There was a lot going on this week – not only at work, but also in the tech world. These Weeknotes are about the tech and social media world.
Mastodon
Now that Elon Musk has decided that he really wants to drive Twitter to the wall and is making one abstruse decision after the next, I have decided, like many others, that I want to take a close look at Mastodon. For me, it’s the third attempt, but this time it feels right for the first time, as not only a small part of my German-language bubble is moving, but also parts of the Python community I’ve been following on Twitter have become active on Mastodon with vigour. I also have a feeling that it won’t be an experiment this time, because there won’t be a way back either. Twitter will not be what it used to be and what I liked there in a few weeks.
On the one hand, I have therefore set up my own instance at 2pxnl.de, which is currently only for me. On the other hand, I have set up an account on the server fosstodon.org for the English-speaking community. My own instance is, my gateway to my German-language bubble, an experimental field for bots and the replacement for the general shop that was my Twitter account. The account at fosstodon will be all about English-language tech content.
So far it’s working out relatively well that I keep both accounts separate. But it’s also a bit annoying, on the other hand, the separation could ensure a bit of theme fidelity.
My accounts are oliver@2pxnl.de and oliverandrich@fosstodon.org.
Sign up for Mastodon and try it out for yourself. The strict chronological timeline, lack of algorithms and nice conversational tone are refreshing.
django-tailwind-cli
I’ve been experimenting a lot lately when it comes to software development. I got pretty deep into Elixir, dabbled a bit in Go, but in the end my heart probably belongs to Python. But it also makes sense for my current main interests: I’m more intensively involved with machine learning and AI applications again. On the other hand, I find the idea of the Small Tech Foundation exciting to write “small”, self-hosted applications. In my case, Python and Django are perfect for this – all batteries included.
From this, a few small libraries for Python and Django will gradually emerge. The first of these is django-tailwind-cli. I drew the inspiration for this from the Tailwind CSS integration in the Phoenix web framework, because there they now do without any dependency on Node.js as long as you don’t need it. I wanted a similar solution for my Django projects, as I like Tailwind CSS a lot.
django-tailwind-cli relies on the Standalone CLI of Tailwind CSS and provides management commands to download the CLI, start in watch mode and build production CSS files.
Relaunch of the blog
I have had the Mastodon server since last weekend. I also released the library last weekend in version 1.0.1. So what kept me from writing about it last week?
Quite simply, I was tired of WordPress and needed a new solution. The reason for this change was that I wanted to run a multilingual blog that I could also administer well. Yes, there are WordPress plug-ins for this, but one is worse than the other.
Therefore, due to an inspiration from Daniel, I took a look at 11ty. And what can I say? It is phenomenal. After just under 2 hours I had a functioning, Markdown-based, multilingual blog. After that, it took another week to implement all the necessary features and the design after work.
Here we go – the blog has a new look. Completely static, no Javascript and of course it uses Tailwind CSS for CSS.