Michael Eliachevitch's Blog

emacs elfeed: Browse specifically tagged feeds in eww automatically

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Since I got into web feeds recently, I am continuously tweeking on my feed reading experience. I like the elfeed feed aggregator package for the Emacs editor/lisp-machine and provides a wonderfully hackable experience.

Recently, Tassilo Horn (@tsdh) mentioned me in his blog post “Make your RSS enjoyable in feed readers such as elfeed”, where he explains how to configure elfeed to open feeds in EWW (the Emacs Web Browser) with a prefix-arg (C-u) to the elfeed-search-browse-url and elfeed-show-visit commands. This is useful when a feed entry only shows a preview, instead of a full blog post or news article.

After reading that and adapting my own configuration, I asked myself: Since I know which feed URLs only show previews, why not save some button presses and automatically open certain feeds in EWW? For configuring which feeds to open in EWW, I decided to leverage the built-in tag-system (I mostly set tags via elfeed-org) to decide which feeds to open in EWW instead of storing those feeds in a separate list. In my case, I decided to use the browse tag. Here is the code that I came up with:

(defun meliache/elfeed-show-eww-if-tag (entry tag)
 "Browse elfeed ENTRY in eww if it is tagged with TAG."
 (when (member tag (elfeed-entry-tags entry))
 (let ((browse-url-browser-function #'eww-browse-url))
 (elfeed-show-visit))))

(defun meliache/elfeed-show-eww-if-tag-is-browse (entry)
 "Browse elfeed ENTRY in eww if it has the tag `browse'."
 (meliache/elfeed-show-eww-if-tag entry 'browse))

(advice-add #'elfeed-show-entry :after #'meliache/elfeed-show-eww-if-tag-is-browse)

I temporarily overwrite browse-url-browser-function with EWW as the main browser for elfeed-show-visit to open the URL in EWW independent of any other¹ browser configuration.

I considered writing meliache/elfeed-show-eww-if-tag more generically to accept an arbitrary number of tags (via a &rest tags parameter), but better keep the complexity here low and anyway, elfeed has good functionalities for automatically tagging entries.

In the end, I implemented my function as an advice after the elfeed-show-entry function, even though I prefer using emacs hooks if possible. There is a elfeed-show-mode-hook, but it called before the buffer-local variable elfeed-show-entry is set, thus I don’t have access to the feed entry properties. As an after advice, the elfeed-show-entry function is still called and thus the eww buffer is displayed nicely in the side window that I get from elfeed-goodies:

The downside is that if I quit the buffer eww buffer with q, I still have to quit the elfeed-show buffer as well with another q press, which can be a mild annoyance. Probably guess it should be possible to completely replace elfeed-show-entry with my own function that prepares the buffer same as the former and then calls EWW.

So far, I only added the browse tag to the APOD feed (Astronomy Picture of the Day), which only shows a miniscule thumbnail of the daily picture which is barely recognizable without opening the website. And as can be seen above, EWW offers a nice viewing experience for that purpose. However, for many news feeds, I want to read the summary before deciding whether reading the whole article is worth it. In addition to that, the EWW experience is often suboptimal, I often have to scroll through several pages of header links until I get to the actual post. I think I will mostly add the browse tag to those horrible feeds where the feed contents are empty or offer no additional information over the feed headline (e.g. the Nature briefing feed).

: After implementing tsdh’s suggestions to have EWW be the secondary browser and open links in that when a prefix-argument is used, my first implementation just called elfeed-show-visit with a prefix argument programmatically, but this might not work for others. ↩︎

Short update: I'm back and doing well 🙂

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Since my first post about my PhD struggles I haven’t posted anything for five months. I got much more productive shortly afterwards. Back then I started being open with my struggles, which included writing about them, but also talking about them with colleagues. Being open about that is definetly important. It had helped and I subsequently did a lot of progress, which was good because conference deadlines were coming up. I was actually quite happy about that, because my supervisors started meeting with me very regularly and I enjoyed this, almost as if that were socializing. I’m definetly like feeling part of a team.

In the end not everything turned out as I had hoped, part of which was not under my control, but nonetheless I’m happy with the experiences and progress that I did.

However, in that time I didn’t have much time to update this blog. For me writing is like therapy, it relaxes me, provides reflexion and perspective and I feel like writing gives me some control back over my life. Thus, when things are going well, when my life has structure and a good routine, I don’t really need that additional control anymore (though I still think it helps). And as a result, almost forgot about this blog.

In case you were wondering during that time if I’m still alive, kept active on twitter and via a crossposter on mastodon.

Today I got motivation to take it up again, because I got an email comment ¹ from someone telling me that they’d love to read more. This made my day 🤩. I can barely believe that someone found this and went through the trouble of messaging me, despite it not being much advertised anywhere. One of my greatest desires whenever I do something is create something of value ². And even if only a single person sees value in something, that’s a lot of motivation to keep going.

The timing is currently good because the post-conference summer is more relaxed now. At the same time, I sometimes have difficulties when there is little external pressure giving me structure, so I’ll try to work on my own systems and habits, on of which might be writing.

So far I had been writing mostly when I was not feeling well, which might give this blog a selection bias and readers might think that I’m a pessimistic, fearful procrastinator, while most of the time I’m quite the contrary, only occasionally I have such moods.

I still have to find a niche what to write here. Should I mostly write personal things? Tell more about my hobbies? Post pictures? Those things might also overlap heavily with my twitter. Or should I strictly write professional programming posts so that I can link this blog to my linkedin? I’m not sure, I guess I’ll just write and see what will become of this.

Cheers, Michael

: If you’d also like to submit an email comment, see the instructions here. ↩︎
: I found that the desire to create value quickly can also result in procrastination. For my research, as typical in academia, I often have to put in weeks of frustrating work until I can show a useful result and am lucky enough that the data makes sense. I found that I enjoy procrastinating by writing software tools to make an analysts life more comfortable, because often I can create something useful in a couple of days and don’t have to worry about issues with the data. It’s not just useless “immediate gratification” vs. something useful long-term, there are often useful projects with faster (but not immediate) gratification vs. long-term with weeks until you see progress. But sometimes the latter are those that really matter. This is why most anti-procrastination guides tell you to split your work into small managable chunks, do pomodoros intervalls etc. ↩︎

First post and introduction to this blog

Sun, 14 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hello and welcome to my new blog. I’m still not sure what exactly I will post here, but I want to try and keep up a regular writing habit. With writing I believe it’s like with many other creative work that quantity must come first and only if you start writing much and often, you’ll get more experienced and learn to write better. It’s a fight against my urge for perfectionism.

I already used the coronavirus pandemic for working on my daily journal again and also started a note-keeping / zettelkasten workflow with org-roam. The step towards a public blog doesn’t seem large to me. I don’t want to publish my private journal and notes, so I’ll keep this blog separate and orthogonal to those, meant for things that I think some reader might find value in. Also, I must be careful for this not to be too much of a time-sink for my procrastination.

I already had the idea for a blog a couple of years ago after my master thesis. Back then I spent some time figuring out the technical stuff of how to write a and deploy a static website with ox-hugo and also wrote the About page (I seriously should update and shorten it down soon). However, at that point I stopped and didn’t continue on this, as often happens, but now I decided to pick it up again.

At the moment I mostly use twitter for occasionally sharing thoughts, but I don’t really like the idea of a centralized internet centered around huge companies which are interested in my data (btw, I’m aware of decentralized microblogging services like mastodon). Blogs are nice in that regard because you can just subscribe to the via their RSS feed (check out the feed for this blog) and receive their updates via your feed reader no matter what website they are hosted on. I stress this because I must admit that I only recently started subscribing to RSS-feeds and feel like I have been missing much until now. Also, as I use a static site generator, it means that all source files for this blog are under my control and if something happens to sourcehut, where this is hosted now, I’ll be able to switch to any other hosting service.

Because the deployment set-up was some work, I might write a separate blog post about it soon. But I hope I’ll also find chances to write some non-technical things here, so don’t feel discouraged if you followed because you know me personally but all the tech-talk so far was intimidating.

Trying minimalist shoes 👟👣

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The joy of barefoot walking

I always enjoyed the freedom of walking barefooted, though mostly just at home. One major contributing factor was probably that I practiced Judo regularly since I was 11 (only on break since recently due to me moving, finishing my PhD and the COVID19 pandemic) and like many partial arts, it’s a barefoot sport. The warm-up runs, games, gymnastics, strength and of course the Judo exercises and fights are all performed barefooted.

I just love the feeling of standing with my bare feet on the mats, just remembering this feeling sparks joy in me. For much of my life this feeling meant that I can forget all of the daily troubles and go full out and have the best fun during training (even if sometimes, fun means suffering during exercise, but that is still fun for me).

Others might better relate to memories of summer days at the beach or playing in the grass as children. It’s interesting how many memories I can contact with just some feeling under my feet. Of course the intensity of those memories has to do with all the experiences that we associate with those feelings (same reason why I have strong associations with certain smells). But another reason might be the high amount of sensory receptors on our foot soles. However, most of the time when we wear shoes they are deprived of much stimulation. The visual equivalent would be sitting in a room with white walls all day.

Especially during the very hot summers, I sometimes also walk barefoot outside. But this has the downside of having to wash your feet later and once I had a bad experience with stepping on a shard of glass in the basin of a water fountain. Also, there’s societal expectations/norms and people laughing about you, but I usually try not to care much. Still, I can understand why most people don’t walk barefooted.

I don’t think the invention of shoes was a idea. They were invented for a good reason; because people needed them to get work done, to prevent injuries, to march long distances… I’m one of the privileged few with a safe office job in a high-income country. I don’t have to do menial tasks my surroundings are mostly clean and safe (except the occasional glass shard). People whose daily life itself is a fight for survival don’t often seek for adventure in their free time and similarly, I assume they don’t wonder as much about sensory deprivation of their feet.

“Diogenes did not need a study or a warm habitation; it’s hot there without. You can lie in your tub and eat oranges and olives. But bring him to Russia to live: he’d be begging to be let indoors in May, let alone December. He’d be doubled up with the cold.”

— Gromov in the short story Ward No. 6 by Anton Chekhov about the ancient Diogenes who was happy with living in a tub.

What potential advantages I see for myself

There’s also some believe that frequent barefooted walking might be have health advantages and might help to prevent foot problems. Several years ago I had pain in the right foot from running. An orthopedist diagnosed me with a mild form of flat feet and prescribed insoles. They definitely helped with the immediate symptoms. However, I didn’t want to depend on them and also tried foot exercises (you can find many online, e.g. on youtube). After over a year I could switch back to shoes and running with no insoles at all without having pain. I don’t know if that’s because of the foot exercises, the insoles of just time, but since then I try to take care for my feet and exercise them as much as possible.

Recently, I was in the local running store for buying new running shoes, because my old ones wore out after a lot of regular running during the pandemic (luckily, the foot pain that I had several year ago never came back). The employer took my footprint and strangely enough didn’t confirm flat feet 🤷. Also they recommended me to do a lot of barefoot walking to improve my running form and stability¹. By that they didn’t mean that I should go around my entire life without shoes (it’s a store which sells cushioned running shoes), but I should try to do it at home and in my free time as much as possible.

Later I did some online searches and found some articles that barefoot walking might improve foot strength and running form when combined with foot gymnastics. But I didn’t see any scientific consensus that it might improve flat feet in adults (there were varying opinions), though I didn’t dig into the scientific literature. However, there seems to be more consensus that barefoot walking is important in children to prevent conditions like flat feed. And there are frequent warnings that changing to barefoot walking to fast and doing much of it might actually cause injuries, so be careful and listen to your body.

Discovering minimalist shoes

When hearing in the running store that I should walk more barefoot, I remembered that many of my climber/student friends wear shoes they refer to as barefoot or minimalist shoes (it seems that they are popular recently among this group of people). These are light shoes with thin and very flexible soles and large space in the front for the toes. They protect the feet, but still offer much freedom of movement and make the muscle in the foot work when walking. The lack of cushioning promotes not walking the heels and instead stepping on the mid- or forefoot. You can feel the ground under you much better than in normal shoes, but I still would not claim that it “feels like walking barefoot” because you can’t feel the texture of the ground well and are missing much of sensory input of real barefoot walking. This is why I prefer referring to them as minimalist shoes. It seems that they are quite a hyped currently and not surprisingly, they are quite expensive, which prevented me from buying them when I first heard about them years ago. But now I have some income and a new incentives, so I went to the local store and bought a pair of “Groundies” and do the experiment for myself.

My experience so far

Walking in the minimalist shoes so far seemed surprisingly normal. When I first tried them, I could immediately start walking and it felt quite natural and not strange at all. I guess this is expected in retrospect since we all have walked barefoot in our lives. Walking in socks also doesn’t feel strange, and minimalist shoes are like socks with laces and a rubber sole.

I also find them quite comfortable when working in the office. I just like the lightness and the freedom of movement that my feet and toes have. On hot days it’s really nice how well my feet breath in the shoes, in contrast to other sneakers I don’t miss my sandals or slippers.

However, I found that I don’t enjoy walking on hard surfaces for a long time, like concrete, asphalt or cobblestone. There, I really have to be careful not to step to hard on my heels. On the other hand, walking of soft surfaces like grass or soft earth in those shoes feels very comfortable (though not as much fun as actually being barefooted). But even on hard surfaces walking is okay if I just walk more slowly and pay more attention to how I place my feet. I think this will get easier and more automatic the more used I get to this type of walking, but now, it still gets tiring after a while. So I don’t recommend walking in them for long distances, especially if you are still getting used to minimalist shoes. From what I saw on the internet, changing the shoes to fast can also cause injuries. If you feel pain, just stop.

But one of the other great advantages that I didn’t consider much when buying them, is that due to their light weight and flexibility, you can always take your minimalist shoes with you and they won’t take up much space. Since it’s still warm, I always wear either my minimalist shoes or my Teva trekking sandals and have the other pair of footwear in my backpack. Whenever I feel like my feet need cushioning and arch support, I change to the sandals. Thus, I can increase the volume of the distances that I walk in the minimalist shoes incrementally and get gradually used to them.

So far it has been not a life-changing experience, but it was fun so far. But I still need to wear them for longer and get really used to them before I can give my final personal verdict and decide if that’s really for me. Next weekend I will have a short 6 km hike and I’m excited how it will be to wear the minimalist shoes there. However, since my feet might still get tired, I will bring my trekking sandals as well.

(Maybe I’ll add some pictures later in an update of this post)

: Running store employees, youtubers etc. are not medical professionals and therefore I’d be sceptical. In case of medical issues, I would always visit and listen to your doctor first and foremost. This is the best that you can do for your health. ↩︎

Blogging workflow with org-mode via ox-hugo and publishing on sourcehut

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a technical post on my experience so far for blogging with ox-hugo and publishing it on sourcehut pages. Both have very good getting-started guides (just click the links), so here I’ll focus on my experience and the technical specifics of using both in combination. You can check out the source at sr.ht/~meliache/blog.

ox-hugo

I use the org-mode of the emacs as my daily engine for note-taking (via org-roam), journaling and for planning my agenda. Therefore, it appealed to my to write a blog in it to reduce context-switching and facilitate making blog entries from existing notes.

I found ox-hugo to be a nice solution to my needs. It is an emacs package that exports an org-mode file to multiple markdown files that are then used by the hugo static site generator to generator the website. This is not the simplest approach, there are emacs packages to generating static sites directly without the need for intermediate software (see org-blog-wiki), alternatively I could have used hugo directly which also has rudimentary markdown support. But this seems to works for me, it’s nice being able to leverage the full power of org-mode and also profit from the large hugo ecosystem and user-base (see why ox-hugo). And I don’t have to fear lock-in, since I have control over the org- and markdown-files on my computer and might switch over to any other system if I ever decide to. This is what I love about having a static site.

Figure 1: Writing this blog post in org-mode

Publishing to sourcehut

I recently discovered sourcehut as a git-forge and thus lightweight and privacy-respecting alternative to github, gitlab and the likes. Since recently it also allows hosting static websites via sourcehut pages, so I decided to give it a try. What I liked from the start is that after getting an access token it allows deploying your website via curl with a simple command (see srht.site/quickstart), no other configuration needed. This helped getting started quickly without any further configuration needed and seeing my blog online was a definite motivation boost. All I needed was a simple shell command for building the hugo website (export to hugo happened from emacs) and deploying it, which I saved in a deploy.sh shell script:

hugo &&\
 tar -C public -cvz . > site.tar.gz && \
 curl --oauth2-bearer "$( pass access-tokens/sr.ht/blog )" \
 -Fcontent=@site.tar.gz https://pages.sr.ht/publish/meliache.de
# cleanup
rm -v site.tar.gz

As you see, I insert access token via the pass password manager, so I don’t have to reveal it in the repository. I could extend on this script to fully automate the deployment, e.g. with git commit hooks etc. But I decided to try to automate the deployment with via a sourcehut build manifest. Since my set-up is a bit obscure, having a build-manifest ensures a level of reproducibility, e.g. ensuring that others will be able to fork the blog repository and build it without having to set up emacs and running interactive commands from within it and also without having to commit the generated markdown files. In addition, I just wanted to gain experience with build-systems.

What I was missing was an emacs lisp script that installs ox-hugo on the virtual machine of the build-system and then runs it to export the blog. After reading some blog/stackoverflow posts emacs scripting, I ended up with ox-hugo-export-blog-script.el, which can be run on a fresh system with

(require 'package)

;; List the packages you want
(setq package-list '(ox-hugo))

(add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/") t)
;; Activate all the packages (in particular autoloads)
(package-initialize)
;; Update your local package index
(unless package-archive-contents
 (package-refresh-contents))

;; Install all missing packages
(dolist (package package-list)
 (unless (package-installed-p package)
 (package-install package)))

;; disable backup file generation, don't need this in script mode
(setq auto-save-default nil)
(setq make-backup-files nil)
;; allow all local variables, since interactive prompts are problematic in script mode
(setq enable-local-variables :all)

;; open blog and export it to markdown iwth ox-hugo
(find-file-existing "../content-org/blog.org")
(org-hugo-export-wim-to-md 'all-subtrees)

This allowed me to build the website with the following .build.yaml:

image: alpine/latest
oauth: pages.sr.ht/PAGES:RW
packages:
 - emacs
 - hugo
tasks:
 - ox-hugo-md-export: |
 cd ~/blog/build
 emacs --quick --script ox-hugo-export-blog-script.el
 - hugo-generate-site: |
 cd ~/blog
 hugo
 - package: |
 cd ~/blog
 tar -C public -cvz . > site.tar.gz
 - upload: |
 cd ~/blog
 acurl -f https://pages.sr.ht/publish/meliache.de -Fcontent=@site.tar.gz

This builds take about 37 seconds which is quite a bit longer compared to a simple hugo build due to the required installation of emacs and ox-hugo, but still acceptable. In my experience so far the build system sometimes still has upstream problems and might be a while in pending, so I still keep my curl-deploy script in case I’m impatient with deploying

Update: Alternative approach by System Crafters

Shortly after I posted this, the System Crafters posted his own livestream on publishing an org blog on sourcehut, but he uses ox-publish, so make sure to check that out:

System Crafters Live! - Static Websites with Emacs, Org Mode, and Sourcehut • Episode planning • Q&A

Noticing the life around us

Sun, 21 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

During the COVID-19 pandemic my perception of the world changed. Because of home-office, I spent more time alone at home. During my childhood, our cats at my parents home gave me a lot of comfort when being lonely. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pets at my current home, thus I turned my attention towards what other life exists in front of my balcony and windows and in my home. I get pleasure in watching that life and I think it makes me more relaxed. I also started feeling more in touch with the world around me and I think for me that’s part of mindfulness: Not being blind of the world we live in, not being scared or resistant of it, but noticing the ecosystem that we live in and being aware of it.

Birds 🐦

I started paying more attention to birds and got very interested in birding. I really love Corvids and here in Bonn I noticed that there are many magpies which are really fun to observe and super cute. Further, (since I moved here only recently) I was surprised to discover that we have a feral population of rose-ringed parakeet 🦜. I put some nuts on my balcony which the local magpies really seem to enjoy, but they are very shy and only come down to feed when they think that I don’t see them. Therefore, this summer I used the Raspberry Pi that I had lying around to build a birdcam with the instructions and software from mynaturewatch.

Figure 1: Magpie snatching a walnut.

Figure 2: Eurasian jay

Figure 3: Our ninja-squirrel being sneaky

Later I also finally invested my money in a binocular which I like to use for both watching stars and birds.

Most recently I read the most excellent, fun, cut and informative book A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching by Rosemary Mosco and even found out how fascinating some of the most common birds in our cities are 🕊, that I admittedly was originally apathetic towards.

Plants 🪴

During the pandemic, for the first time in my life I decided to buy some edible plants and try to grow some of my own veggies on my window. I bought some tomatoes 🍅 because they are supposed to be beginner-friendly and some Habanero chilli peppers because I really like eating spicy 🌶. It was really fascinated how such a large huge plant can grow from the tiniest seeds. However, I discovered that the plants don’t get much direct light on my west-facing window (with more shadow from the balcony roof) and I assume this (in addition to possible over-fertilizing) is why my cherry tomatoes grew very tall (up to the roof), but had only a very moderate yield. The chillies I probably planted to late in the year and they didn’t have enough time to grow tall enough before fall. However, while the tomato died by now, the Habanero plant looks really healthy and I hope that it will yield fruit next year. Another thing that surprised me is just how much water the tomatoes need compared to e.g. the chilli plant. I now really get why they are among the most climate-unfriendly veggies (or fruit, botanically speaking) that you can buy due to the high water amount they need, so I’ll try to restrict how many tomatoes I buy.

Figure 4: Young tomatoes plants a couple of weaks after sprouting

Micro-organisms (Fermentation)

In addition to cooking, I got into fermentation during the pandemic. It started out with making my own Kimchi, followed by Sauerkraut and most recently Kombucha. Among those, Kimchi has the advantage that despite the initial effort, it requires the least waiting time and is already good after a couple of days (you can even directly eat fresh Kimchi after making it and it’s good). Home-made Sauerkraut was something that I know from my Russian grandma who makes it every year and after making Kimchi it was surprisingly simple to make, though requires more patience. Kombucha I started only recently after I got hold of some started liquid (which contains the scoby, a symbiosis of yeast fungi and acid bacteria) and a pellicle (the characteristic biofilm created by the scoby). I had tried Kombucha once once when visiting the US and really missed that I couldn’t easily buy it in Germany. The “Kombucha” in DM just tastes like fruit-tea. So making it myself seems like the only option here in Germany. Making fermented food is in my opinion easier than growing plants for food, yields results more quickly, is not comparable to what you can buy in the supermarked, but still, you have something that is alive (though I admit plants make the better home decoration).

I doubt that these fermented foods are more healthy than simply eating fresh veggies. The scientific literature doesn’t seem to show strong evidence yet (though more research is needed). However, for our ancestors that was one of the few ways to preserve veggies. And in addition, they just taste so good 😋. That got me thinking how so many foods have their characteristic, complex taste due to fermentation with yeast or bacteria, e.g. cheese, wine, beer, bread…. But these micro-organisms are doing there work in the invisible. But thinking about it, they are everywhere around us.

Therefore, I really enjoyed the recent Synapsen Podcast Sie sind unter uns (German) about the bacteria and other micro-organisms all around. In this podcast the scientist Rob Dunn was interviewed, who wrote the book Never home alone about the biome in our homes. I just bought it yesterday and am really looking forward to read it. From the prologue:

This book is the story of both the life that is likely living beside us in our homes and the ways in which that life is changing. The life in our homes speaks to our secrets, our choices, and our future. It influences our health and well-being. It is full of mysteries and shimmers with grandeur and consequence. We do not know the stories of most of the species in our homes, but we know some of them, and what we do know will surprise you. When it comes to the species mating, eating, and thriving alongside us, nothing is quite what it seems.

Figure 5: Kimchi making

Figure 6: Pickling cucumbers

Figure 7: Fresh Sauerkraut salad

Other activities

Like many people, during COVID I started taking more walks and running more and this is a great opportunity to get a closer connection to your surroundings, the nature, wildlife and not-so-wild life like cats and dogs (whom I still really love), so I can only recommend it. Go outside and keep your eyes open!

Improved RSS feed

Thu, 05 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I just improved this blog’s RSS feed:

The feed now show the full content of each blog post. Previously, the RSS feed just showed the first paragraph of each blog post, which is the default in HUGO, but I didn’t notice at first. I’m really annoyed that this is the default, as it seems an anti-pattern to me. Everybody should be able to read the entire blog from RSS if they wish so. Of course I wouldn’t want that if I were interested in monetizing my blog or gathering user data. I fixed that easily by changing {{ .Summary | html }} to {{ .Content | html }} in my rss.xml, as I learned in: Who Goes Blogging 6: Three Steps to Improve Hugo’s RSS Feeds by Joseph D. Heyburn.
The feed on the home page now only shows blog posts and doesn’t have entries for other sections like About or for static pages hosted on this blog. I learned how to filter the RSS feed on Tips for Customizing Hugo RSS Feeds by Ben Congdon.

In the future I might consider adding an Atom feed. From what I read it is a more sensible standard, and most feed readers support both anyway, but configuring it requires some extra steps in Hugo, e.g. using the hugo-atom-feed theme component and duplicating the configuration which pages to show in the feed etc. and even if I find a way to unify this configuration, it’s just more work and I’m not sure yet if that’s worth it.

New domain for my blog: meliache.de — Update your feeds!

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I finally set out and bought a custom domain for my blog. Therefore, the URL changed from meliache.srht.site to meliache.de. I still have ownership of the old sourcehut domain, so I put there HTML page with a link and a simple JavaScript snippet forwarding visitors to the new domain.

But, I realized that if somebody followed this blog via the RSS feed, that feed might be broken, so they (you) might need to re-subscribe the new RSS feed address. But I just fixed that by copying the hugo-generated RSS-feed including this post to the old address meliache.srht.site/index.xml, but I won’t keep the feed at the old URL in sync indefinitely.

At least in the future I hope domain changes will be less frequent. One of the major reasons why I bought the new domain is that in addition to looking more professional I’ll be able to change between hosts for my blog (github pages, sourcehut, …) without needing a change of domain.