This is a test post to see if my Python script is doing what it’s supposed to do.

Also, it’s still winter in Berlin!

Today I added pages to this blog that let you explore certain tags (like „photos“, „books“, „drawings“) and projects I documented over the years (like my fellowship in Washington, DC, or my masters thesis). Very happy with how that turned out.

Oh, and we visited the rooftop terrace of the Park Inn hotel in Berlin, close to Alexanderplatz. Good view of a white, snowy city.

Remember Blogger? The very old blogging service owned by Google? Yes, I too was surprised to learn that my 19-year-old blogs still exist on there.

So I brought them here! Yesterday I migrated the content from both my old photos and drawing blog to this Notes section. It makes me so happy to know that there’s content from five blogs in these Notes; and that it all lives on my website now (instead of Tumblr, Notion, and Blogger).

I did curate. I’m not gonna confront you with every weird (visual) thought of my 16-year old me. That said, there are some things in there I actually still like today. The one at the top of this post, for example — from October 2009.

In the past days, I continued working on optimising my blog setup.

I’m very happy with the “write on Tumblr” workflow I made possible thanks to Claude and Github Actions. That’s what I use mostly on mobile…but I don’t like the Tumblr interface enough to also use it on my laptop.

Now I set up an Alfred workflow that helps me publish these notes faster on my MacBook. It works like this:

1. To write, I open iA writer and write my thing. If I want to use images, I just drag them in there (they don’t get displayed by iA writer, but I’m okay with that for now). Once I’m done, I save the markdown file on my Desktop as note.md.
2. To publish, I run „publish note“ in Alfred. Then the script automatically moves the note into the right blog folder and the images in the right image folder. It adds a front matter and commits the note and images to GitHub.

At least that’s the plan. Which me luck. This is a test post.

Today, I switched browsers: I finally quit Arc and moved to Zen (keeping the three-letter-browser experience). It’s the same — Zen copied everything good from Arc — but built on Firefox, not Chrome. It’s been a while since I used Firefox, so I’m looking forward to that experience. So far, so good.

To move browsers, I just took my extensions and browser history with me. No bookmarks. A while ago, I imported all my Arc folders and Firefox bookmarks into the bookmarking app Raindrop.io. It’s more powerful than both, and prettier, too.

I also realised that most of the time, my browser history serves as bookmarks. You wouldn’t believe how often I revisit articles, data visualisations, small tools, etc. I rely on autocomplete when I start typing into that address bar, no matter the browser.