It's time again to do some cleanup of my blogroll before the links start to turn into 404 errors :-)

Removed:

• Veni, Vidi, VISA
• gru.gq
• BrewDog
• mdlayher.com
• Inliniac
• To Linux and beyond!
• The Lone Sysadmin
• eklitzke.org

Following in the trend of replacing tables, I've revived the old statistics page.
Now using less markup as it is built with <div> and CSS only (the display: inline-block; property was particularly helpful).

(the Jekyll/Liquid templating to generate the data for it looks quite horrific though…)

Over the last couple weeks I slowly replaced the various <table>-based layout elements of the blog with more modern HTML elements.
And finally this afternoon the work was completed with the last <table> element gone.

Visually there should be almost no differences, but in case something looks strange just let me know :-)
(and yes, style-wise everything is still using the pixel-based layout from 2002, one day this might change as well…)

To provide basic dark mode support for the blog, I added the following lines of CSS:

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
    html { filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg); }
    img, video, iframe { filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg); }
}

If the browser/OS has dark mode enabled it will invert the colors and rotate the hue to achieve the dark mode effect.
The whole operation is applied a second time on images, videos and frames to avoid that they have their colors distorted.

You can get a preview by using the developer tools of your browser to enable dark mode :-)

The code is inspired by the post here, and then extended to provide a CSS-only solution by leveraging the color-scheme CSS property.

Some very fine Drum and bass. Recently got to experience two of them live (Sub Focus & 1991), and have plans to see Dimension next :-)

Especially like the little The Prodigy mixin starting at 1:04:30 🥳

As mentioned before, I'm a supporter of the Cool URIs don't change approach.
Thus I try to keep all the URLs of this blog working (or at least make them redirect to the new place where the content is located).
Not always an easy task with old domains and multiple blogging engines accumulated over the years.

To help me with that (and ensure I don't break anything when updating a 10+ year old mod_rewrite config) I created a short Bash script to test the redirect behavior.
It contains a list of URLs and their expected redirect target, goes through them with curl and checks that the correct Location: header is returned.

As it might be useful for others in similar situations, the script can be found here.

I miss human curation — Where are my internet friends? And where are their weird blogs? (via)

While adding some new alias functionality to my setup, it repeatedly failed with an error similar to this, despite my configuration changes:

Recipient address rejected: unverified address: host XXX[XXX] said: 550 5.1.1 
<foo@bar.com> User doesn't exist: foo@bar.com (in reply to RCPT TO command);

Turns out that the negative verification result is cached and the cache is not reset during a reload/restart of postfix.
Thus it must be cleared manually like this:

/etc/init.d/postfix stop
rm /var/lib/postfix/verify_cache.db
/etc/init.d/postfix start

After switching the colors of the design, I kept the momentum and continued working on the HTML of the blog.

It took couple iterations of multiple hours, but now it's done: the HTML source of this blog is valid HTML5!

Getting rid of the obsoleteness hidden in old blogentries dating back over 20 years also led to some interesting observations.
Back when moving from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.1, I remember spending some time to transform old <br> tags to <br />. And now for HTML5 I did the inverse and moved all <br /> tags back to <br> :-)

Also once more I'm very thankful for the work of the Internet Archive, which helped to recover images hosted on servers long gone (like URLs which already at the end of 2002 were no longer valid!).

Overall a lot of replacing no longer existing HTML tags and attributes with CSS definitions.
And there is virtually no change to the visual representation of the blog (which was the goal), so we still have the table-based layout with pixel-sized fonts as originally drafted in 2002.
Moving this to actually leverage modern HTML5 mechanisms and making it also more mobile friendly are tasks left for some future cold winter evenings :-)

Happy New Year! — Happy New Colors!

Winter is here (for a while already), time to change the colors of the blog.
To keep it in the nostalgic theme (the previous design was a repurpose of the inital design from 2002), I'm using the colors from the 'plain 2' winter layout (also from 2002).

Enjoy!