Welcome ... I'm Kristof

I've been a passionate software developer for almost 30 years and currently a tech-savvy IT manager. I tinker with things like this blog in my spare time, because creating things never lets you go. Here is more about me ...


SVWW vs HSV @ 2023-10-07
SV Wehen Wiesbaden

SVWW vs. HSV @ 2023-10-07

Two hearts beat in my chest

1:1

Since my youth I am a (small) fan of the Hamburger Sportverein (HSV). Magath, Hrubesch, Keegan were my sporting heroes back then. This was certainly also related to the fact that the club was one of the best in Europe in the early 80s. Two championships, European Cup victory and a strong team left an impression on me. As the last founding member of the 1. Bundesliga, however, it was always in danger of relegation in the last 10 years and then really relegated to the 2. Bundesliga in 2018 after 55 years. What followed were sad attempts to climb back up. Always so close that the saying prevailed: “How can you tell that it’s springtime in Germany? The trees are sprouting and HSV is fucking up the promotion!”

In my first post in this series, I described how my hometown club from Wiesbaden made it into the 2. Bundeliga and this particular home game this weekend has a special appeal for me, of course. The favorite club from my youth against the one from my present. My Wehen Wiesbaden against my HSV.

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Basket Parking
New Photos

Majorcan Details

Summer is over and I’m spending some of my free time post-processing in Lightroom the many photos I’ve taken over the past few months. As a casual photographer, I mostly use my vacation and weekend trips to take my Nikon for a walk and let its chip card glow. My better half is constantly wondering why I stopped there or here again, even if she likes the results afterwards. The point is that I am a color-and-shape junkie. Of course I also do landscapes and portraits, but the details of things have done it to me the most. Colors & Shapes …

In July I was for a few days with friends on a finca in the south of Mallorca and of course I used every opportunity to stick my lens everywhere where there were interesting details to be expected. I don’t know if it had anything to do with the heat, but most of the motifs have a very earthy touch. I probably wanted to stay somewhere underground all the time, because 40 degrees Celsius in the shade was then also a bit too much for me.

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Guinness Orchestra
A New Blog

Mastodon Share Bottom Sheet Dialog

Implement a 'Share Post' dialog in Hexo

Social media thrives on sharing. Thoughts, experiences, self-dramatizations or even texts or posts from other people. This is especially true for microblogging on (formerly) Twitter and (today) Mastodon. To make this easy, the platforms often offer a SHARE endpoint (URL), such as the famous

http://www.twitter.com/share?text=My impossible thoughts on X

… or any dirt buttons to collect user data.

A few months after the groundbreaking of Mastodon 2016, such a feature was also discussed and implemented on GitHub and out came:

https://<your-instance>/share&text=My benevolent thoughts on the Fediverse

But … where Twitter had it easy due to its central structure (twitter.com … period.), we Mastodon users all fidget around on different instances, i.e. each instance has its own /SHARE endpoint and so it’s a bit harder to stick a share button on your own blog, because you have to ask the user where he lives.

Of course, online services like toot.kytta.dev, s2f.kytta.dev, mastodonshare.com sprouted immediately, but also the button providers expanded their portfolio or new ones were launched, like shareon.js.org, share-on-mastodon.social, shareaholic.com.

But seriously … does it take an external service to ask the user for an instance name and redirect him to an URL (and run the risk of falling victim to data collection mania)? Because that’s all it is. All of the above do it exactly that way.

indieweb.social Share

So we come to the ready-made developer solutions e.g. How-To tutorials. Here, too, there are a lot of hits after a search: Mastodon-share-button (WebComponent), Mastodon-share-button (JS), Adding a Share On Mastodon button to a website, Adding a “share to mastodon” link to any web site – and here, … and I’ll join them here for my Hexo-driven blog.

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Vintage Letters

Contribute with Conventional Commits

Fun with a Pull Request

I’ll be honest … I need some Git training. From time to time I contribute small things to GitHub projects and sometimes get confused with all the commands. Fork, Clone, Commit, Stage, Pull Request … all things that mean something to me, but that I certainly haven’t internalized. And so it happens that I sometimes mess up a pull request or something similar.

Sure, my blog here also lives in GitHub, both in terms of source control and hosting on GitHub Pages, but here I’m the only one committing. No issues, no branches, no pull requests or anything else. I change something, hit commit and I’m done.

Another point I can’t dismiss: I’m a Windows guy who likes to click buttons. The command line is not for me at all.
What was the name of the parameter? Do I have to write --param=xxx or /param:xxx … damn where is the button?
My brain is probably too small for that.

Visual Studio Code is a big help there … it has buttons! But that doesn’t save me when it comes to Git, because you have to know in which order to press which of these buttons!

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Sunset Drinks
Discoveries

Discoveries #26 - JavaScript HowTo's

Over time, everyone accumulates links somewhere about procedures that one has not yet internalized. This is also the case with me and JavaScript development. “Damn … what was that about Call | Proxy | Map | <You name it>?!”. Here are 11 of them …

  • Processing images with sharp in Node.js
  • Use console.log() like a pro!
  • Simple Swipe with Vanilla JavaScript
  • The File System Access API: simplifying access to local files
  • An introduction to WebAssembly for JavaScript Developers
  • Getting Started with the Map and Set Typed Collections
  • JavaScript Currying: A Practical Example
  • How to Use the Call, Apply, and Bind Functions in JavaScript
  • How JavaScript's Proxy Object Works
  • JavaScript waitFor Polling
  • How to measure page loading time with Performance API

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Versengold in Concert I

Versengold in Concert

Photos from the performance in Speyer as part of the MPS

Since my youth with I hardrock/metal fan, but from good music I let myself convince, even if it does not fit into this scheme. This is what happened with the German medieval/folk band Versengold from Bremen, to whose concert in Bochum my better half dragged me one day. And what can I say … the guys are so much fun with their easy-going manner, their good, funny and sometimes profound German lyrics and their shanty-like music, from which the North German sailor tradition can be clearly heard.

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SVWW vs Schalke @ 2023-09-02
SV Wehen Wiesbaden

SVWW vs. Schalke @ 2023-09-02

The fight of the promoted against the relegated

1:1

On this game, some in my circle of friends have feverishly awaited, especially my neighbor and friend, who for years is an ardent fan of one of the traditional clubs Schalke 04. We got six additional tickets for the game in time and with a crowd of 11,003 fans, this was also urgently necessary. The stadium (12,566 standing and seated) was full to the roof. Only one of three blocks of the guests was empty. Some Schalke fans seem to have expected nothing from the game in Wiesbaden. No wonder after table position 15 after the last match day.

Since season ticket holders get into the stadium a little faster and my friends sat a little scattered in different blocks, I lost sight of them at some point, but that was not tragic, because they had fun.

To my delight, the booth operators, who I had to criticize last time, actually did a better job today. Two cash registers: one for cash and another for card/smartphone/watch payers. The sale of beer and bratwurst went much more quickly, only I had to stand in line a bit at the fan shop, because I was not yet recognizable as a fan: it had to get a cap and a jersey, of course, finally.

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Red Hopper
Hexo Tag Plugins

Image Masonry Tag Plugin for Hexo

Easy use of the wonderful Macy.js library to display images in posts

Displaying a few more images than usual in a post is always a bit tricky, because you have to make sure they don’t get too big and drown out the text. But they should not be too small either and the arrangement is also important to consider.

For this purpose I have so far used my Image Slider Tag Plugin, but with this you only ever see one of the images and have to scroll through the rest horizontally. A medium sized overview, best in the so called masonry format, where images are automatically assembled based on their size on a limited area, would be much better for some cases. There are a variety of CSS or JavaScript solutions out there on the net, but the most suitable for me was Macy.js … and how I integrated it into my Hexo environment is what I want to describe here.

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