I spent two sunny hours exploring Marburg. Good city. Good river. Good book stores.

I miss chocolate. I haven’t eaten any since mid February, which feels like a really long time ago, and the reasons why I decided to not eat any sweets during Lent are kind of blurry, too. I thought once you stop eating as much chocolate as I do (did!), you get used to „not eating chocolate“ and you don’t care so much anymore. Well, it felt the opposite for me. In the beginning I was motivated; now I feel like I miss it more every week (day?) and, again, I don’t know why I’m doing it (anymore). I could just, you know, start eating chocolate again. But that would feel like betrayal.

Six more days until Easter Sunday.

We’re exactly in the middle of the two states „it’s cold, everything is gray and brown, the trees are bare, it’s basically still winter“ and „spring is here, flowers are blooming, the sun is shining, summer is around the corner“ here in Berlin.

Coming back from Leipzig. Best central station ever. Fairly quick to walk through. Fast elevators. Beautiful architecture. Big book store.

Always a a pleasure to be there.

Today my good friend N and I traveled to Leipzig to meet a common friend in Leipzig, M. While she waited for our train to arrive, M bought a book with sentences that can create mindset shifts, e.g. „nothing grows inside your comfort zone“ or „you can be replaced in your job, but not in your family“ or „acting is better than judging.“ M called those sentences „tools.“ I liked that idea of having a problem and explicitly turning to words to help you. I assume people have always done so (especially with religious writings).

A few hours later, M told us all about her freelancer business. It was so interesting. She explained how a tool helped her shift how she thinks about her work load: Instead of first taking on projects and then working as many hours as they required her to work (leading to overhours), she now first plans how many hours she can and wants to work, and then plans how (and if) projects can fit into that schedule.

I first assumed (or hoped?) it would be another „mind tool“ like those sentences in the book she bought (or the Eisenhower Matrix or SWOT etc.), but as M continued talking, it became clear it’s a software called awork that helps her do so.

But then I was intrigued how this (apparently fairly biased?) software had helped her to finish her days early — not by „being faster“, as so much software promises you with their stock photos of relaxed-looking people in front of a computer — but by going a bit deeper and changing how she thinks about project scheduling entirely. I wonder if there’s more software out there like this.

You don’t understand a chart? It’s likely not your fault, but the fault of the chart designer.

You don’t understand a sentence in an article? Its probably the fault of the writer.

You don’t understand what your teacher/the presenter/the speaker is talking about? Probably their fault.

I believe this is so important to me because my self-confidence was low for a very long time in my life, so I did assume often that it’s my fault. I thought I’m simply too stupid. And I know enough people who still think that, which, well, is a bit sad to watch.

My whole website runs on Jekyll, hosted on GitHub Pages. I like Jekyll because I understand it: Every single post is a Markdown file. All images live in one folder. Templates for posts use HTML, CSS, and a simple language called Liquid which I enjoy using.

Why Jekyll isn’t great for quick posting

I’ve written many articles in Markdown on long Saturday nights in front of my computer, and it has always worked well. But it’s also a bit of work:

• There’s no drag and drop to quickly add images. You have to put images in a specific folder and reference them correctly.
• Every post needs to have a front matter that specifies e.g. the thumbnail image, tags, or the categories your post is in. Adding (or copy/pasting) this front matter is tedious.
• Your posts need to have a correct file name that includes the publishing date, e.g. “2026-03-26-note.md”
• After writing posts, you need to commit and push them to GitHub — definitely more complicated than hitting “Publish” somewhere.
• All of this means that you’re dependent on your desktop computer. Writing and publishing on mobile phones is simply too tedious.

For my new Notes section, I wanted something quick. I wanted to open an app on the go, put in some thoughts or images, hit “Publish” and call it a day.

My solution for this? RSS.

RSS and the Tumblr app come to the rescue

RSS is amazing. I’ve been a RSS reader fan since Google Reader (RIP). It’s my favorite way to stay up to date on what other people post. Almost every blog comes with an RSS feed — even my old Tumblr blog. “Would it be possible,” I asked ChatGPT one evening last December, “to check this Tumblr blog RSS feed periodically, and if there’s new content, transform it into a Jekyll Markdown file and put it on my blog?” Yes, it said, and now I have the following setup:

1. To post a blog post, I open the Tumblr app and write and publish a post.
2. It gets published to an old Tumblr blog I have. It’s set to “not indexed”, so search engines shouldn’t mention it. I also told Tumblr that I don’t want my blog to appear in their search and recommendations.
3. When I publish, the whole post content (text and links to the images) immediately becomes part of an RSS feed.
4. I set up a GitHub Action with a Python script that checks this RSS feed every six hours for post IDs it doesn’t know yet.
5. If there’s an unknown (meaning, new) post ID, it transforms the text of that post to Markdown and creates a new file in my _notes folder for it. The script also downloads the images into the right image folder in my blog setup. It then writes the post ID into an extra txt file, so that it doesn’t do the whole text and image processing for this post again the next time.
6. The GitHub Action then commits all changes.

And that’s it! Every post that lands in the _posts or _notes folder in GitHub gets published automatically. Within a minute or two after the Python script doing its thing, the post is live on /notes.

Why I like this workflow

There are lots of advantages to using the Tumblr app:

• It works on phones. Initially, I did quite a lot of research into using a Markdown-based writing app and GitHub on my phone, but opening two apps for one small note feels like a perfect excuse to just not post.
• Writing new posts looks and feels smooth. Formatting, uploading images, publishing all works as nicely as you’d imagine from a blogging app with lots of money and people behind it.
• The editing experience doesn’t force me to have a title. My notes don’t have a title, so that’s neat. (The title is the date, which Jekyll gets from the file name, which the Python script writes based on the publishing date of the Tumblr post.)
• I can still add metadata to my posts, by creating rules in my Python script. For example, I add tags by adding a new line in my Tumblr post that begins with a hash, e.g. „#Data Vis #Elections“. I told my Python script to not include such a line in the content of my Markdown file, but extract the tags in that line for my front matter. I could do the same to add categories, a summary or title, a different publishing date or layout, etc.
• I don’t get sucked into doomscrolling. I’m not following other Tumblr blogs and really don’t care about the stuff I see in the feed when I open the Tumblr app.

It feels especially neat that I’m using Tumblr for the UI, but not for hosting my content (well, only for six hours max). If my Tumblr account got closed tomorrow, my content would still live on my site. I’d just move to another blogging platform and do the same trick.

The only disadvantage I can think of is that I can’t edit posts with the same workflow once they appear on my site. (It also feels a bit weird to have your posts on the web twice.)

The alternative: An Alfred workflow

For the times when I don’t want to wait for up to six hours, I also created an Alfred Workflow. It allows me to write my blog post in iA Writer and drag images in there from wherever I want (they won’t show up, but their path will). I then save the note as „note.md“ on my desktop and run the Alfred workflow „Publish blog post!“ — which moves any „note.md“ files on my desktop to my _notes folder, renames it, adds a front matter, puts the images in the right folder, and commits and pushes the post.

And that’s it! As so often, setting up that GitHub Action and Python script was mostly possible thanks to Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT. (I’m kind of proud that at least the idea came from me.)

My content now lives on my site – more than ever, that is. Over the past few weeks, I’ve created a new space on this website where I can keep a collection of almost “everything” I’ve ever published online, and one where I can write journal-like “notes.” Here’s what to expect and why I did this.

Everything: All there is from me

I love putting stuff online. Since I was 16 (that’s 20 years ago), I’ve been doing so – on now-dead forums, now-dead social networks, and surprisingly still-alive blogs. Seeing the things I created online makes them better, I find. I’ve shared photos I took from my high school at 16, work with which I applied for art school at 18, and enjoyed documenting my master’s thesis (2014) and a fellowship (2016) almost daily. And over the last 16 years, I’ve learned to love and then mourn Twitter.

For these ~1,100 posts from my past, I created an archive called “Everything.”

It includes:

• 493 tweets that I posted first as @lisacrost (2009–2021), then as @lisacmuth
• 204 photos from an old Blogger blog from when I was 16–18 years old
• 170 drawings from an old Blogger blog from when I was 17–19 years old
• 25 posts documenting an internship at Bloomberg in New York City in 2013, originally on Tumblr
• 99 posts documenting designing my Master’s Thesis in 2014 (Tumblr)
• 133 posts documenting my OpenNews fellowship in 2016 (Tumblr)
• 131 posts documenting my research for the book on colors I’m writing (>2021), originally on Notion
• 14 (so far) book reviews from Goodreads
• 12 thoughts about data vis books I read for the Data Vis Book Club, from the written discussions about those books.

I curated. Many of my 5,100+ tweets are boring (“Don’t miss our data vis meetup tomorrow!”), so I only kept the ones I want to preserve for the future. You won’t find replies or pure retweets in there, either. The same goes for my drawings and the photos I took as a teenager: I hope I hit a sweet spot between showing authentically how 17-year-old Lisa saw the world and showing stuff that’s still interesting somehow.

Notes: My little corner of the internet

On “Everything,” you’ll also find the 30 posts that I shared over the past three months in another new section of my website: “Notes.” This is where you can watch me share sometimes boring, always unpolished thoughts. I upload photos I took that day or the day before, doodles, book reviews, visual experiments, and work in progress. (Here’s a full article on how I’m using RSS to post to this Jekyll blog on my phone, if you’re interested in that.)

What I’m doing there is different from what I usually do. When I write on the Datawrapper blog and on social media, I think a lot about you: what you’ll find interesting or useful or fun. I research, structure and restructure, edit and proofread — all so that you get to read something that’s as valuable as I can create. I enjoy doing so, and it makes me really happy to know that you enjoy reading it.

“Notes,” however, is my little corner of the internet. It’s a small, cozy room of my own where I go if I don’t want to think about you for a while. Here, I write for myself. I still censor myself — this is the internet, after all, not my actual journal or best friend — but I post lots of things that wouldn’t feel right as a proper article, on the Datawrapper blog, or on social media.

That said: I won’t mind guests! Do visit my little room, or at least peek through the window from time to time. In fact, I created an RSS feed for you to do just that.

ROOTS before POSSE

Why am I doing all this? Because I got inspired by the concept of POSSE: “Publish on your own, syndicate elsewhere.” For me, ROOTS is the logical first step toward that: “Return Old Online Things to your own Site” (yes, I made this up). Why? If I do decide to delete my X account or if Blogger gets quietly discontinued, then I don’t care: it’s all on my site already. I own it. It’s all Markdown files and images that I can back up anywhere I want.

You’ll see me POSSE (or PESOS – “Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site”) in the future, too: If I post a Goodreads review, it’ll also be on my Notes and Everything pages. If I post on LinkedIn, it’ll be there, too. Everything I create and find important will eventually end up on my website.

Bonus: No more cookies for you!

If you’ve been on my website before, you might notice that something else has changed: I don’t have a cookie warning anymore. I deleted my Google Analytics tracking code. And I only show you those old Disqus comments on articles where they existed, and only if you agree to it. So: I don’t know if two people read my notes (my mom and I) or hundreds. I like that.

Head over to Everything to stroll around my posts, or have a look at the new Notes. I hope you enjoy the two new sections.

I haven’t done any of this in a long time, and it all brought me (even) more joy than I remembered it did.

Today was the second Monday since I’ve returned to work from my parental leave. I’m weirdly nervous about working, full of positive stress I’m causing myself. It feels a bit like starting this job again for the first time.

Also nervous-making: I haven’t written a blogpost for this, my, website in years…but in the past days I’ve worked on two, and I’m about to release them. Nothing in there is controversial, and still, I’m polishing every word.

I don’t believe it’s making them better.

3.5/5, I guess. I liked reading it. It felt a bit repetitive (two siblings visit four planets on a scavenger hunt and their enemy always gets first what they’re looking for), and I don’t fully agree with the „it’s worth doing things even if they seem pointless” conclusion (as I understood it).

And the idea of „marriage”, „university” etc. in a alien species felt a bit lazy to me.

But yes: The writing was nice. I liked getting thrown into the story; I liked the few (enough!) references to the mom of the siblings. I liked how much was untold and that the story worked, anyway.

I did feel indifferent about the cat.

We just returned from a short vacation to the Baltic Sea. I’m so glad I got to experience ice at and on the water; this was really special.

This book go t recommended to me by a nice person at the sci-fi and fantasy book store Otherland here in Berlin after asking for something to read as a Becky Chambers fan. They wore a t-shirt with a “The end is near” print and said that they did not like that optimistic stuff, but that they’ve heard that this book, Sea of Tranquility, was similar and much recommended.

I bought it on the spot.

It’s not a long book, and it starts with three, what feels like, short stories with almost no connection. I have trouble getting into a story, let alone three, but the writing was great, and I managed. After 40% of the book, the stories start to merge in a satisfying way.

There was some unexplained stuff in there. Why did Mirella see what she saw as a kid; was this just some massive coincidence? Why did the main character act the way he did at the end; what made him do this after so many years of training? I didn’t understand his motivation enough.

Still, good plot, good writing, good ending. 4/5.

(And funnily enough, the book talks a lot about why we like „the end is near“ stories…maybe the book store person would like it after all.)

There’s now EVERYTHING on my website! It’s a page I worked on over the past weeks; a page that combines all content on my website plus the tweets, old blogposts etc. that I have imported in December.

Originally, I wanted to combine it with the Notes page. But thanks to Jonathan’s feedback, the whole structure is clearer now: Notes show a stream of notes; the latest at the top. Everything shows the overview. And yes, if you look at it today, you’ll see mostly notes (especially before you start scrolling). But there are filters for you to enjoy, and to dig deeper into my digital past.

I don’t assume many people will do that digging. But I like it. And that’s reason enough for it to be there.

Two weeks left before I return to work after 8.5 months of first maternity leave (Mutterschutz) and then parental leave (Elternzeit). Today I visited the “new” Datawrapper office in Friedrichshain: New for me because the company moved there last summer, a few weeks after I started my leave, and I’ve only been there twice so far. Old for all my coworkers, though.

It’s beautiful. I’m much looking forward to actually sit down there with my laptop and work.

I also visited the “Pablo Neruda” library, a great library here in Berlin. I’ve been there once before, for a manga event on a weekend (not a big fan of manga but I got invited by friends and came along), and got pleasantly surprised today that’s it’s basically around the corner from the Datawrapper office. Because I’ll be nearby often anyway, I spontaneously decided to make it my second go-to library and took some English non fiction books and BrandEins business magazines with me.

I know I’ll only skim the books, but I’ll read the magazines. Every time I’m trying to read non fiction book these days (well, weeks), I give up after a while. I don’t get into them as much as I get into fictional books. But I love to read shorter magazine articles, even these weeks. And BrandEins just has the best. I’ll tell you another time, why.

I started drinking green tea. I have five different kinds at home, three of them open, and haven’t touched them at least as long as I haven’t been to Kreuzberg. (So, you know, ages.) They’re delightful. My favorite is the Oolong. Second place scores a Kukicha Karigane, which I was absolutely mind blown from when I tried it at a tea saloon at the Chaos Communication Congress in December 2014 or 2015. It tasted so nice, so sweet, so light, I loved it. I ordered the exact same tea from France…and that’s the one I still have, and enjoyed so many times. The use-by date is long (long!) past, but the taste is still there. Third place is a cheap Genmaicha, which always tastes nicely like popcorn, and what else do you want.

I’m very close to opening the two still sealed packages of green tea. They’re waiting for me. But I’m afraid that my green tea phase will end so soon that opening them will be a mistake. It also feels greedy: Can’t I enjoy my three nice kids of tea that I have? Why do I need more? Then again, yolo, and maybe opening those green teas will be the reason this tea phase won’t just be a phase.

There are two great things about drinking green tea that I haven’t considered before (besides the amazing taste, that is, and the health benefits).

The first is the water temperature. I’m one of those people who pour cold water into their fresh tea because it’s too dann hot and I’m too impatient. I made myself a beverage? I want to drink it NOW, and I don’t want to burn my tongue while doing so. Green tea understands: It’s often happy with 70 degree warm water anyway, which, I learned in the past days, is a tea temperature that’s immediately possible to enjoy.

The second, more obvious advantage is that green tea just keeps on giving. You pour hot water on it once, drink it, pour hot water again, then again…you can make yourself not just one tea, but three or four. And it’s always a mini ritual. It’s very, very nice.

Even if this green tea phase will be over in a few weeks, I’ll make sure that I won’t let so many more ages pass again before I start another one.

My first Martin Suter book. It came highly recommend.

But hm. 3.5 stars, maybe? Which is little considering that I really wanted to know how it the book ends; it became a page turner (unfortunately only) half way in. The story was solid.

The writing was curious, though. I couldn’t care less aber the main character, Tom; I don’t feel like I properly got to know him on any of the many pages where his actions are described. It’s almost an achievement to write so much about a person without making them interesting or likeable.

Two things I really liked about the book, though. First, the insights into (old) rich men’s lifestyle. It felt authentic, and was new information to me.

Second, that the story came as a Diogenes hardcover book. I like that publisher so much. The quality of the object was great. It even came with a ribbon page marker. It makes me want to read more Diogenes books.

We visited a museum for architectural drawing here in Prenzlauer Berg today — apparently, that’s a thing. It makes me so happy that museums like this exist, for things that are niche enough to make people like me wonder „Huh, I didn’t know that’s a thing.“

The exhibition about the Austrian architect Otto Wagner was small and nice. I found it absolutely wild how much care he and his team poured into these drawings. There were often perfect. Like digital-perfect. But instead of filling the full sky with one click, they had to cover up everything else and apply some color evenly. This alone took properly a day. And somebody — well, the whole company — to say: It’s worth it. Let’s do it. It’ll look better.

I’m glad that such people and institutions exist. That go the extra mile. That don’t do the thing that makes the most sense economically, but makes the most sense aesthetically, or ideologically, or emotionally. Thanks to every one out there who acts this way.

As of today, my site doesn’t have a cookie warning anymore. I still had that annoying banner (cookie banners are always annoying – charming, sometimes, but still annoying) on my site for two reasons: Google Analytics and Disqus comments.

Now I turned off Google Analytics tracking – and for the, what, 20 posts where people left their comments, I offer people to see them in exchange for a cookie.

Yay, no cookies! I want to cut sugar this year anyway.