Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on migrating the website of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) from being run based on a self-hosted Wordpress blog to Hugo . I thought it would be nice to share a bit of background on the requirements and the how & why the migration was done.
Just a small public service announcement: If you’re using the Gemini protocol, my webste (well, in particular the blog posts), are now also accessible via Gemini at gemini://tilde.club/~gedankenstuecke/. You can also find a web-proxied version here. If you have no clue what this means: Gemini is a small, alternative internet communications protocol browsing remote documents, similar Gopher.
In mid-2024, I’ve moved back to using vim as my main text editor, both for code and prose like this blog post. Something like 15 years ago I had dabbled a bit with vim, but never much more than being able to perform simple edits and get the hang of the hjkl navigation. Good enough to quickly make minor edits from any shell, but not a whole lot more.
tl;dr: Blog posts here can now have a little button at the bottom that can pull in “comments” that are made by replying to a post on the Fediverse (i.e. Mastodon et al.). Some days ago, I saw the nifty little “comment” integration that FOSS Academic Robert W. Gehl has on his blog, which in turn were inspired by some other integrations.
Science that’s not just made by and for white men is under more-than-usual attack these days, thanks to the new administration in the USA under the leadership of Trump/Musk, which made a directive to remove all mentions and funding for initiatives relating to diversity, equity & inclusion (DEI) on January 22, 2025.
March in Rosario, Argentina on February 1st, 2025
tl;dr: Here’s a how-to for adding some “AI”-poison to your static site that’s hosted on Codeberg Pages (or GitHub Pages ). I’d appreciate some feedback on if this is useful/how it could be improved. If you’re running any type of website in 2025, you’ll likely be suffering from the impact of generative “AI”. Be that “AI”-generated spam posted to your site, crawlers bringing your server(s) down or just having
A small map-extract of Venado Tuerto over four time points in 2024, showing the addition of buildings and POI. tl;dr: One can now create >2 frames in the OSM comparison GIF. And the MyBinder version can download OSM history files , no local up/downloads needed.
If you pick dates close to each other, they also make for a great “find the differences”-puzzle. tl;dr: One can now create before/after maps of OpenStreetMap with osm-mapping-party-before-after right in the browser, thanks to MyBinder. Just click here to launch it. For a good 6 months now, I’ve been contributing to OpenStreetMap virtually every day.
Ever since a certain someone bought Twitter, I’ve been quite invested into using the Fediverse as my main social web efforts. My Mastodon timeline does a good job for short-form text updates. And Pixelfed is a great nascent Instagram-replacement. One thing I particularly enjoy about both of them is the fact that they bring back the simple, chronological timeline.
tl;dr: I handed in my resignation back in early July and will be leaving my job - and the UK - at the end of October to go on a sabbatical. This could have been a long and rambling post about all the problems with academia and/or the tech industry, but at the end of the day Lucidity’s Quitting My Job For The Way Of Pain already made most of the aspects in a more fun way than I could hope to deliver them, so I’ll try to