Daniel Pietzsch

This blog is now retired

Wed, 04 Dec 2019 17:40:21 +0100

I’ve decided it’s time to go more independent. And as a result of this I will no longer post new content here on Tumblr. My new home is now https://danielpietzsch.com and you’re very welcome to continue to follow me there.

Here are all the ways you can currently get my updates:

Eventually I will run this blog on different software and leave Tumblr. Tumblr is what powers this...

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 23:12:35 +0100

Eventually I will run this blog on different software and leave Tumblr. Tumblr is what powers this blog. It has served me well, and still is. But I am feeling increasingly discontent.

The main reason I feel this way is that I want to have more control over the technology that runs my blog/website. Although this is more work (but more fun!), I think it’s the only viable long-term solution. You never know, if Tumblr will still be around in a few years time. Plus I’ll have a better idea where my data is located and that it’s not directly fed into a third party system/social network.

Plus I dislike some things they do:

They won’t let me directly link to a different website. It’s always going through their redirecting service. It makes the browser status bar pretty much useless, plus I’d like to be the direct referrer to other sites.
I have the suspicion it promotes Tumblr to my visitors, although I turned that off.
It often shows a their privacy policy screen one has to accept when visiting pages on Tumblr. I don’t know if that’s the case for custom domains, too, but I think it is. That’s annoying.
I get regularly distracted by other people’s posts on my Tumblr Dashboard, when I only came here to post something. This is good and bad at the same time.

But these are comparably minor things. I simply want to be more in control and have something that I can comfortably run long-term.

I want to write every day of 2019

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 21:57:15 +0100

I like to write. I definitely like having written. I want to get better at it. I want to remember things better. I want to share what I learned. And what interests me. Or simply jot down my thoughts. I want to create more value – even if it’s very little or only for myself.

Posts may be short. Posts may be long. Some will lack. A few might be strong. It can be common. It can be personal. It can be profound. Or rather trivial.

But I want to do it*.

*wish me luck!

On my new photo journal website

Sat, 04 Feb 2017 18:46:50 +0100

I’d like to write about why I created my new photo journal website.

I have been wanting a site where I can post lots of photos at once for quite some time now. I have been enjoying these longer, chronological posts by other photographers, and it’s become my favourite way of consuming images. For me, it’s way more enjoyable to really take my time and look at a single person’s photographs, than consuming single images of several different photographers – which is usually the default on social media. It’s more like sitting down with a photography book of a single artist.
Currently I’m very much into personal and documentary photography, and I think longer posts lend themselves better to this style.
Plus, I enjoy creating these posts with photos covering a longer time span much more.

I also wanted to have full control over my photos, my site and the way I’d like to present and archive them. I wanted something Indie . And hosting your own site is the only way to do so.
Now I can have everything the way I want: no limit on the number of images, and simply a long page where you can scroll through full-size pictures – chronologically and without the need to click or tap anything. I can also easily (batch-)download all the images and posts, since it’s simply an FTP download of a static website.

It’s interesting how I more and more go back to hosting my own sites again and also code lots of it myself. That’s how I started out in the late 90s. But I think it’s the only way I can control the things I share on the web long-term. It feels like my photos found a real “home” again. A homepage for my photos. This feels very right to me.

Daniel Pietzsch’s Photo Journal

Thu, 02 Feb 2017 21:49:18 +0100

Daniel Pietzsch’s Photo Journal:

I haven’t posted any new photos in a while now. That’s because I’ve gotten a little tired of the social media style of posting one or a handful of photos at a time.

But I haven’t stopped taking lots and lots of – mostly analog – photos. And I’ve also been busy working on a new home for them.

So, may I present: my new photo journal.

On this new site, I plan to create one entry per month. Each does and will include lots of images, documenting what I do and see.

Currently I’ve added August and September 2016, which contain mostly new photos, starting with only a few known ones I’ve uploaded here in recent posts.

Follow along, if you like!

Dark mode

Sun, 16 Oct 2016 11:46:03 +0200

This blog now has an option to enable a “dark mode”. Meaning, you can see everything on a dark background. Just click or tap the checkbox next to the little moon (🌙) in the top right corner. Your browser will remember the setting the next time you visit – which I hope you will.

The dark background is much gentler on the eyes when looking at your screen in a dark surrounding and generally nicer for looking at photos. And since that’s the content I post most frequently, I might even make this “dark mode” the default in the future. But for now, it’s an option.

The technical background

I’ve had this separate “dark mode” for a while now. But since it had no user interface (UI) on this site, it could only be discovered and enabled, when the browser recognized alternate stylesheets and itself offered a UI to switch between them. Of the major browsers, I think that’s only Firefox’ desktop version – at least on a Mac. And even then I think most folks don’t know about – or use – this.

Searching online for some help, I found this ancient article by Paul Snowden on the A List Apart website from 2001. While dated, it still was describing pretty much what I wanted: a little script to switch between alternate stylesheets of a website (as opposed to – for example – toggling class names on the <body> tag or something similar). I couldn’t and didn’t want to use the author’s script as is. But the article gave me the hint that <link> and <style> tags have a disabled attribute which I can use to enable or disable them. So off I went to write a little script that does these four things:

Make the UI visible – in this case a checkbox plus label – to toggle the stylesheets (because in case JavaScript is disabled, there’s no need to render the UI, since you couldn’t use it anyway).
When the checkbox is toggled, loop through all relevant <link> and <style> tags and enable or disable styles accordingly to the current setting.
Store the name of the enabled stylesheet in the browser’s localStorage to be able to retrieve the preference for future visits (and further navigation).
Read the preference from localStorage on page load to enable the visitor’s preferred style.

Here’s the whole script:

function switchStyles(enabledStyleTitle, disabledStyleTitle) {
  var links  = document.getElementsByTagName("link")
  var styles = document.getElementsByTagName("style")

  for (var i = 0; i < styles.length; i++) {
    if      (styles[i].getAttribute("title") == disabledStyleTitle) { styles[i].disabled = true }
    else if (styles[i].getAttribute("title") == enabledStyleTitle)  { styles[i].disabled = false }
  }

  for(var i = 0; i < links.length; i++) {
    if (links[i].getAttribute("rel").indexOf("style") != -1 && links[i].getAttribute("title") == disabledStyleTitle) { links[i].disabled = true }
    // I don't exactly know why I seem to need to "double-toggle" this here. But on WebKit-based browsers, it wouldn't apply the appropriate style on first page load. And this seems to do the trick.
    else if (links[i].getAttribute("rel").indexOf("style") != -1 && links[i].getAttribute("title") == enabledStyleTitle)  { links[i].disabled = false; links[i].disabled = true; links[i].disabled = false; }
  }

  localStorage.preferredStyle = enabledStyleTitle
}

function switchStylesBasedOnChecked() {
  if (styleSwitchCheckbox.checked) {
    switchStyles("Dark", "Light (default)")
  } else {
    switchStyles("Light (default)", "Dark")
  }
}

// START HERE
var styleSwitchCheckbox = document.getElementById("style-switch")
 styleSwitchCheckbox.parentElement.style.visibility = 'visible'

// simply "check" the checkbox when the user's stored preference was "Dark"
if (localStorage.preferredStyle == "Dark") { styleSwitchCheckbox.checked = true }

// On page load, making sure the correct setting is applied
switchStylesBasedOnChecked()

// Whenever the checkbox changes, switch styles again
styleSwitchCheckbox.addEventListener('change', function(event) { switchStylesBasedOnChecked() })

Feel free to use this script yourself – unmodified or modified.

I also like to high-five the person or team who was responsible for the localStorage API. So straightforward, I almost couldn’t believe it.

Design update

Sat, 24 Sep 2016 17:44:37 +0200

I’ve been working on this blog’s design again. The biggest change is that it’s now responsive – meaning it adapts to different screen sizes, from big to small. When you are visiting this site from your smartphone, you used to be seeing Tumblr’s default mobile design – now you’ll see my own.

Further amendments:

It’s now a black & white theme.
No more Tumblr Photoset rendering. I simply render all images full-size and inline, one after another.
It supports iOS’ “Dynamic Type” feature. That means, this theme will adjust its font size based on your iOS device’s text size settings (in case you use this feature).

Of course, it’s not perfect in every corner of the site. But I’m pretty happy with it for now.

Nomad!

Mon, 25 Apr 2016 19:59:15 +0200

As you might have noticed, Nicole and I recently bought a campervan. And for just more than a week, we’ve been travelling with this thing already.

We don’t have a flat anymore and are living in the camper full time now. Since we’re both self-employed/freelancers and have been working from home for the last year, we thought we could do the work from a mobile home just as well – at least in theory. In practice, time will tell, but so far it has worked out.

We’re planning to evenly split our time for work and play and dedicate approx. 50% to each on average. I guess this percentage will vary, though, depending on each of our workloads at any given time.

Our plan for the rest of this year is to travel mostly in Norway and Sweden. If you’d like to follow us, you can do so, on our reactivated German travel blog over at danielandnicole.net. There you’ll get the latest infos on our whereabouts and travel experiences etc.

And here, I’ll probably simply continue with the regular flow of not-so-recent (film) photos and other miscellaneous posts.

Exciting times!

The reason for my little hiatus here, is that I was hiking the Soonwaldsteig with Andre the last...

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 13:55:37 +0200

The reason for my little hiatus here, is that I was hiking the Soonwaldsteig with Andre the last extended weekend. And I was only shooting film. Then I got sick.

So, photos are queuing up a little bit here. I’m scanning the negatives from the trip now, so that I can start sharing again shortly.

A new design for this blog

Fri, 10 Apr 2015 11:21:50 +0200

Over the last couple of days, I created my first Tumblr theme to give this site a little refresh. My major focus was typography and a more simple and more semantic markup.

I’ll continue to improve and refine the theme, but I think the major bits are all done. Take a look, if you haven’t already!

Going (more) indie

Sat, 07 Mar 2015 11:40:10 +0100

A while back, I started sharing my stuff more-or-less exclusively through my blog on my own domain.
I wanted to have a single web-presence where I can share all my content: be it photos, texts, videos, links or whatever else. I wanted to have control over how it’s displayed and where (the URLs of my own domain).

I think the trigger was my frustration with the fleetingness of corporate third-party services. They were (and are) getting neglected, moving in a direction I was not happy with, or getting acquired by Facebook, which I try to avoid as much as I can.
So, I thought, instead of putting a lot of work into sites that I can’t control, I’d rather put it into my own website on my own domain.
I just wanted something more reliable and permanent.

I still wanted to continue using these third-party services, though. I wanted my connections on these sites to be able to continue following me there. But I didn’t want to have to rely on these services as much as before. I wanted the canonical source of my content to be my blog.
So, I continued (and I am going to continue) posting copies of my content to Flickr, Twitter and all the other services that I use, but this posting happens automatically most of the time and always through my blog¹.

And that’s why I was excited when I heard about the idea of the IndieWeb. I think I first heard it from Jeremy Keith at the Decentralize-Camp last year.
The best way to explain what it’s about, is to just quote their website:

What is the IndieWeb? The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the ‘corporate web’.

Your content is yours When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.

You are better connected Your articles and status messages can go to all services, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone. Even replies and likes on other services can come back to your site so they’re all in one place.

You are in control You can post anything you want, in any format you want, with no one monitoring you. In addition, you share simple readable links such as example.com/ideas. These links are permanent and will always work.

I’m now slowly but certainly moving more and more in that direction.

While I currently use Tumblr as my blogging platform – which hardly counts as an independent tool – I still think it is not that much of a contradiction to the IndieWeb principles. Tumblr allows you to host your blog on your own domain – and I believe that this is the main point of the IndieWeb. Whether you host the website yourself comes second, in my opinion. If Tumblr went away – or I wanted to move away from it – I could still switch to host my own site, but – crucially – I could keep all the URLs.

This whole approach has been serving me well for quite some time now. And I’ll continue refining the design of my blog to better cater for this style of sharing and to implement more of the IndieWeb building-blocks.

If you’d like to hear more about this yourself – as opposed to just reading the IndieWeb website – I can recommend this excellent episode of the Working Draft podcast featuring Jeremy Keith.

There are also actual real-world IndieWebCamp events taking place, which you can attend.
There’s even one happening in Düsseldorf in May. And I’ll be there!

This is called POSSE (“Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere”) in IndieWeb terms, and I achieve this either via Tumblr’s sharing tools or IFTTT. ↩︎

Change to the RSS feed

Tue, 31 Dec 2013 13:00:29 +0100

Very soon, I’m going to stop forwarding this blog’s RSS feed to Feedburner.

Everything should just keep working. And if you’re subscribed, you should continue to receive updates. But if you don’t, you can visit blog.danielpietzsch.com and grab the feed’s link again from the bottom of the page.

Automator workflow for quick and easy screenshot sharing via Dropbox

Sat, 19 May 2012 10:15:18 +0200

I created a simple Automator workflow to quickly share screenshots via Dropbox. Here’s what it does:

Detect when a new screenshot is added to the Desktop
Move the image to ~/Dropbox/Public/Screenshots/
Copy its public link to the Clipboard

Currently I use this mostly for adding sceenshots to GitHub Pull Requests and Issues.

If you think this is useful for you, too, head over to the Goodies section for the download and installation- and modification-instructions.

Essential Mac third-party software

Sun, 13 May 2012 07:45:44 +0200

I recently got a new MacBook Air at work.
Thanks to the increasing number of tools like iCloud, Dropbox and GitHub I can store and backup more and more of my digital stuff online. This makes setting up a new Mac from scratch pretty effortless. And so I did.

I thought it would be interesting to write down what third-party apps are essential for me to get work done. Here’s the list:

Dropbox
Apart from music, photos and code, I store all my documents here. This also includes my bash profile and gitconfig dotfiles to set up the respective tools.
TextMate
Still my editor of choice.
Git
For source control management. I definitely need to access my work and personal code repositories.
Things
Despite missing cloud-sync, it’s still the only to-do app I want to use.
Skype
For chat and calls.
Alfred
Quick access to anything on your Mac and the web.
Jumpcut
To be able to access my clipboard history.
Divvy
The best window management software.
Rdio
On-demand music to listen to throughout the day. It’s absolutely fantastic.
1Password
My password manager of choice. Great for storing other sensitive data, too.
Skitch
For taking and annotating screenshots.
MenuMeters
Drives me crazy when I can’t monitor how my Mac is performing.
Homebrew
The easiest way to install UNIX tools.
rbenv and ruby-build
For installing and running different versions of Ruby.
Rubygems
Essential when programming with Ruby and Rails.
Chrome
Mostly to access Flash content without having to install Flash Player for Safari.

I will install more software as time goes on, but since I didn’t need to install them so far, I wouldn’t call them essential.

One month after the Christchurch earthquake

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 12:17:00 +0100

We have been lucky. We weren’t in Christchurch when the 6.3 earthquake hit just before 1pm on Tuesday, Feb. 22nd 2011. We were hiking through the mountains near Glenorchy/Queenstown (approx. 400km away to the south-west).
A hut warden was present on this track and he told us on Wednesday morning what has happened. He also offered us to make one call via radio (there’s no cell-phone coverage in NZ’s mountains). The connection was short, but we managed to reach our neighbours to ask if they are ok and if their and our houses are still standing.
Everything was ok, and so we went ahead with the normal plan and continued walking for the next couple of days.

Only after we came back on Saturday, we realized the degree of destruction this earthquake caused. It was terrible to see all the pictures.

We drove home on Sunday only to grab a few things and then leave again. We didn’t feel safe in our house on the hill, although it wasn’t looking bad on the outside. The inside was a bit of a mess, but we expected things to be worse.

At first, we spent two nights on a campground in western Christchurch, before my company organised flights for us to Auckland. We ended up staying there for almost 3 weeks in an unfurnished flat. It was not exactly comfortable, but still more comfortable than being in Christchurch, having no running water and sometimes no power. No shaking was a big bonus, too.

We returned last Sunday. Wednesday evening I went out with my GF1 to take some pictures of the visible damage in Sumner, the suburb we live in.
I need to say that most buildings are looking ok and that you don’t see lots of obvious major damage everywhere. But you certainly won’t overlook it, either.

Recovering after the earthquake: The time on the Sumner clocktower is the one when the earthquake happend. Just before 1 PM.

You see quite a few of these Port-a-loos in the street. Water was not available first (it is restored now), and the sewage system is still not running properly again.

Sumner Church had some considerable damage after the quake in September, and the Febuary one made it worse.

Water tank: before running water was restored, you had to get water from one of these tanks.

A huge rock came down from the cliff in the background.

The Cornershop Bistro. Awesome restaurant where we spent a lovely evening not long ago.

“The Ruptured Duck” restaurant was heavily damaged after the September quake and this one now put it over the edge. It was still standing after the quake, but got demolished now.

zrick buildings are often hit worst.

Some properties are now a bit too close to the edge.

Where’s the roof?

You can see all the pictures in my Flickr set “Earthquake damage in Sumner”.