Botanischer Volkspark Pankow Blankenfelde. A park that’s nicely relaxed, nicely uninteresting, very beautiful. It feels odd that so many people seem to like it, too (they were all there), but I guess it would also be odd if we were the only people who would.

Today I went shopping close to Hackescher Markt, which, despite not being the weekend, was full with people. It was sunny and hot and there were people and bikes and cars and trams (and yes, boats) everywhere.

I started reading „Rheinsberg“ from Kurt Tucholsky, and one of the first pages, he makes the claim that the hustle and noise of the city drains one’s energy, even if you don’t notice it anymore at some point.

Is that true? I’m not sure it’s true. I’m not sure it’s true because when I’m in the calm countryside, do I really feel like I have more energy? Also: Energy for what? For taking care of my kids? For doing the dishes? For social interactions? Am I able to concentrate for longer in complex conversations after a day spent in a cabin in the woods? Actually: Maybe. Maybe that’s true.

The city gives you cultural, visual input that the countryside can’t, though, and I do feel motivated and energetic when inspiration hits.

Maybe the perfect life would be spent in a calm, boring village; with (bi)weekly visits to the inspirational city.

My first (short, German) talk in years (!) is happening tomorrow at Information Commons in Berlin. I’ll speak about what got me excited about data vis and what we do at Datawrapper.

If you have to prepare a talk in the future, I can highly recommend to read through Jonathan Corum’s “How to give a talk.” Like everything he does, it’s really good → style.org/talk/

And if you want to see more slides/talks I prepared, you can find them here → lisacharlottemuth.com/talks

But hey, I got there. I even got back home.

Will repeat. I biked everywhere until four years ago and I loved it. The Karl-Marx-Allee and I will become big friends.

I love the combination of sunlight and dark, rainy clouds.

Today I was in the woods and I really felt like …staying there. I was near the end of my walk, a walk with a perfectly reasonable length, and I thought „I don’t feel like I’m done yet. I don’t want to go home. I feel like doing the rounds again.“

So I kept walking.

I like these situations where your feelings and needs in the moment overpower your plans. Especially when you notice that it has no unfortunate consequences whatsoever when you just do what you feel like doing instead of following those plans. „Ice cream? Right now? Really, now, at 10pm? We actually wanted to go to x, but well…I mean, why no? Ice cream it is.“

These situations remind me that life is more flexible than it often seems. And the bring back control over one’s own happiness.

Today, I rebuilt it in Datawrapper with updated data.

That was fun. I should rebuild more charts.

I just discovered Ferdio’s “Notebook on Infographics”: Very useful, filterable lessons, and so (so!) beautifully animated.

And because you can also hire Ferdio for animation and presentations, they also offer → The notebook on animation → The notebook on presentations

Until now, I only knew Ferdio because of their excellent Data Viz Project. It’s great to see that they’re investing so much time and love into projects that help the community.

Cloudy day. Free Friday. Grocery shopping and laundry and instant ramen and sugar and caffeine and trying to get rid of a persistent cold. Walking through a park and trying to really look, really enjoy its loveliness. It’s hard.

Two weeks ago, Tuna Acisu, researcher at Our World in Data, was looking for a scientist who, after the death of the researcher who has done so before, would continue to track the peak blossom of a specific cherry tree species — Yamazakura (Prunus jamasakura) — in a specific place: Arashiyama, Kyoto.

All so that Our World in Data could keep updating their chart that shows the day of the year with the peak cherry tree blossom. (I love Our World in Data.)

They found somebody (yay!). Than The Guardian and The New York Times both reported on it. And they both showed the chart, after redesigning it slightly.

The Guardian changed the text a bit, but kept it mostly as is.

The New York Times showed the dates instead of the number of days since January – which is smart, because we think in dates, not “days since the start of the year.” And: they flipped it. April 1st is on the top, May 1st is on the bottom. The year is “going down”, and cherry blossom peaks are “going up”, similar to the temperature in climate charts.

Which made me wonder: Do we have a shared understanding of where “earlier” and “later” is on a y-axis? Or is this something we can decide depending on the impression we want to leave and the statement we want to make?

One of the best things about Berlin are the many, many lakes it’s surrounded by. Today we visited one of them; one of my favourite ones. It was a beautiful spring day with bright green leaves, lots of sun, and 11.5 degree cold water that my husband dared to swim in.

Why we don’t visit those lakes more often is a mystery.

We totally should. We hopefully will.

Also did some stamp action with my son. Fun.

The Atlas of Global Development 2026 dropped last week, and like always, it’s a visual feast.

Astonishing data (showing that global development is moving more slowly than it has in 75 years), turned into smart visualizations by Alice Thudt, Jan Willem Tulp, Christian Laesser, Ændra Rininsland, Maarten Lambrechts, Dominikus Baur.

Come for the charts (above are some of my favorites in random order), stay for the great scrollytelling explanations that always go a bit deeper than you’d expect.

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

Here’s how different organizations show the Artemis II mission to the moon and back:

🌕 El País by José A. Álvarez & Francisco Domenech. My favorite, because it shows how the moon moves, too:

🌖 New York Times, 2022 by Eleanor Lutz. Back then, Artemis II was planned to launch in 2024:

🌗 New York Times, 2026 by Marco Hernandez & Kenneth Chang:

🌘 RTVE:

🌒 BBC:

🌔 ZEIT:

In case you’re also looking for a “Where is Orion right now?” map: I found one by NASA itself.

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, and 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.