For some time now, I'm notifying blo.gs about changes in the blog. After looking a bit into how search engines percieve my website recently, I learned that they also have some notification mechanisms for new pages/blogposts.

Thus I upgraded the oneliner into a dedicated script to notify external services about changes in the blog.
It is optimized for my Jekyll setup, where the generated pages in the _site folder are stored in git.
The notification ignores changes to summarized pages like rss.xml etc to only trigger notifications when there are changes in the original blog posts.

Here's the script, feel free to re-use (it expects to have MYDOMAIN, INDEXNOW_API_KEY and BING_API_KEY defined as environment variables):

#!/bin/bash

set -e
set -u
set -o pipefail

CHANGES="$(git diff --name-only HEAD HEAD~1 -- _site)"

# early abort if no changes on _site
if [ -z "$CHANGES" ] ; then
	echo "No changes in _site found"
	exit 0
fi

# build URL list
URLLIST="\"https://${MYDOMAIN}/\""
for f in $CHANGES ; do
	case "$f" in
		_site/robots.txt|_site/humans.txt|_site/about.html|_site/rss.xml|_site/atom.xml|_site/feed.json|_site/sitemap.xml)
			continue
		;;
		*)
			url=$(echo "$f"|sed -e "sX^_siteXhttps://${MYDOMAIN}X")
			URLLIST="${URLLIST},\"${url}\""
		;;
	esac
done

if [ "\"https://${MYDOMAIN}/\"" = "$URLLIST" ] ; then
	echo "No relevant changes in _site found, skipping notifications"
	exit 0
fi

# notify ping.blo.gs (Automattic) about updates
curl --fail -s -D - -X POST http://ping.blo.gs -H 'content-type: text/xml' --data "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?><methodCall><methodName>weblogUpdates.extendedPing</methodName><params><param><value>x-log</value></param><param><value>https://${MYDOMAIN}/</value></param><param><value></value></param><param><value>https://${MYDOMAIN}/rss.xml</value></param></params></methodCall>"

# report changed URLs to indexnow, include /indexnow canary URL
curl --fail -s -D - -X POST https://api.indexnow.org/IndexNow -H 'content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8' --data "{\"host\":\"${MYDOMAIN}\",\"key\":\"${INDEXNOW_API_KEY}\",\"urlList\":[${URLLIST},\"https://${MYDOMAIN}/indexnow\"]}"

# report changes URLs to bing, include /bingsubmit canary URL
curl --fail -s -D - -X POST "https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/api.svc/json/SubmitUrlbatch?apikey=${BING_API_KEY}" -H 'content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8' --data "{\"siteUrl\":\"https://${MYDOMAIN}\",\"urlList\":[${URLLIST},\"https://${MYDOMAIN}/bingsubmit\"]}"

When you switch to TalkTalk as your mobile phone provider, by default Visual Voicemail for your iPhone is not enabled.
And you're stuck with the 90s voiceprompt of the 'Talkbox'.

The following steps will activate Visual Voicemail for your iPhone:

1. Send a SMS text message with VVM ON to the number 935.
2. Shortly after you should get a text message confirming that Visual Voicemail has been enabled for you.
3. Now on the iPhone, open the phone app and go to the voicemail tab. There you will either see a button asking you to setup the voicemail or a button taking you to the 90s voiceprompt.
4. Do click on this button and setup the six-digit PIN code for your voicemail (this can be done either via a call/voiceprompt or via the guided iPhone button/dialog).
5. Once you have setup the PIN for your voicemail, close the phone app on your iPhone.
6. Then open the phone app again and go to the voicemail tab, where it should show the usual Visual Voicemail list of missed calls and no longer the button to call the 90s voiceprompt.
   In my case it took a couple minutes for this to work, thus some patience might be needed.
7. Congratulations, you have now a working Visual Voicemail on your iPhone with TalkTalk :-)

No festival this weekend. Did some hiking with friends instead.

Last weekend I attended the Subset Festival. It was the first edition of a new drum and bass focused festival.
There were some great artists there, most of them I knew before and was very much looking forward to see them live.

My favorite one was (unsurprisingly?) Andromedik, but also liked Hybrid Minds, Netsky and Andy C.
Very cool was that the festival was rather small, so felt quite intimate and super close to the artists.

Could post the same music video as two weeks ago (Andromedik's remix of The Feeling, which he said is a song very close to his heart), but you should also discover some other tracks.
Thus here we go with the recently released Paradise 🥳

Andromedik - Paradise (ft. Luka)

Building up on the changes from the canonical hints, I simplified the structure of the archive links.

Now it's /year/month/ everywhere.
Which of course brings another round of redirects to support in the nginx config to map the /archive/archive-year-month.html links to /year/month/ 🙈

In theory all previous link schemes should still work, but if you find a broken link, please let me know :-)

To help regular search engines be less confused about the various pages of the blog (especially multiple generations of old inherited URL schemes), I added canonical hints to some pages.

Mostly straight-forward, except for the archives where I chose the concise /year/month/ scheme instead of the full /archive/archive-year-month.html.
Curious to see how this works out. Currently the links in the navigation and overview point to the full URLs, and the short ones are only implemented with rewrites in nginx and visible in the canonical hints.

I encountered an old Debian system and tried to upgrade it from Debian 10 (buster) to Debian 12 (bookworm).
During the apt-get dist-upgrade it did run into a problem, where libcrypt.so.1 was removed and the upgrade failed to continue.
Additionally this caused that dpkg itself also stopped working and that sshd stopped accepting new connections.
Thus fixing the following error became urgent:

/usr/bin/python3: error while loading shared libraries: libcrypt.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Luckily I was not the first person to run into this issue.
In a Stack Overflow answer I found the crucial workaround taken from a comment on the corresponding Debian bugreport.
The following steps allow to manually install a copy of the missing libcrypt.so files to fix the issue (when running this you might have a newer version of the package at hand, thus adjust the dpkg-deb step accordingly):

cd /tmp
apt -y download libcrypt1
dpkg-deb -x libcrypt1_1%3a4.4.33-2_amd64.deb .
cp -av lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/* /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/
apt -y --fix-broken install

Applied the CSS flexbox mechanism to the archive page.
This helps to transform the steadily growing lists of monthly archive links into a more userfriendly layout, going from a single column to eight columns and bringing all the links above 'the fold'.

I'm continueing my festival summer also this weekend. Yesterday I've attended the Simmentaler Bier Festival, which celebrates the 10 year anniversary of the Simmentaler Bier brewery.

The festivities included some fine music from far away and not so far away.
Rooftop Sailors opened the afternoon with their refreshing rock music.
Then came my favorite, Open Season, which was a nostalgy throwback as I was attending their concerts already 22 years ago ❤️
Last band of the day was Delinquent Habits, which brought their habit from LA to serve the public Tequila shots during the concert.

Open Season - Rocksteady

One of my favorite moments from the second weekend of ZÜRICH OPENAIR 2024: the concert of Lost Frequencies, especially the drum&bass live performance of The Feeling 🥳

Lost Frequencies - The Feeling (Lost Frequencies & Andromedik Deluxe Mix)

Finally took the time to create a /now page and add it to the blog: /now 🎉

Still need to figure out if it will eventually replace the about page or not.
For now the about page links to the now page.