refresh my memory on Docker though if I go the VPS route instead of the “one-click” deployment platforms. What’s your go to? I tried renting a Hetzner VPS about a year ago but got rejected during the ID verification process (maybe it’s not the best option there anyway). I’ll try to avoid this by non-KYC (know-your-customer) providers in the future.

Gaming

Haven’t gamed for ages, but @joelchrono got me playing the games in the Nintendo Switch emulators! I had a good old laugh and great time trying some games from the NES Classics collection. We ended up playing River City Ransom the most! I am actually quite impressed by the game—it had way more depth than I expected. The sound effects and sound track are enjoyable, the map is an open-world style, and the pixel art sprites and backgrounds are charming. I never knew of this game prior, but after a quick search, it seems we chose a cult favourite!¹

Nintendo Switch

I am currently on the 7-day free trial basic NSO membership, but might consider getting the expansion pack for accessing the Nintendo 64 emulator as that’s the console I grew up with. (Thanks Joel for the good times!) By the way, I’m up for casual gaming—send me a message to get my friend code!

Here are some of the main games I have:

• Taiko No Tatsujin
• Katamari Damacy Reroll
• GRID Autosport
• Overcooked 2
• Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl
• Tetris 99
• and some other indie, single player games….

Link Roundup

Here are some links I found interesting last week.

• Ars Technica: Supply-chain attack using invisible code hits GitHub and other repositories
• Kevin Xu (Interconnected): Chinese Open Source: A Definitive History
• Android Authority: Wary of strangers recording you? This app warns you when smart glasses are nearby
• The Verge: Grammarly is using our identities without permission — I use the local version of LanguageTool exclusively for spell/grammar checks.
• If you’re into pixel art, I came across Michael’s site on the IndieWeb chat channel and I think it looks really cool. It’s under construction but there’s a post there about creating pixel art.
• Angelo Gladding: A cool site and /uses page
• Ryan Bagley: Perfect Image Processing with Hugo
• Kev Quirk: Sunsetting The 512kb Club — Luckily Brad is taking over. Thanks, Kev, for getting me into slimming down my site from the get-go!

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1. Here are two reviews of RCR by Schill and Matthew. ↩︎

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2026/w10/2026-03-09T22:38:02+08:002026-06-02T21:58:22+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Became a Wikipedian, craving a split keyboard, doing trackball mouse switch repairs. F1 2026 fantasy season starts. Links on tech, security, and privacy topics.

Contributing to Collaborative Projects

During the HWC: Pacific event last week, Reilly mentioned a blogger called Molly White who writes about technology. I saw her photo and realized I watched her getting started guide on Wikipedia in the past—something I’ve parked on my “someday/maybe” list.

Having joined the IndieWeb wiki for a few months, I feel more prepared to also join Wikipedia. It can feel daunting at first, as Molly describes, but it isn’t too bad once you start. Another place I enjoy contributing to is OpenStreetMap! Do you have any large-scale projects you contribute to?

Wikipedia

It’s Sunday now, and having written the two paragraphs above earlier in the week—I am happy to say I have gone ahead and started my Wikipedian journey! It took some time getting used to MediaWiki (the backend wiki software), but I got my User page sorted with an infobox, collected some userboxes, made a custom signature and menu bar, and completed a few simple copy edits and translations already. I will try to learn the Manual of Style as I go—but it’s been a fun start! Maybe I should write a quick post on it while it’s still fresh…

I think more people should become a Wikipedian because it is an opportunity to collaborate with others, give back to the global community, and sharpen your writing and research skills. Another pertinent reason to contribute in times like now, where AI-generated content is rampant online, is that we need real humans to ensure that one of the biggest online knowledge sources stays accurate, factual, balanced, and trustworthy.

Split Keyboards

Recently I’ve been getting the itch again to buy my first split keyboard. When I did research the last time I looked, at the top of the shortlist was the ZSA Voyager. While the OWLAB Spring (Alice layout)¹ has been serving me well for roughly two years now and with additional tilter mod from 3dkeycap about six months ago—the comfort levels of this budget concave key well mod has made me want to try to Glove80 by MoErgo a lot more. Both of these split keyboards are quite expensive; both almost HK$ 3000 (~ US$ 400), so I’m still on the fence. If you love your split keyboard, tell me about it!

Software is quite an important part of minimal layouts, and if comparing between the Voyager and the Glove80, I think most users would say software by ZSA is one of the best out there (from what I’ve read). Currently, I’m using Vial (QMK fork) for my OWLAB Spring; and last week, I came across another keyboard software called Kanata which is a cross-platform, FOSS keyboard re-mapper that I might test out how to use home-row mods. Read more about it at Dreams of Code’s repo and a blog post by ZSA.

Trackball Repair

Last week my Kensington Orbit started registering double clicks when I clicked once. It was driving me around the bend! One advantage of living in Hong Kong is ordering electronic parts like these from mainland China is very budget-friendly and shipping is incredibly fast (and also cheap). I bought four replacement Kailh 7.3mm silent mouse micro switches for RMB¥ 10 (~ US$ 1.45) which came in two days. The red button variant has a lifespan of 10 million clicks, whereas the yellow ones I bought has 20 million.

Disassembly was straight forward (requiring a T5 Torx screwdriver), a Reddit guide and YouTube video (video opens on Invidious) made it easy.

Soldering

I have not soldered for years (the last time was probably when I built my OLKB Plank v3) so I am rusty. I also realized my budget soldering iron is likely underpowered for the lead-free solder I had in my drawer—Takumi ECO A075 (99.25% Sn / 0.75% Cu).²

Recently I learnt that lead-free solder is more difficult to work with than the more common 60/40 (tin/lead)—which is why it took longer than expected to heat the joint properly for the solder to flow. I think I should get some separate flux too because the flow was not great. I’m not sure why the desoldering was also slow; maybe because the iron didn’t get hot enough to melt the existing joint? Luckily after some persistence, the combination of the Goot solder wick and desoldering pump did the job.

The new switch is a huge improvement compared to the cheap, original clickity-clack switch. The dampened/silent button feels amazing!

Formula 1 2026

Stats: Team 1 after Race 1: ANT(X2)+LEC+BEA+LIN+HUL + FER+HAA, total budget = $102.1M

Round 1 in Melbourne, Australia is already over, and I’m not sure what to make of the new regulations. While I did enjoy the switcheroo action at the start with Russel and Charles, I don’t think I can accept that F1, the pinnacle of motorsport, isn’t pushing absolute speed limits on every corner—instead requiring lift-and-coast techniques just to charge the battery enough to keep racing. I guess I’ll just have to get used to the new way they handle the cars…

F1 Fantasy

It’s my fourth year playing F1 Fantasy (second year playing seriously). My Team 1’s budget could have done better had I chosen Gabriel instead of Nico (-0.6M), but it could have been worse! Looking forward to China’s sprint race and hope to make up some gains next weekend.

If you missed some of my related F1 posts on Mastodon, here are a few leagues you could join if you’re interested; the more, the merrier!

• Fedi F1 League (for the Fediverse, created by @Rob)
• IndieWeb F1 Fans (created by me)
• I’m up for any Head-2-Head leagues too—just contact me via any method in the Response section

A new thing I’m starting this year is also playing with the folks in the #f1/libera IRC channel. They do their own spreadsheet fantasy which is impressive (it’s maintained by @tomf, link in the channel description). They’ve been welcoming, and I’m quite happy to have a chatroom to join when race weekends are on because I don’t like using Discord (where most F1 groups tends to be I think).³

Link Roundup

Here are some links I found interesting last week.

• Indieweb Garden Graph: Gardn — I forgot to share this last week, but it’s an interesting IndieWeb project created by Aaron (aka CrowderSoup). It is a way of collecting and displaying your blogroll, check it out! I need to add it to my site.
• XDA Developers: The internet nearly died (and nobody knew) — This was an interesting read albeit old news (2024), about a very well-thought-out backdoor vulnerability to a common utility called XZ (used in file compression) that almost infiltrated every Linux server in the world via OpenSSH. Thanks to Andres Freund, a Microsoft PostgreSQL dev, who stopped it in time because he digged into why his SSH connection was 0.4s slower than usual. For more, check the Wikipedia article on XZ Utils backdoor.
• Reason: Computer Scientists Caution Against Internet Age-Verification Mandates — I am not looking forward to the day that age-verification requirement is implemented. It’s not just about the children, but it’s the next step in mass surveillance and increased privacy risk in using services that impose it.
• Ars Technica: With developer verification, Google’s Apple envy threatens to dismantle Android’s open legacy — You may have noticed I added the banner at the top of my blog to raise awareness about this pressing issue. As a pessimist, I don’t have a good feeling about the outcomes…
• Svenska Dagbladet: She Came Out of the Bathroom Naked, Employee Says — These glasses are creepy as hell.
• Caroline Crampton: The View From RSS — I also like RSS a lot but I’m not that good on keeping up to date with all the amazing blogs I follow.
• 404 Media: AI Translations Are Adding ‘Hallucinations’ to Wikipedia Articles
• Privacy Guides: Privacy Activist Toolbox

Closing

That’s all for now. I am finding it very depressing these days when watching the news. I hope everyone not in the war zone areas are doing okay (mentally) in these pre-WWIII days (or are we already in WWIII?) And for those affected in the active war zone, my heart goes out to them. 😢

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1. See Justin’s review of the OWLAB Spring to learn more. ↩︎

2. This user used the same solder I got—from the same HK hobby electronics shop, WECL. ↩︎

3. I have a very simple getting started guide for using IRC on the Libera network on my /contact page. ↩︎

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2026/w09/2026-03-03T00:12:35+08:002026-06-02T21:58:22+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Tried Nordic walking for the first time at a 5km walkathon and feeling a sense of accomplishment as I add another item to my plumbing DIY achievement list.

Plumbing Achievement

Last week, I tacked a leaking pull-out/sprayer-style kitchen tap at home. The cartridge/handle area had been leaking slightly for some time; but it got significantly worse last week when the handle stopped working altogether (couldn’t turn the tap off—luckily we had isolation valves beneath the sink).

I watched some video tutorials and went out to get a replacement faucet. Having completed other DIY plumbing fixes before around the house, including changing and disassembling every replaceable part of the toilet (except the flange/sewage outlet ring), changing washroom faucets, shower taps, and outdoor garden taps; I thought I had all the tools I need. Unfortunately, removing the old kitchen faucet proved to be the most challenging due the space limitation and awkward angles.

The two (hot/cold) supply flex tubing were stubbornly stuck to the tap, so I had to trim all three tubes (counting the pull-out hose with counter-weight) using diagonal cutting pliers. Then, my hollow tube spanners couldn’t reach the weirdly shaped mounting bolt (that was wider than the nut at the top)—so I had to go buy a 180 degree basin wrench to reach the nut.

After a lot of tries to get it to grip on, I finally got the nut loose and I thought I have completed the hardest part! But no—I had to use a metal saw to saw off the bolt from the top of the sink because even though I got the nut loose, it wasn’t able to come off the end! The C-shaped washer and nut did not come off the bottom like it should, which would allow me to pull out the tap from the top (like all the examples in the video tutorials).

Anyway, the installation of the new faucet took only five minutes and I’m so glad I managed to remove the very old, “non-standard” faucet. The new one has what I call a “normal” mounting mechanism with a metal washer and two philips screw holding the fixture in place. No hard to reach nuts or abnormal bolts!

Taking up Nordic Walking

I participated in my first walkathon last weekend! It was a 5km Nordic walkathon, doing a short loop around the HK Central promenade towards Wan Chai Exhibition center and back. I always wanted to try out Nordic walking and I have to say it was really enjoyable! It activates a lot more muscle around the core, lats, and arms (that I could feel) compared to just walking or hiking.

Hoping to improving my technique and doing it regularly as one of my main exercises. By the way, Nordic walking originated from Finland (a country I am really interested in visiting one day!) This video tutorial by Nordixx Canada is the most thorough I thought.

Hugo Theme Upgrade

Started doing a huge upgrade to the theme and styling on BurgeonLab last week. I reckon it’s halfway done and I’m quite happy with the changes in styling and new features. Looking forward to sharing it with you all! Alec’s CSS Tips came in handy (I used the tip for creating nested lists with decimals for my table of contents).

I decided to fork the Hugo Anubis2 theme by Junyi-99, and make changes directly to the theme files because I was creating exceedingly number of overrides—be it partials, layouts, or CSS rules. While doing this, I learnt how to use Git branches and managed to do the theme redesign separately without affecting the live site. It’s been going well so far! Git still scares me sometimes but it has been invaluable in maintaining this Hugo blog.

A nice tool I downloaded for my IDE (VSCodium) to see the branches is hansu/vscode-git-graph (fork of mhutchie/vscode-git-graph). The official GIt resource, Branches in a Nutshell, was useful in understanding what was going on.

Link Roundup

No link roundup this week.

Closing

I hope my Middle Eastern friends (and their family) are safe, and those who are stuck in the area because of cancelled flights—I hope you’re able to get home safely soon. My thoughts go out to those who are affected by the war.

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2026/w08/2026-02-24T01:15:55+08:002026-06-02T21:58:22+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Happy Chinese New Year! I'm improving WCAG compliance and A11y as I learned how to use Git branches. Also, IndieWeb wiki, Nordic walking, and PGP experience.

CNY

Happy Chinese New Year to you, my dear reader! It’s the Year of the Horse this year—may all of you be galloping to success (馬到功成), be full of vitality like a horse and dragon (龍馬精神), and to be in the forefront of what you do (一馬當先).

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53$ echo "Credit: <https://patorjk.com/software/taag/>"
54$ echo "Credit: <https://www.asciiart.eu/art/4cb0b182bb3a5234>"

The “terminal emulator” I created for the /⁠caw page is coming in handy!

Tasks Log

• Signed up for my first (Nordic walking) Walkathon, which will take place next month. Excited to take up this new sport/exercise; read many good things about it.

• Updated my IndieWeb user wiki page which has information about this blog and my “itches”. If you have your own site, you are technically part of the IndieWeb! Check the Wikifying guide to learn how to add yourself to the wiki.

• Learnt how to use Git branches which I’m using to create a brand new look for this blog. Git still confuses me sometimes but it is indispensable.

• Created a Bookwyrm account on the Bookrastinating instance. In the progress of manually migrating my reading history… Plan to create an /elsewhere page in the near future with links to my other online profiles.

• I used PGP with email for the first time last week (or was it the week before last) with one of my readers, Nathanael! I realized that Tuta doesn’t offer PGP as they use “their own encryption” which is not great; to be limited like that. I might be switching away from them (for email) because of this reason, when I renew next year. For email that supports PGP, I think the shortlisted options currently for me are Proton, PurelyMail, and Mailbox.

• Added an in-built Webmention form in the Response section for you to add your reply (if you don’t have auto-sending functionality on your blog)! Read Reilly’s guide to learn more about webmentions.

  

• Created a little “flourish” / separator last week. Sometimes a thin <hr> isn’t enough of a break in the text! What do you think?¹

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To-Do

• My home router is very outdated, I think it’s time to get a new router; preferably with OpenWrt. I know slightly more about networking nowadays, so hopefully I’ll find something better than a basic, off-the-shelf consumer one. If you have any good recommendations for home routers with OpenWrt, please let me know. 😉

Accessibility / a11y

Because of one of my reader’s feedback about this site’s default (dark theme) not being comfortable for their vision—I am redesigning my theme + site. With a lot more CSS and HTML knowledge compared to a year ago, I’m determined to fix the CSS mess I created while learning, to something more manageable.² I aim to meet more WCAG criteria in the process!

Tip

If you have any feedback about my site, please let me know via the reader survey or any of the contact methods. Thank you!

Resources

• W3C: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2
• W3C: Writing for Web Accessibility
• a11yproject: Check your WCAG compliance: Checklist
• WebAIM: Links and Hypertext
• Western Washington University: Accessibility Guide
• AllAccessible: Color Contrast Accessibility
• TetraLogical: Quick Accessibility Tests (Opens YouTube playlist via Invidious)
• Contrast Report

Link Roundup

Here are some links I found interesting last week.

• Keep Android Open: Sadly, no good news about Google’s Android lockdown. I seriously do not know what to do if F-Droid disappears. Probably 60-75% of all my apps are FOSS and from F-Droid or Accrescent. 😭 I am going to install their banner later next week to show my support. Please spread the word!
• Dhole Moments: Cryptographic Issues in Matrix’s Rust Library Vodozemac and peq42: New security issues found in Matrix — I started using Matrix perhaps two years ago. Seems like it’s a no-go after reading these two articles about the security issues. I might check out XMPP next!
• Searchmysite — Interesting service I came across last week, it’s a search engine for indie / personal websites.
• CommentPara.de — I shared this before, but it was down for maybe a whole month? Sharing this again because it is a cool way of easy, anonymous web comments for IndieWeb sites that have Webmention.
• WebsearchAPI: Monthly AI Crawler Report: January 2026 Traffic Trends — good for updating your robots.txt; it’s better than nothing. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Blog Posts

• Shellsharks: Setting off on a self-hosting journey
• Joelchrono: Setting up phones is a nightmare
• Terrygodier: Current: An RSS Reader
• James: Search engine shortcuts in Firefox and Adding dark mode to my website
• Jo: Proust’s questionnaire — I want to do this too, I remember learning this questionnaire from this interview ages ago. (BTW, I’m the biggest Daniel Craig fan! 😍)
• I’m so honoured to be added to two blogrolls (Shellsharks and Eklausmeier) last week—thank you Mike and Elmar! Check out their blogroll, or mine!

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1. Light bulb icon license is under CC0 (public domain) ↩︎

2. I think I might take the chance to fork the theme as well, because I’m so done with overriding theme CSS rules. ↩︎

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2026/w07/2026-02-17T20:56:46+08:002026-06-02T21:58:22+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

IndieWeb web dev ventures on my site: new guestbook and likes page, improved Microformat2 markup, fixed h-card to support Webmentions. Also new /caw page.

This week’s weeknote is another technical log of what I did to my site. Skip to the Link Roundup if it’s too technical! Should I do a separate series for web dev talk and how I am building my site—a bit like Shellsharks’ Devlog series?

Let me know via Mastodon comments or my contact form (while I try to find a good FOSS, privacy-friendly polls app, let me know if you have a recommendation, cheers!)

New Guestbook Page

Last week, I finally created¹ a long-wished-for feature on my site last week—a /⁠guestbook page! Posted the news on Mastodon and got a lot of responses which really made my day, thank you! The design of the guestbook entries reuses the CSS from my “noticeboard” section on the home page; a sort of old-school CRT terminal look. But I haven’t designed a light version for the light/dark theme, so it looks the same when switching themes.

The guestbook relies on using my preferred static form provider, Formspark.io (not affiliated, but I like it), to manually collect submissions and input the data in a .yaml data file. I actually only recently discovered the use of the data folder; I think I can make use of it more for lists/data that will be regularly updated. Do you make use of the data directory with your static site? How do you use it?

Webmentions: Current Status

While working on the guestbook, I tried to investigate how to improve my current use of Webmentions; because some guestbooks like Chris Burnell’s, rely on webmentions exclusively.

Currently, Burgeon Lab only supports receiving mentions (without public display of mentions) via the webmention.io endpoint. I subscribed to the Atom feed to know when someone has mentioned me. Sending webmentions outwards require me to do so manually per page using the tool on Telegraph.

Upgrading Webmentions Workflow

While it is all good and working, this manual process was more of a stepping stone for me to get the basic understanding of what is going on behind the scenes, wrapping my head around how webmentions work. This is a good example of manual until it hurts.

The next step is for me to automate the process using Indiekit’s plugins, like the one by Ricardo (@rmdes) and the webmention.io plugin.

Microformat2 Markup (mf2)

Because I wanted to sign Chris’s guestbook using webmentions, I had to work on my /⁠notes (i.e. microblogs/tweets/toots). Notes are one of three types of content that I do not create “in Hugo” directly (in an IDE, on a device with my Hugo blog source code). I use Indiekit to create these and have them syncing back to my Hugo’s content folder on build in the CI/CD step.

Since Indiekit tags replies and likes with the correct mf2 markup, I don’t have to do anything on that end. All I need to do it get my Hugo theme reading the front matter parameters generated in the Markdown files by Indiekit, for example:

1+++
2likeOf = "https://some-cool-website.com/"
3inReplyTo = "https://someone.com/cool-blog-post/"
4+++

New Hugo Section: Likes

I can happily report I got replies on notes working, and while I was at it, I added a /⁠likes feed for sharing things I find interesting on the web (an inspiration was @artlung’s Likes). These two “response” types of content are common in the IndieWeb, and they use mf2 class="u-in-reply-to" and class="u-like-of" respectively. Learn more about replies and likes on the IndieWeb Wiki pages.

Realization about H-Card

Going back to my endeavour to sign Chris’s guestbook—I initially got the webmention sent and working with the u-in-reply-to markup, but unfortunately, my h-card, i.e. business card markup, was not working (which is why my submission has no image or name). I realized I only had a full h-card set on my home page but nowhere else!

To fix the issue, I created a minimal h-card that consists of only my name + image + URL (homepage) on every page except the homepage. I created layout/_partials/hcard.html:

 1    {{- if or .IsHome (eq .Permalink "/about/") -}}
 2        {{- partial "hcard-full.html" . -}}
 3    {{- else -}}
 4        <div class="p-author h-card" style="display: none">
 5            <a class="u-url" href="https://burgeonlab.com/">
 6                <img class="u-photo" style="height:18px;width:auto;height:1.1em;vertical-align:-.1em;" src="https://burgeonlab.com/images/site-logo-96.png" loading="lazy" title="Burgeon Lab Logo" width="96" height="96" alt="BurgeonLab.com logo" />
 7                <span class="p-name">{{ .Site.Params.author.name }}</span>
 8            </a>
 9        </div>
10    {{- end }}

It works now, the author data can now be read from the reply note I made to Chris’s guestbook after this change. But I might have to let him know of my blunder to see if he can fetch the webmention again for my name and icon to show up on his site. Lastly, I have style="display: none" on the h-card because I wasn’t sure of including a by-line for a single author blog, but I might reconsider this in the future.

Additional Resources

• Microformats Parser (PHP) v0.5.0
• X-Ray Test
• Microformats.org/h-card
• IndieWeb: Authorship
• Authorship.rocks

Link Roundup

• Caw Caw: Trapped in the Terminal — This is actually a new page I created last week! It was a fun and creative exercise. There’s quite a collection of /caw pages now and even has its own IndieWeb Wiki page.
• Discord Alternatives, Ranked — Re: ID age verification, luckily I don’t really use Discord; I never got used to the UI. Here’s a Mastodon post by Marc about alternatives. Just another example of enshittification of closed platforms.
• Zkbro: Creating a text-wall — Zac signed my new Guestbook page and while exploring his lovely site, I saw his take on a guestbook! It’s super cool. Check it out!
• Ross A. Baker: no-agents.md — I recently enabled BunnyCDN Shield (this is an affiliate link) after hearing stories about personal sites crashing from sudden influx of AI bot scrapers. I don’t know if these attacks happen on small sites like mine, but it’s better to be on the safe side I think! These crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, etc.) don’t respect robots.txt. Gonna try Ross’s project!
• The CIA Erased The World Factbook With No Warning… And Told Everyone To ‘Stay Curious’

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1. I actually realized my contact form was maybe broken for a while. I hope no one used it to contact me. 🫣 ↩︎

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2026/w06/2026-02-10T23:23:17+08:002026-06-02T21:58:22+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Book tracking with Fediverse Bookwyrm, CNY and New Balance sneakers. Some IndieWeb themes, agentic AI security concerns, and other curated links.

HWC: About Books & Reading

I haven’t attended a Homebrew Website Club event for a few weeks; it was lovely to see familiar faces again last week at the Pacific event (meeting notes). I managed to get @joelchrono to attend his first Indieweb event! Because we spoke about book/reading habit tracking on personal sites, he updated his Bookshelf page as a result of the meetup. It looks really neat! There are many ways of tracking books including a very basic text-only list to something graphical like Joel’s.

I don’t have any public book sharing links or pages yet on BurgeonLab. In the past, I used Goodreads; but I want a Fediverse alternative—Bookwyrm is one such platform.¹ Out of the available instances, I accidentally came across Bookrastinating which is moderated by Joel! I really like the instance name reflecting my backlog of books. 😅 I’ll link to my profile once I’ve added some info to it, and perhaps, I’ll make a manual books or biblio page on this site in the future. What do you use to track your reading habits? You can chip in on the discussion I posted on Mastodon!

This comes at a perfect time as I recently started reading some new books and want to keep my reading habit a steady behaviour (I tend to do bouts of heavy reading and take long breaks—and I don’t really like that).

New Shoes

I’ve always been a shoe fanatic. But ever since going down the barefoot shoe path full-time, I rarely buy new shoes! I’ve worn the Camper Peu for over 15 years and in the last three years I’m wearing a pair of Vivobarefoot Primus Trail FG. I do wear sneakers or leather shoes occasionally, but I don’t think I can ever go back to narrow toe boxes or high heel drop.

Chinese New Year

It’s going to be Chinese New Year (CNY) next week (it’ll be the Year of the Horse) and in Chinese culture (especially in Hong Kong, or where the Cantonese dialect is spoken in South-Eastern China), it is not a good idea/taboo to buy shoes during CNY because the Cantonese for shoes (haai4, 鞋) sounds the same as a sigh or the sound one makes when they are in despair, misery, or unhappy (haai4, 嚡). The superstition is that if you buy shoes in the new year, you’ll bring bad luck! That’s why shoe shops have big discounts before CNY.

New Balance 2002R

I bought this unique looking pair of New Balance 2002R. I didn’t know the model name (Protection Pack: Rain Cloud) and history of this pair of sneakers until after I bought it. The Rain Cloud (grey colourway) is the most popular amongst sneaker fans from what I read when it was released in 2021. I really love how retro it looks—the details around the heel and tongue is done well, and the rough suede looks aesthetic in person. It’s got quite a thick outsole which I’m not super used to, but at least the heel drop is not too excessive (it’s around 11.1mm).

While researching about the 2002R, I found this really informative shoe review site called Run Repeat from Denmark. I love all the detailed measurements they provide. I am definitely going to use them to find my next pair of exercise trainers when my current pair wears out.

New Vocabulary

blog fodder (noun)

material, ideas, or topics that can be used in your blog.

That TED Talk was full of blog fodder.

foist (verb)

impose an unwelcome or unnecessary person or thing on, to force onto another

He foisted his work on me.

panoply (noun)

an extensive or impressive collection

The museum displayed a panoply of ancient weapons.

Sinology (noun)

the study of Chinese language, history, customs, and politics

She specialized in Sinology and is well-informed in Chinese happenings.

Definitions will be primarily taken from the Oxford Dictionary of English as of the post’s published date. Secondary definition sources may come from the free version of the WordWeb Dictionary. Example sentences may also be sourced elsewhere or written by myself.

IndieWeb Themes

I recently came across some CMS themes that are tailored for the IndieWeb.

• Announcing Three New Free JAMstack Blogging Themes — Here’s two Hugo themes and one Jekyll theme by Brennan.
• Introducing Cornerstone: A WordPress Theme for the IndieWeb — And one for WordPress by Khürt.

Link Roundup

Here are some links I found interesting last week.

• Uses.tech — I joined this /uses directory after chatting about it at the HWC event.
• AP: Modern cars are spying on you. Here’s what you can do about it — I remember reading the Mozilla privacy report on modern cars a few years ago and felt very uneasy. Luckily my family car is old—it’s a Mercedes W212 from the 2010s which doesn’t have all the Internet connectivity and sensors built-in. I really don’t know what to do if the car really gives in and retires! 😔
• Ars Technica: The rise of Moltbook suggests viral AI prompts may be the next big security threat — I’ve followed the news about the rise of OpenClaw, the renames (previously known as Clawdbot, Moltbot), and now all the security flaws it possesses.
  • If I had a computer with a bit more RAM (the 16GB maxed out M1 Mac Mini is not really cutting it), I theoretically would like to experiment and test out a local agent in a sandboxed environment just to see what the hype is all about.
  • But I feel quite insecure with the idea of agentic AI despite never trying it. From what I’ve read, it is privacy evading and full of security risks. Unless there are better implementations that have robust privacy options and improved security practices; I guess I’ll just stick to local LLMs using Ollama for now!
• OM: How AI Goes to Work
• Mitchell Hashimoto : My AI Adoption Journey

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1. There are other non-Fediverse, Goodreads alternatives that I came across; a popular one being StoryGraph. But there are many others like: LibraryThing, BookSloth, Anobii, Hardcover etc; but I have not researched those. ↩︎

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2026/w05/2026-02-02T23:46:31+08:002026-06-02T21:58:22+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Major blog version upgrade with refined Hugo templates for photos, locations, and notes sections; photo carousel 2.0 much improved, location features added.

This week’s weeknote is going to be pretty technical (about working on my blog’s backend, adding Indieweb features, support for Micropub/Microformats, etc). If you’re not interested, jump to the Link Roundup!

Blog Gets Major Version Upgrade

I think my blog deserves a new version number (pending changelog updated this week after making significant progress in integrating Indiekit Micropub posts! Lots of new Hugo templates and HTML/CSS behind the scenes—displaying three new sections of BurgeonLab: /photos, /locations, and /notes.

Photos

I’m most proud of the implementation of Indiekit photo posts—managed to make a CSS-only photo carousel to work well on both desktop and mobile after multiple attempts to get everything to work correctly. If you have a moment, can you check it out? Feedback is welcome. 😄 I have three photo posts currently (only the second post has multiple photos).

I made the grid images 4:5 instead of 1:1 and added a number to the top right corner if a photo post has more than one image.

Still pending to do is add post-elsewhere for syndicated posts (POSSE or PESOS). For example, I would add this Instagram post to my tea photo post.

Locations

Then I worked on integrating location information by working around Indiekit’s way of presenting location information in the front matter to work with Hugo. There are two types of location on my site: one type is a “name, street address, town, country”, and the second type is a lat/long coordinate, which will open up a link to OpenStreetMap.

I plan to add an interactive map to the /locations page showing all places with coordinates from relevant posts, marked with clickable pins linking to each post. This belongs to the same idea of adding my GPX data from walks onto the site which I mentioned last week.

Notes

I didn’t do much on /notes last week. I have yet to test out syndicating notes (aka microblogs) to my Mastodon account. The only hiccup for this post type were the tags. Indiekit presented them as categories whereas in my Hugo setup, they’re called tags. Luckily this was easily fixed by using a quick step in the SourceHut CI script:

1find content -path "*/[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9]*.md" \
2  -exec sed -i '' 's/category *= *\[/tags = [/' {} \;

Which means Hugo can auto generate the taxonomy and term pages for the tags used in Indiekit posts! I did try to change it at the source (i.e. getting Indiekit to output hashtags as tags directly, but I couldn’t get it to work; hence the workaround).

Other New Features

Updated my homepage a bit as well: a new Top 10 section—first time using the default Hugo weight parameter to rank the posts in order of popularity based on data from GoatCounter, and a new style of the Noticeboard section. I think it is looking really cool!

Link Roundup

Here are some links I found interesting last week.

• Shellsharks: Link Dumps — Shellsharks is a blog I remember discovering early on. I love how it’s just a treasure trove and full of cool features. I’m always inspired by Mike’s work and the content is always interesting. Thanks for including me in your list, Mike!
• Calibre 9.1 — New Calibre version 9 is out. It’s my favourite e-book manager that I self-host on my RPi4B.
• Alex Harri: ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering — Super cool (and mathematical) detailed article about ASCII art.
• NeatStats — Discovered this privacy-first analytics service, created by Neatnik (who created omg.lol). I’ve never used omg.lol, but it is definitely a platform I’m interested in and have heard good things about.
• CodePip — A friend asked me about how best to learn basic HTML and CSS. I suggested this fun game site, and W3Schools tutorial and web.dev.
• Niki: It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons — I’m still holding out on updating macOS from Sequoia to Tahoe. Great post about the UI/UX of Tahoe. Really shows how bad it really is. 🤮
• Open Source Photography: Making IPTC Searches Visual on Linux — Another great article from Marc, with excellent use of the terminal and scripts to automate tasks. My photo library is quite messy, especially since I stopped using LR Classic. I really need to set aside a weekend to sort out my photography workflow; I have a huge backlog of shots that haven’t even been imported yet! Really bad…

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2026/w04/2026-01-26T22:33:20+08:002026-06-02T21:58:22+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Pass step count goals, mapping trails with GPX, fixing expired mac profiles, and creating a simple CSS carousel for multiple photo posts.

Being More Active

Having my best friend visiting HK got my average daily steps up to 14694 last week! Because my calves were destroyed after descending 300 meters on Tai Mo Shan (steep descent of over 500 steps of concrete stairs), I had to take two rest days. Want to know why I went to base of Tai Mo Shan, read my first multi-photo post!

I did a few walks with GPX tracking, but I have yet to investigate self-hosting maps on my Hugo site. I look forward to sharing my trails soon! The two tools on preliminary research points towards Hugo GPX Map Module and GPX Shortcode for Hugo, which both rely on Leaflet. Do you like maps? I love looking at the data collected and seeing the visualizations on the map!

First Multiple Photo Post

I added the ability to rename what Indiekit calls category (i.e. hashtags) to tags (which is what I call them in Hugo) with an additional step in the CI and local fetch script, using find and sed. It works flawlessly now! In the meantime, I learnt that multiple photos per photo post was a thing, so I made a very basic (I think it’s a bit buggy on mobile but I haven’t had time to fix it yet) CSS-only carousel for the single photo Hugo template; which is based on CarouselCSS I found on GitHub. I’m trying to add some arrow buttons on the edge of the photo so navigation can be more user-friendly. Looking forward to using my /⁠photos page as my Instagram replacement!

Change of DNS Resolver

I have been using Quad9 for a few years now (there are good options to choose from) and have been enjoying the experience. But last week the .profile expired on my Mac—which is still running Sequoia 15.7, before I got the chance to download the new profile to replace it. Guess what, in settings, I was not able to remove the expired profile and was stuck in a catch-22—lost all internet connectivity, but need to download the new profile using Safari. 😑 Luckily a few CLI commands helped force delete the profile:

1. sudo profiles -D — Deletes all device configuration profiles (use sudo profiles -P to check what profiles you have installed before deleting them)
2. sudo pkill -HUP mDNSResponder, sudo dscacheutil -flushcache — Basic DNS flush commands

I was then able to download the updated profiles from Quad9 (that will expire on January 29th, 2027). But I was wrong! Quad9’s current Mac profiles only support >=26.1, which is only mentioned in their Mastodon post. I’m holding off on moving to Tahoe as long as securely possible because I really dislike liquid glass, so I’ve switched to Mullvad for now.

Link Roundup

Links I found interesting last week:

• Davos 2026: Special address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada — What world leaders should sound like.
• IndieWeb: POSSE — Still trying to understand and work out the best way to have canonical content on my site and syndicate it elsewhere.
• Termux — I’ve heard of this Android terminal emulator for a long time; but I don’t know why I never downloaded it… I finally did last week, got hugo, git installed but got stuck while running hugo server --noBuildLock at the warnings step. If I could get it working I would be super stoked! Does anyone use Termux with Hugo? Update: Got it working! Here’s a post on how to use Termux + Hugo on Android if you’re interested.

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2026/w03/2026-01-20T23:54:03+08:002026-06-02T21:58:22+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Managing Hugo themes and sharing photo apps. Starting my first ever 100 Days To Offload writing challenge, hoping to fill this blog up with more content.

Hugo Themes

I’ve been trying to use less overrides in my Hugo blog because the source code is getting messy. I’m currently using the Anubis2 theme as a Git Submodule, but since I heavily customized the base styles, I ended up using many overriding partials (files with identical names and paths as those in the theme but placed in the root directory) that are read by Hugo first in the template lookup order. And don’t even mention CSS—it’s a nightmare!

If you use Hugo, how do you manage themes that require a lot of customization? Do you fork the theme and make edits there using that as the site’s theme, pulling occasional upstream updates? Do you keep stacking overrides like I am? Or do you use another approach? I’d love to hear your setup.

After reading posts about Hugo themes by Adam Ormsby and LaRomierre, I have settled on the plan to create a private fork (on Codeberg) of Anubis2 (originally on GitHub) so I could make my customizations primary rather than treating them as overrides. My custom partials and templates are a bit makeshift and doesn’t follow the best Hugo practices, so I’m not ready to publish them publicly—but I hope to clean them up and share the theme someday.

Photography Apps

I have been a VSCO user for many years and enjoyed the colours and editor in general on Android. Came across an article talking about AI invading the app; I guess it means it is time to say goodbye; just like the many other apps I left because of AI integration: Adobe, Google, Meta, Evernote, etc.

These days when I want to edit photos, I use an Android app called Saulala. It is free and has good privacy practices (no internet connection, no data collected), but I only realized it wasn’t open source last week after Adam asked me about it. I like the AgX processing it uses and the look it gives, so I’ll continue using it. Credits goes to Petrikas for creating this unique photo app!

Another handy Android photo app I use is Image Toolbox (which is FOSS), and on the Mac, my photo editing software of choice is Darktable and Digikam ever since I left Adobe.

IndieWeb Updates

I received a friendly message from Zachary who kindly invited me to his Crosswinds + Currents Directory (for bloggers from Asia/Pacific). He is a generalist blogger (which I love and look up to), and his site design is logically laid out and has a guestbook page that I keep meaning to add to my site. I must check out how to get one on Hugo—go check out his site!

Blog Updates

I finally decided to take up the blogging challenge: 100 Days To Offload, created by a fellow blogger Kev. I made a special layout page for it and created a neat little progress bar with some stats! The tracker is also on the homepage under “Noticeboard” (aka bulletin board) which is a new section for me to pin any ongoing/current projects—like my quick blog survey 😉!

Really looking forward to it and I appreciate everyone who showed their support when I announced it last week on Mastodon. Thank you! If you’re a beginner blogger, or maybe even a veteran blogger—consider joining! I think the community behind it is pretty spectacular, especially in times like now with AI slop filled to the brim; it feels nice to read content from real humans and connecting with each other.

Link Roundup

Just a few links I found interesting last week.

• Akselmo: Various desktop Linux tips for newbies — For those who might be new to Linux
• Ross Baker: KBBL—A Webmention implementation in Rust — My next IndieWeb task is to set up auto sending of webmentions. Will check this CLI tool from Ross for sure.
• Jack Baty: Notes — I’m working on my /⁠notes page, having finally worked out how to get tags working from posts made by Indiekit (what I call tags in Hugo are called categories in Indiekit). I like the clean look on Jack’s page, maybe I’ll implement something similar in the future.

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2026/w02/2026-01-11T22:06:15+08:002026-06-02T21:58:22+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Big IndieWeb updates behind the scenes with Indiekit and joining Homebrew Website Club meets. Learnt Git redaction, PR merged and improve Mermaid diagrams.

First Fortnight

I’ve been playing catchup with my first weeknote of 2026. I’m starting to write, but it’s already Thursday of Week 2. So instead, let’s start 2026 off with a fortnightly note! Expect a longer-than-usual ramble…

First and foremost, Happy (Belated) New Year! My one wish for everyone is one that many may take for granted: good health. May 2026 bring you an active lifestyle and a positive mindset to tackle whatever life throws at us. This goal especially applies to myself, as I’ve recently fallen into a bit of a physical activity slump.

IndieWeb Updates

If you’ve been following my blog and updates on Mastodon, I have been mentioning IndieWeb more frequently because I’ve started taking action since Christmas Day 2025 (at the Give the Gift of Create Day (Xmas ‘25)), updating my blog’s backend to work with the building blocks. (My guide on Indiekit coming soon!)

Homebrew Website Club Events

Having discovered IndieWeb in mid-2025, I decided to attended my first online events in December last month; and it’s been enlightening and interesting each time! Joe, who’s usually the host of Homebrew Website Club (HWC) meetings, is friendly and guides the conversation along nicely (thanks for running them, Joe!) We usually talk about things related to personal projects or sites, tools related to website development, or other non-technical topics/general chat. I have attended about four of these online Zoom calls already, and the “show-and-tell” aspect of this type of meeting has motivated me to create and develop my website. Not to mention the diverse group and cool things people share during these gatherings inspire me as well!¹

The latest HWC I joined on 2025/01/07 was another varied and thought-provoking session. There are meeting notes/minutes for each meetup if you’re interested in seeing what was discussed.² If you live in the States, Germany, or the UK, there are in-person events too—check the IndieWeb Events page for more information. I wonder if there are any Asian countries that do events (online or in-person)… 🤔

Tip

Subscribe to the iCalendar feed on the bottom of the Events Page.

Why I Passionately Promote the IndieWeb

I hope to inspire those who do not have their own site to start one too and join in on the fun (because I know I am)! Some reasons I think you should have your own website:

• Having ownership of your content and data, in your little corner of the Internet has significance in this day and age, because of the seemingly inevitable enshittification risk for every major platform.
• Not being a prisoner of Big Tech social media apps (which are saturated with AI-generated content and privacy-evading software).
• Connect with genuine and real human beings (there can be real humans behind Instagram and TikTok feeds too, but the “algorithm” and the foundation of an ads-driven platform can only be so trustworthy).
• Learn a new skill—understand a bit (or a lot) of HTML + CSS to make your site truly customized the way you want!
• More reasons why you should join.

Recently Completed IndieWeb Tasks

• Add Micropub endpoints to BurgeonLab using Indiekit (allowing me to use a variety of Micropub clients to post different types of posts, on-the-go).
• Improve Hugo compatibility with Microformat markup (h-feed, h-entry, etc) and support other IndieWeb post types—like photos, notes (i.e. microblog/tweet/status), etc with their own Hugo sections and layouts.
• Create new IndieWeb-inspired pages³ like a Firehose page, Stats page.
• Add a social button to the footer linking to my IndieWeb User page (which I’ve also updated).

Completed

Learnt Some More Git

I learnt how to redact a repo’s Git commit history last week! I sometimes still struggle with Git concepts, so I always try to “learn while doing”. It wasn’t anything serious that I “leaked” in a public repo—and I already deleted and recreated a new set of variables, but I thought it was still important to learn how to redact all occurrences of the leaked secret from the Git commit log. I think it is worth its own post, so I won’t say more. It was a fun learning opportunity though!

I do have a short list of resources to learn Git properly—on the top of my list is Oh My Git, an open source game teaching Git. Looks like a fun way to learn; has anyone tried it or have other Git learning resources you recommend?

Indiekit Pull Request Merged

On a slightly related note, I submitted a PR to IndieKit which got merged by Paul. 🥳 It allows me now to use S3 buckets for media storage. My Indiekit setup is nearly done, and I can’t wait to start using it! Also decided to show some support and appreciate by being a Indiekit sponsor.

More Mermaid

I improved my Mermaid diagrams styling last week, and it looks much better in my opinion! Here’s a quick before/after:

If you want to check them out more closely, here are a few posts I’ve written that has Mermaid diagrams. I have at least two more coming!

• Process Overview of Using ECharts
• Final Checklist Before Publishing on Hugo
• GitHub Replacement Workflow

Link Roundup

Here are some links I found interesting last week.

• Top Four — After Ross mentioned starting his Top4 at one of the IndieWeb meetings, it’s on my to-do list!
• The Verge: Motorola’s latest smartwatch promises 13-day battery life and Polar-powered health tracking — I’ve not been keeping up to date with CES this year… but one thing caught my eye, Moto Watch will run open source software and not WearOS? That sounds really great, but there are no details yet. Any hardware (especially from big, corporate brands), that runs open source software should be commended.
• TK (11d.im): 2026w01 and Hobonichi and Digital Notes (TK’s blog is in French and I paraphrased the second post title to English.) — I was a huge fan of Hobonichis for around 6 or 7 years I guess? It is a cult Japanese diary/planner with very thin, bible-like paper that has great fountain pen properties. It wasn’t until I got bored with their layout options, annual designs, and their paper source had a change, I decided to find an alternative. For my planner choice—I use a Mark’s Edit dairy (my 3rd year), and still enjoying the A5 version. His experience with note-taking apps was a nice read, and he ended up with a CLI app called nb (which looks rather cool I have to admit); while l am still enjoying my Obsidian workflow ever since I dumped Evernote in late 2022. I actually “upgraded” some of my Obsidian workflows last week—which is probably worth its own post…
• Piccalilli: Date is out, Temporal is in — Interesting new JS implementation for times/dates. Out of HTML/CSS/JS, JavaScript is the one I know least about… But the article did a good job explaining! Another JS related link I came across is Day.js (a super lightweight version of Moment.js) when I was chatting with MG on Mastodon about his implementation of relative dates for his new /photos section on his site.
• Fediverse Observer — A site that lets you find a good server to suit your Fediverse needs! Use the software filter at the top to find the service (e.g. Mastodon, Lemmy, PixelFed, etc). I have been using it to see if there are any good servers to join; either a PieFed or Mbin account. Anyone use either or prefer the other? I don’t want Lemmy as I read the development is sluggish. (For those of you who don’t know, these are federated, content aggregators, i.e., Reddit alternatives. Elena has written a multipart series on Fediverse apps if you’re interested!)
• Introducing CSS Grid Lanes — I think this might come in handy for when I finally get around to working on my photography portfolio.

Closing

Okay, that’s all for now—hope it wasn’t too long. Thanks for reading my first “1+1” weeknote of 2026! Catch you next week,

Naty

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1. If you’re like me, camera shy, it’s no problem: (1) it’s not recorded, (2) when the group picture being taken you can turn your video off (Joe gives an ample warning), and (3) you can also just listen/lurk without needing to actively participate (although we hope you would!) ↩︎

2. The first two events I attended were also Homebrew Website Club events: HWC - Pacific (2025/12/23 ), and HWC - Eastern (2025/12/17). ↩︎

3. There are lots of inspiration for content on your site on the IndieWeb Wiki. For example, learn more about firehose and stats. ↩︎

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2025/w52/2025-12-31T19:15:14+08:002026-04-28T20:55:04+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Made my first contribution to Hugo Docs, installing Indiekit, testing Micropub content. New Hugo templates for IndieWeb posts. Plus a quick F1 Fantasy summary.

Contributing to Hugo Docs

Made a small contribution last week on Hugo documentations regarding installing Dart Sass in SourceHut CI pipelines. I couldn’t get it to work until I switched to the linux-x64-musl installation as SourceHut uses Alpine as the VM OS. It’s my first contribution to a big documentation, so it feels pretty cool! I want to do more documentation writing—if anyone reading needs some help with docs, let me know!

Implementing Indiekit

I began working on using Indiekit as the Micropub endpoint for BurgeonLab this Christmas. It was challenging, as I have zero experience with: Node.js, MongoDB (the two main technologies behind Indiekit), and S3 object storage.

After a lot of trial and error, and I ended up needed some guidance from AI chatbots to explain the workflow, and troubleshooting issues I had with Node.js and S3. Another first for me was using Render to host a serverless app and getting that working was really cool—being able to do the micropub.rocks tests and passing most of them was even cooler! I genuinely didn’t think I could get it to work because I couldn’t find a guide on using Indiekit with Hugo. So I will write up an overview to help anyone else who might be interested in joining the IndieWeb!

The whole implementation isn’t fully working yet, but I think most of the heavy lifting is complete. With the new Micropub post types coming to BurgeonLab, I have created my first iteration Hugo templates! You can visit /photos and /notes to see a sample post in each post type. I also added a /⁠sitemap page this week!

I can’t wait for 2026 to be the year I fully embrace being on the IndieWeb!

F1 Fantasy 2025

I didn’t get a chance to write up my thoughts on playing F1 Fantasy (my third year); here’s a quick summary of my Team 1:

• Global leaderboard: Rank 773/2.7m+
• Hong Kong leaderboard: Rank 7/9k+
• Best scoring race: 333 points at Monaco with limitless chip
• Most points in a single race: 376 points (used no negative chip at Brazil for Team 3)

League Results:

• Fedi F1 League (Rob Stokes): Rank 1/37
• Hong Kong F1 Fantasy League: Rank 1/20
• Subreddit r/formula1: Rank 34/12k+
• Formula Fantasy Hub Official League (Rob Beaumont): Rank 95/4k+
• The Fantasy Formula (FanAmp): Rank 233/70k+

I am not sure what to expect in 2026, with the regulation changes. I just want more racing, and less “DRS trains” and “this is a hard-to-overtake track”. A quick explainer video: Everything You Need To Know About the Formula 1 2026 Regulations.

I’m really quite happy with the results; being in the top 1000 globally and top 10 in Hong Kong. My favourite F1 Fantasy content creators are Rob Beaumont, Euan, and the guys at FanAmp (links are all to YouTube). I also highly recommend F1 Fantasy Tools if you are playing, it’s got loads of data and great for building budget in the early stages.

Link Roundup

Here are some links I found interesting last week.

• Software Freedom Conservancy: Seven Diabetes Patients Die Due to Undisclosed Bug in Abbott’s Continuous Glucose Monitors — I wouldn’t want a proprietary piece of hardware in my body. I hope FOSS becomes more widely used in the healthcare field.
• beepb00p.xyz: How to annotate literally everything — A very thorough overview about annotating things we read.
• The New Stack: CSS Finally Gets Inline Conditional Logic With New if() Function
• Piskel — A web-based FOSS pixel art /animated sprite editor.
• Wellness Ping — A FOSS service offered by Micr0byte that notifies your emergency contacts if you don’t respond to regular email check-ins.

Final Word in 2025

Want to wish my dear readers a very Happy New Year! No matter what stage you are in your life, I wish you good mental and physical health, success in your endeavours, and motivation to chase your dreams.

Have a great 2026,

Naty

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2025/w51/2025-12-23T18:33:07+08:002026-04-28T20:55:04+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Attending my first IndieWeb event, fixing Hugo HTML validation errors, and insights about the traditional Chinese holiday—Winter Solstice.

Life Online

I attended my first IndieWeb event last week: Homebrew Website Club (Eastern Time). It was pretty cool to put some faces to names I’ve seen around on the IndieWeb community / IRC. Everyone was chill and welcoming!

Joe and David shared what they had in common with Hong Kong, and Morgan shared that he got his hands on the PinePhone to test (Pine64 is from HK actually!) I’m looking forward to reading about his experience as I really want my next phone to be either: 1. a fully degoogled Android OS (e.g. GrapheneOS) or 2. Linux-based.

Did some satisfying work on my website last week—I managed to fix the plethora of errors and warnings on all the pages in this blog using the W3 Nu HTML5 Checker! I tried looking at it a few years ago but had no clue how to fix them. With more HTML/CSS/JS knowledge these days, I got it sorted! 🥳 I totally forgot to screenshot the errors; they were mostly wrong implementation of:

• ARIA labels
• divs and spans
• not using unique IDs
• landmarks as children
• strays /divs
• attributes

So I added a HTML5 validated badge to my growing collection of web badges (now located at the footer). I also updated my Hugo /layouts folder to the new v.0.146 template system. It broke some things because the theme I use is still on the old system, but I managed to bypass it for now.

In Real Life

In Chinese culture, there’s an old saying that “Winter solstice is more important than Chinese Lunar New Year” (冬大過年). I never looked into why that is, until yesterday when I celebrated it with my family.

Winter solstice (aka as Dung Zi or Dongzhi) is usually on December 21 or 22; it is the shortest day in the year (in the Northern Hemisphere). This means that the days following winter solstice, the daylight hours will increase (bringing in yang/positive energy), i.e. like the beginning of a “new year”. To learn more, read this article by UNESCO HK about the 24 Solar Terms; where winter solstice is the 22nd solar term.

Oh, and I passed the written test for getting a learner’s licence last week; it was easier than I thought. 😅 Can’t wait to get in the car!

Link Roundup

Here are some links I found interesting last week. Note: I’m trying out YouTube frontend alternatives when sharing video links, e.g. Invidious.

• Elena Rossini: Newbie’s guide to self-hosting with YunoHost — Elena has written Part 2 as well! Great starter’s guide for homelabbers. She’s written a Fediverse starter guide too, if you’re interested.
• ghacks.net: Firefox adds AI — New leader over at Mozilla and it’s just going downhill real quick. I am not sure how privacy-focused forks will cope, I hope they do manage because I’ve fully left Firefox and relying on forks exclusively (bouncing between Librewolf and Floorp).
• A Message from Ella | Without Consent — This is an old advert (2023) by Deutsche Telekom, but I only came across it last week. It is poignant and even more relevant today.
• Air Loom 3D Flight Tracker — Very cool site showing 3D rendering of planes in the sky.
• CoverFlowFinder — A macOS Finder alternative that’s open source. Haven’t tried it.
• Darktable v5.4.0 out — Seems like a good update!
• Fountain Pen Companion — I just came across this site aimed at fountain pen users albeit too late (I was a fanatic in 2010-2019). I know some of you are just starting out with the fountain pen hobby (like Joel and Cassie)
• Recovering Anthony Bourdain’s (really) lost Li.st’s — Everyone should have lists. It’s a accessible and concise way of keeping ideas and notes. I should try to keep some of my own too. By the way, Bourdain seems to enjoy HK restaurants quite a bit!

I wish everyone a happy belated dung zi / winter solstice, and a warm, peaceful, and safe holiday season.

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2025/w50/2025-12-16T17:26:20+08:002026-04-28T20:55:04+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Improving website performance on my secondary WordPress blog. Made a new link-in-bio page gathering content from multiple blogs onto one central dashboard.

In Progress

While working on a /now page last week, I realized I need a /ideas page too. It started getting messy with to-do items and future ideas mixed in.

Completed

• Two weeks ago I mentioned that I was working on revamping the link-in-bio/dashboard page. It has been updated now! I like having more content but also miss a simpler layout. Perhaps I’ll push the recent blog posts section down and add the straight-forward link buttons back at the top. (Feedback is welcome!)

• Happily, I managed to improve the page performance significantly now that I’m more experienced with website frontend loading. Performance scores like LCP, FCP, CLS, etc are no longer so alien to me compared to a year ago. But with the secondary blog still running on WordPress, it reminds me once again how much I don’t like WP. It adds so much bloat; I have no idea where more than half of all the resources loaded on a page originate from…¹

Week in Posts

In case you missed it, here’s what went live on the blog last week.

• How to Find Orphan Pages on Static Sites: Python Checker
• Contributing to Joel’s collab game post

Link Roundup

Content I found interesting last week.

• Dr Paris: 20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple — Absolute horror story. Just goes to show how Big Tech can screw you over, and it could happen to anyone. We must educate ourselves and try to own our data instead of relying on Big Tech because they don’t care one bit.
• I didn’t know Joseph Gordon‑Levitt (the actor) was so outspoken about AI. He raises concerns about its dangers and weak regulation, and he’s critical of Big Tech. Here are some related links:
  • Joseph Gordon‑Levitt: Joe’s Journal
  • Deseret News: Why is Joseph Gordon-Levitt going after Meta?
  • Deseret News: Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt raises concerns about AI at Utah summit
  • Hollywood Reporter: On AI and Copyright, Trump Is Groveling Before Big Tech and Selling Out Working Americans
• The Word Table Tennis (WTT) Finals took place in HK last week. It was enjoyable to watch the top players on live TV. This game (Youtube link) featuring the world’s top duo, China’s Wang and Sun versus Hong Kong’s top duo, Wong and Doo, was exceptional! I like all four players. Sadly, Wang and Sun both had to retire for their final showdowns in their respective single matches due to injuries…

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1. I ended up fiddling around in the theme editor—improving the templates to have a consistent styling, remove the excessive inline-styles I didn’t understand before, change from the default .ttf font to a .woff2 variable font for better performance, fixed my previous incorrect implementation of JS email obfuscation, and removed WP comments completely. ↩︎

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2025/w49/2025-12-08T20:33:42+08:002026-02-18T19:43:58+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Created readership survey; installed upvote button, moved photography site code. New vocab section in weeknotes and plans on learning Darktable in 2026.

Completed

I created a readership questionnaire for the blog! If you read my blog and have a minute or two, can you fill it in? I’d appreciate it a lot 🙏. With the year coming to a close, I want to gather some information about my audience so I could improve my site for 2026. I’m really thankful for the positive response from readers who connected with me via Mastodon or email in the past year; telling me they found my posts useful or shared my content on their own site. Thank you!

Installed an upvote (aka 👍/❤️/kudos/appreciation) button near the bottom of pages just above the comments section. It’s a simple counter that “just works”—it’s just like the one on posts from Bearblog! I’m chuffed to have this little feature (and all the upvotes I already got—thanks everyone), plus it was easy to install. To learn how to install iine (a privacy-respecting, open source tool made for small web users) on Hugo, see Add Bear Blog Style Upvote/Like Button to Hugo with iine.

I participated in an online group activity by Marc (Bushcrafter) who runs the blog, Open Source Photography. He shared a raw image (of an insect perched on a branch) with his readers to edit. I found it a compelling exercise as I am still very much not comfortable editing photos in Darktable after jumping ship from Adobe (after 15 years of LR Classic). I personally like Jonathon’s realistic version and Evgeny’s edgy monochrome interpretation most—they both used RawTherapee.

Came across a weird issue with my photography site (runs Hugo, hosted on Hostinger) last week. It was the perfect excuse to move the source code from GitHub SourceHut and hosting from Hostinger Bunny.net.¹ Everything went smoothly—I’m glad to have the CI pipeline working too using SourceHut Builds for it with a build.yml manifest (akin to GitHub Actions). I had to look up my own guide to remember the bit about rclone obscure for SFTP though!

My photography hobby has been pretty much at a standstill since I left Lightroom Classic because I haven’t got around learning Darktable + DigiKam (my FOSS replacement duo). I hope that will change in 2026, and I’ll start sharing photos online again.

Oh, and I updated my weeknote Open Graph image design to something more simple.

In Progress

Working on a new slash page: /now. A bit late to the game—should be ready some time next week.

New Words This Week

I often come across new vocabulary. One habit I picked up in secondary school from English lessons was writing new words into my all encompassing school diary. I remember using a black faux-leather A5 Moleskine with a horizontal weekly layout with blank lines on the right side. I’m actually a big fan of journals; you can read about my current favourite, the Mark’s Edit Semi‑A5 (Weekly + Notes) on my other blog! But I digress.

This will likely become a recurring section in my weeknotes—let me know if you like them or not! TBH, they’re more for myself to help memorize the words. 😅 I did enjoy writing a bit of CSS to make them look like definition cards.

non sequitur (noun)

a conclusion or statement that does not logically follow from the previous argument or statement

His non sequitur left everyone confused about the direction of the conversation.

recidivist (noun)

a convicted criminal who reoffends, especially repeatedly

The recidivist was well-known to local law enforcement.

laissez-faire (noun)

the policy of leaving things to take their own course, without interfering

A laissez-faire attitude to life.

troglodyte (noun)

a person regarded as being ignorant and reactionary in their views

Troglodytes in boardrooms who are unaware of climate change.

Definitions will be primarily taken from the Oxford Dictionary of English as of the post’s published date. Secondary definition sources may come from the free version of the WordWeb Dictionary. Example sentences may also be sourced elsewhere or written by myself.

Link Roundup

• Andy Matuschak | Most people take only transient notes — Good info on evergreen vs transient notes.
• Gerben Jacobs | Webmentions: A short explanation — Slowly understanding more about webmentions.
• John Snow Project | SARS-CoV-2 Leaves a Lasting Mark on the Immune System — A very well presented article about the dangers of downplaying COVID infections. A recommended read for anyone who cares about their own health and their loved ones (especially elderly or those with pre-existing risk factors like cardiovascular disease).
• Grumpy Website — It’s a site about user interface and user experience. Find it quite amusing.
• 11d.im | 2025w48 — Shout out to TK for featuring my weeknotes on theirs for two weeks in a row! 😇 (Their blog is in French.) I enjoyed reading their experience on installing Linux and “taking back control” of using a computer to suit a person’s needs.

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1. Both of the hosting links are affiliate links, which means I get a kickback if you decided to become a paying user (cheers!) I use Hostinger for my WordPress site and it’s been good to me so far, still on the 4-year plan I got a while back. But for static sites—I’m a huge fan of Bunny.net. I’m just a really happy customer! ↩︎

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2025/w48/2025-12-01T20:36:36+08:002026-02-18T18:14:38+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Switching from WeeChat to Senpai for IRC bouncer, Mac CLI tools, links page on Black Friday Create Day, Hong Kong fire and bamboo scaffolding.

Only a brief weeknote this week.

Tech Log

• WeeChat (IRC client) is not working well with Soju (Bouncer Server). It was spamming my channels with many JOIN/PART spam which was infuriating and impossible to prevent it seems on the Mac. While Goguma on Android worked flawlessly and took literally only 1 minute to set up.

  I eventually realized WeeChat doesn’t have great support for bouncer servers, so I switched to Senpai which has a similar look (CLI-based) but is much more straight forward to use. I regret not trying it first! It was built to work with bouncers. Another three (web-UI) clients I was going to try if Senpai didn’t work out:

  1. ObsidianIRC
  2. Kiwi IRC
  3. Gamja

  Additional reading:

  senpai: a modern IRC terminal client | Hugo IRC Bouncer Setup With Soju, Gamja, Caddy and Docker | Henrique Dias

• I have been spending time with the Mac terminal a lot more in the past year or two, and I’m starting to wonder if I should try another terminal emulator like iTerm2. What is your daily driver? From a quick search online, I came across Alacritty and Kitty, but I think iTerm2 is going to be the easier one for me to get into grips with being a CLI novice. I still remember it was Neofetch that drew me into learning how to use the CLI (nowadays I use Fastfetch).

• Installed jrnl, a plain text journalling CLI app. It’ll come in handy for quick jot-downs, as it has a low barrier of entry, especially now that I have the terminal often running. What exactly I’ll use it for—I don’t know yet. I’ll probably be making small notes about completed jobs, random ideas, or notes while troubleshooting bugs.

• Quite happy with my new Open Graph image generation workflow. I updated the post with the upgraded script and it’s been working really well so far!

IndieWeb Updates

• I came across Black Friday Create Day on the IndieWeb chat IRC channels. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to join the event, but I came across a links page (link in bio) by artlung which got me thinking about mine. I haven’t touched mine since I started on my Hugo blog (it’s still a page on my WordPress blog); wondering if I should move that over here. I know there are some really clean and minimalistic Hugo themes for one-page sites/landing pages or even just hand-coding one now that I’m much more comfortable with HTML/CSS. Something to investigate on a rainy afternoon, I reckon. Update: New link-in-bio is out!

IRL (In Real Life)

• I was asked by @joelcrono to collaborate on a special post of his. I wrote my submission and I look forward to reading his final post. I don’t know if I’m allowed to reveal the topic, so I’ll just keep it under wraps for now. Update: Joel published the post—Desert Island Game, which features just under 20 gamers’ choice of game to bring on a desert island. Happy to contribute to a cool post like that, thanks Joel.

• As you may have seen on the news, there has been a devastating fire that broke out in the Tai Po district of Hong Kong, across 7 (out of 8) buildings in an apartment complex. As of today, about 6 days after the fire, the death toll is up to 151, with searches in the scorched buildings still being conducted to find the remainder of the missing persons. It’s been a very heavy week for all Hongkongers. RIP to all the victims and hope affected families stay strong.

  There’s a lot of misinformation flying around in the media, which is frustrating. For example, blaming the rapid spread of the fire on the bamboo scaffolding itself is incorrect—the main factors were the surrounding netting (cheap, non–fire‑proof material) and Styrofoam used to cover windows (apparently to protect the windows). Another failure was the lack of alarms. As someone who admires bamboo scaffolding, I’m very disappointed to see it blamed. Bamboo scaffolding is a true craft with a deep history in Hong Kong’s development, going back over 100 years.

  Additional reading:

  A Visual Appreciation of Hong Kong’s Bamboo Scaffolding | Atlas Obscura

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2025/w47/2025-11-26T15:00:16+08:002026-06-02T21:58:22+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Learning more about the IndieWeb led me to setting up IRC, joining webrings, getting my first webmentions, and connecting with amiable fellow bloggers.

An IndieWeb Fuelled Week

Most of the free time I had in the past week (writing this weeknote a bit late; it’s already Wednesday) was spent surrounding topics I discovered while exploring the trove of information from indieweb.org.

Re-discovering IRC

I successfully set up IRC on my Mac (WeeChat) and Android (Goguma)¹, registered my “nick” on the Libera servers. I even managed to set up the bouncer server provided by SourceHut (included for paid users). Why join IRC suddenly, you might be asking? Well, I actually used IRC like a decade ago (Adium) to chat with a hobby group—but it didn’t stick.

This time it was prompted while browsing the IndieWeb discuss page. I discovered a great deal of interesting ideas and cool bloggers. After creating a basic profile, I connected to the general chat IRC channel and was greeted by a bunch of really friendly people (some of their sites are linked below). I subsequently joined some other channels using this IRC directory, like #Fosstodon, #Indieweb, #f1, #coffee, #selfhosted (these are all on the Libera.chat server—I’ve yet to check out other servers).

I quite like the idea of having a place to chat with different people; and the ephemeral nature is appealing and interesting to me. If you are an IRC user as well, find me on #Fosstodon (which is my favourite Mastodon instance) or one of the IndieWeb channels (#indieweb, #indieweb-cafe or #indieweb-random). My nickname is burgeonlab. Do you have any channels you like? Let me know below!

One Thing Leads to Another: Webrings Galore

With my recent IndieWeb fascination, I finally decided to join a few webrings. I first heard about them around six months ago—see my post on My Blogging Pursuit. If you go to the bottom of my home page now, I give a short explainer about webrings and added a <details> HTML element to the footer. If you click on it, the list of webrings my site belongs to will be displayed, each with its own navigation:

• Previous site in the ring
• Next site in the ring
• Random site from the ring (dice icon: )
• Text link to the webring’s home page

I only have one webring application that remain to be approved. There are SO many cool personal sites in these rings. If you ever get bored or want some inspiration, definitely check them out!

Understanding Webmentions More

I added a Webmention endpoint (via webmention.io) to the comments section of all my posts a few months ago for people to notify me if they’ve written a response or if they mentioned me in their post. What I didn’t really understand at the time, was this is usually an automatic process (assuming webmentions is enabled on their publishing platform). I found a really thorough Webmention 101 guide by Reilly that covers almost all my questions—I recommend reading it if you’re also learning about it like me.

The receiving part is confirmed working because I got my first mentions last week! There’s no frontend display of the mentions though—it’s just accessible for now via my Webmention.io Dashboard.

• Reply from Gerben
• Like from Joe
• Weeknote mention from TK

While the receiving part of webmention is relatively straight forward, I find sending webmentions automatically to sites I’ve linked to a bit tricky for static sites (Hugo in my case). I am still learning about it, once I have it sorted I’ll probably gather all the notes and put out a post. Integrating it into my CI pipeline is probably the best option… In the meantime, I will be manually sending webmentions using tools like webmention.app or Telegraph (Use “Find Links” under Dashboard), which will scan every link in a post and send webmentions to sites that are able to receive them.

Link Roundup

Here are some links I discovered this week.

• Tom Burkert | RSS feeds discovery strategies — Tips on finding RSS feeds.
• thatalexguy | Discovering the Indie Web — Intro to the SmallWeb.
• Technology by Morgan | Accessibility Statement — I want to make one too!
• Josh Griffiths | YouTube is Awful. I’m Not Posting There Anymore. — Yet another story about enshittification.
• Ben Werdmuller | The State of the Open Social Web — Detailed article about open social networks.
• James’ Coffee Blog — Great blog with lots of technical writing info which I plan to read, amongst other posts.
• dead.garden — I hope to make a photo/Instagram export section in the future similar to this, really nice work.
• IndieWeb Carnival — Inspiration for writing.
• RapidRAW — Came across this RAW image editor; haven’t tried it yet, but will do when I’m in the mood for photography… I’m using Darktable + DigiKam; but I’m still not “at ease” with the setup after ditching Adobe Lightroom Classic.

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1. Goguma actually means Korean sweet potato. ↩︎

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2025/w46/2025-11-18T19:54:56+08:002026-02-02T18:11:50+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

Hiking in Hong Kong at the Wilson Trail (Section 2). Also, Men's table tennis final, EU Digital Omnibus wrecking ball, and Android sideloading update.

Highlight of the Week

I’ve been outdoors and in town much more than usual—did a proper hike after a very long break (health reasons). I miss it! Although Hong Kong is a very built-up, crowded, and bustling concrete jungle, there’s actually over 70% that is covered in natural areas (greenery, country parks, etc)! It’s a true paradise with over 500km of maintained trails in the numerous country parks; so there’s something for everyone. If you’re into trekking or trail running, I highly recommend a documentary film that I watched a year or two ago about the HK Four Trails Ultra Challenge (298km run in 72hrs) called Four Trails.

The best reward IMO when you get to the top of most mountains in HK is seeing the stunning views of the city below your feet, or alternatively, it will be beautiful reservoirs or island clusters (HK is actually made up of over 200 islands). Some hikes are so accessible that it only takes 15 minutes or so from being in the middle of the city to being above the skyline!

Anyway, the walk I did was part of the Wilson Trail Section 2, a total of 7km with two uphill sections—first peak was Jardine’s Lookout and the second was Siu Ma Shan which translates to “small horse hill”. Highest point was 433m. It was a pretty hot day with zero cloud cover, 23–26℃, with an AQI of about 57 USAQI. I tried a new GPX logging app (OSMTracker for Android) on my phone and I would definitely use it again in the future. Battery life usage I’d say is good (battery dropped from 95% to 78% for the whole walk, with a few photos during the hike).

Here’s the GPX track I logged with GPS logging interval set to 30s (which I will set to 60s next time; I don’t walk that fast). I love seeing the elevation gains and map overlays, but I totally forgot to put waypoints while hiking because I was trying to be careful not to injure myself (being so rusty). Luckily, the hike went well and I felt pretty good afterwards. Just have sore calves now two days post hike!

Others

• If you’re into men’s table tennis, there was a very exciting final match on the 15th at the China National Games: Wang Chuqin VS Fan Zhendong. Super competitive game between probably China’s top two players at the moment.
• I had to dig out my old pair of Salomon hiking boots for the hike. But when I tried it out the night before, it was slippery as hell! I think the rubber sole hardened or aged from lack of use. Using some 300 grit sand paper, the “shiny” layer was removed evenly, and luckily, the grip returned 100%.
• There’s an update from Google following the public outcry about killing off Android sideloading and alternative app stores like F-Droid. I don’t think their wording is strong or clear enough, but at least it’s a small step in the right direction.
• Another week, another uncertainty about digital rights and data privacy. The Digital Omnibus is putting the GDPR at risk and not only will it just affect the EU, but globally. More info by the European Digital Rights (EDRi) (links to a PDF).

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2025/w45/2025-11-09T11:21:32+08:002026-02-18T19:43:58+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

FOSS freedom at risk, Meta AI data scraping, Hugo updates, F1 Fantasy at Brazil, shout out to my new fans, and getting a driving licence.

Software Freedom Concerns

If you follow me on Mastodon, you might have seen me raising my concerns last month about Google’s app developer verification that will lead to the complete downfall and disintegration of F-Droid. I use F-Droid for probably 85% of all my apps. The variety of FOSS apps and how they’re often much less bloated, ad free, and most importantly, privacy respecting, compared to those commercial apps on Google Play is a breath of fresh air in today’s world filled with Big Tech.

What can we, as end-users, do to stop this from happening? It’s less than a year before Google pulls the trigger; platform lock-in will apply to everyone who uses Android OS. I feel very frustrated and pretty hopeless by the prospect of losing Android—being the sole viable mainstream mobile OS that I can use without severe loss of privacy, curtailing of software freedoms, and inability to actually “own” any of our devices these days is beyond my comprehension.¹ It just makes it so much worse when they keep claiming it is for “our privacy” or “it doesn’t kill side-loading”; it’s just plain lies. Monopolies are never good; this is just a horrible step for all users.

Then this week, I saw another very similar sounding article about Apple’s notarization process, aiming to lock down macOS, just like they have already for iOS and iPadOS. Having a walled garden is great for them, but it kills off independent developers and gravely affects users of FOSS apps. To be honest, I have already started to hate macOS ever since it started morphing towards iOS (I think that was around Ventura macOS 13 in 2022?). I have only ever used Android phones and have been using Macs since 2007 with Leopard. I think I can still eke out a few more years (fingers crossed) of using macOS as my daily driver, but eventually I will move to Linux.

For switching mobile phones though… practical alternatives are limited. I want to switch to GrapheneOS but 1. Pixel devices are quite expensive for what they are and 2. they’re not actually available locally in HK and has no warranty coverage. But, if I understand correctly, F-Droid and alternative app stores will not work even if I was using Graphene or Lineage, etc.

The reality is, we no longer have true ownership of our hardware these days if we’re buying from major retail companies. Devices are being “sold” to us, but actually, they’re managing our device as closed, locked platforms, leaving little freedom to install software from the sources we prefer.

Relevant Links

• F-Droid: F-Droid and Google’s Developer Registration Decree
• F-Droid: What We Talk About When We Talk About Sideloading
• FSFE: Apple’s “Notarisation” – Blocking Software Freedom of Developers and Users
• The Verge: Google Must Crack Open Android for Third-Party Stores, Rules Epic Judge
• While researching, I came across this group called Keep Android Open that is trying to raise awareness and push back. I will try to educate myself and my friends about it (a bit of a challenge because they’re not privacy aware at all sadly).
• Then I noticed Adamsdesk has also written about this very topic in his October monthly write-up.

Completed

• Applied to take the MCQ next month for my learner’s licence in Hong Kong. I’ve taken two written tests in other countries before (scored 100% on both actually) and had under 15 hours of driving instruction in Canada, but never completed the practical tests. Looking forward to this—I love all things automotive!

• Fix a serious screw-up, on my part, for trying to improve website performance by messing with cache-control headers. I stupidly didn’t do my homework before applying CDN edge rules on Bunny.net (affiliate link), and ended up setting a browser cache of one whole year for HTML content—which is a big no-no². I will probably write a summary of what I did, but my notes are kinda messy…

• Generating post covers / Open Graph images for my weeknotes has been pretty fun. How might it be fun, you ask? I have implemented a diagram scripting tool to generate Markdown images (kind of like Mermaid but for text). The tool is called D2 Lang. Update: Read my guide to learn how I automate OG image generation. You can see the result on my accompanying Mastodon post.

• Updated my /⁠subscribe page with the three feeds available on this blog (so far). I used Shields.io to make those badges/buttons which I quite like. The feed generation required some tweaking, but I manage to workaround Hugo’s default RSS generation to disable sections I don’t want a feed to be generated. Added it to my Hugo Tips and Tricks post.

• As I write this rather late on Sunday evening, the F1 Interlagos Gran Prix will start soon. I’m really quite into F1 Fantasy in 2025 (this being my third year). There’s a Fediverse F1 Fantasy League that I’m part of (created by Rob) and I’m doing quite well in it. Global rankings pre-Brazil are also pretty phenomenal in my opinion… Happy! If you also play, definitely let me know, I’d love to play H2H battles and join more leagues.

  

Shout-out

• This week, I received two really amazing messages; one is from Tomáš, an appreciative reader of my blog who complimented on my site’s style. Thanks again, Tomáš, for your kind words and reaching out.
• The second is an email from Alec who told me about how he appreciates my site’s look/colours and found my Hugo Heatmap Calendar tutorial to be “great”. Thanks, Alec, for your support and follow!
• Also, there was one more reader called MG who implemented the code already on their site last week. Happy it worked!

PSA

If you use Meta AI, be aware of a change in policy for December 16, 2025 (a month from now), scraping all your AI chat data for training purposes.

Read more here: Meta Will Use Your AI Chats to Gather Data on You and the actual Facebook policy.

Lastly, I am just going to remind myself there’s only seven weeks before the end of 2025 (what?!)

Signing off,

Naty

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1. It’s like our phones is now just a paid-in-full, loaned-out Kindle E-Reader—sure you can buy books; but it’s only limited to what is available in the Amazon book store. You cannot install any third-party apps because you’re loaning the device, so you don’t actually have control over it. ↩︎

2. Cache properties need to be balanced; it’s web performance vs not serving stale content. For assets that don’t change much like icons/logos/fonts, you’d want them to be pretty much cached for return visitors. But for things that often change or updated, e.g. your post content (HTML), or CSS/JS (things I’m always messing about with, but maybe for others, it might be more of a static resource), you want to make sure the cache is updated with the latest version when you deploy the site. ↩︎

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]]>https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2025/w44/2025-11-02T23:36:28+08:002026-06-02T21:58:22+08:00Naty Snaty@eclecticpassions.net

First week note: optimized Hugo page speed, got flu shot, posted about coffee, explored Gopher. Links on Spotify, agentic AI, Google's sideloading saga.

Hello, Weeknotes

After much delay and deliberation (with an extra dose of encouragement from @joel), I’ve finally decided to put writing week notes to the top of my to-do list. And being a perfectionist, I “had to” get everything, bar the actual writing part, sorted before I could focus on writing (or should I say typing). So off I went and happily created a new Hugo section (page kind) called weeknotes, made a new dedicated Atom feed, archetype template, and list view template. I felt fulfilled by the new additions because this time, while working in Hugo, I actually understood why and how to do most of the things without relying fully on guides or forum posts.

In case you don’t know what week notes are—they’re like a weekly, public dairy entry where one can share their ups and downs that week, what they perhaps learnt, completed, or anything really! From the examples in the IndieWeb community, weeknotes seems to be a fairly flexible, personal, and is a sort of rough-around-the-edges type of format. It is uncharted territory for me, and a bit uncomfortable I have to admit, as I don’t like the thought of “light-hearted” or “unserious” work. But this has been a conundrum for me since secondary school and into my working years—I’ve been told by many that I’m always too serious. Will writing slightly less-polished, more carefree posts help? I have no clue. We will see.

I have not decided on any framework or format yet (because that’s just another excuse to not write), so I’ll just try something generic for my first week and see how I get on. If you write weeknotes too, send them my way! Or try sending me a webmention.

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Completed

• Got my flu shot (a recombinant trivalent one) and by some wicked fate, when I booked into a random clinic to get the shot, I was assigned to a GP that is the younger sister of my childhood doctor! I am not that good at maths, but the odds of that must be….! Just dumbfounded.
  • Anyway, if you haven’t had your influenza jab yet this year, consider it (especially if you’re in the higher risk groups) because flu tends to peak around winter and your body needs at least two weeks to build up the protection after the jab. In HK, cases are still rising from the summer flu season and current activity levels suggest it may even overlap with the winter flu season causing more cases of infection.¹ Take care!
• Ticked off “start weeknotes” that’s been on my blogging to-do list for a long time.
• Changed the canonical URL from www to non-www. I think it looks neater!
• Optimized this site to get near full marks in PageSpeed. Debug Bear’s free website speed test was indispensable.

Upcoming

• Lots of draft posts created this past week, hopefully I can get at least one out.
• Will be publishing my first Git repo project and docs site soon, all firsts for me!
• Currently trying out some 3D-printed keyboard stems/tilters mimicking a keywell arc shape. Want to test it out in a budget friendly way before looking more into boards like the Glove80 or the ZSA Voyager.

Life

• I recognized a famous Hong Kong barrister while I was waiting for the underground (MTR). Mr. Franco Kuan was one of three barrister mentors in a reality TV show (article only in Chinese) recently. He is a crime specialist, ex-senior public prosecutor, and deputy magistrate. I asked for a photo and chatted with him briefly before the train came. He was awfully nice about it and was heading to a nearby university for his class. I enjoyed the show despite not knowing much about legal issues in general. There were some medical cases in there so that was nice.
• Went to a local annual coffee festival event on Friday. It seems to get worse every year—the crowds were a deterrent (I hate crowds).
• Posted two coffee-related posts to Instagram this week. I’ve been very much absent from the platform for maybe 3–4 months, which has been great honestly. I only open the app once or twice a week for under 30 min (got the timer setting turned on, and it’s off in the work profile the rest of the time); but I miss messages with friends who are not available on other platforms, unfortunately.

Link Roundup

Here’s some content I came across this week that were interesting:

• Indivisible Announces Campaign to Cancel Spotify Streaming Services Over ICE Recruitment Ads — I’m not a fan of music streaming platforms, but now seems to be a good time and reason to leave Spotify for good.
• Signal President Meredith Whittaker calls out agentic AI as having ‘profound’ security and privacy issues — It’s from March 2025, but privacy issues are only getting more pertinent and important.
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Sideloading — Follow up post from F-Droid about Google’s Developer Program. I’m really upset about this issue.
• I just discovered this alternative “Internet protocol” called Gopher. It’s a text-based World Wide Web alternative, or should I say precursor. I checked it out with Lynx. Looks super cool and still very active. It’s on my list of things to explore one day!

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1. HK Center of Health Protection urges public to get influenza shots ↩︎

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