Every now and then, when my sweetheart and I go on a day trip in the region, I sling my camera over my shoulder in the hope of capturing a beautiful scene or two. Last year was no exception. Often, however, I don’t get around to reviewing and editing the photos, but I have now caught up on three events from 2025. Enjoy…

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Four years ago, I made this blog fit for IndieWeb. The most important part for me was the integration of Webmentions, which are mainly automated “pings” sent from one website to another, telling the latter: “Hey, I mentioned your post ABC in my post XYZ.” Such a connection between two blogs is certainly not the same as the fast interactions of the Fediverse platforms, which are more like email or chat, but are usually one-way and, unfortunately, still rather rare. But for me, they offer a healthy basis for networking my own digital home with others who think along similar lines.

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I’ve known for a while that I want to add a statistics page to my blog. Just for the fun of tinkering with code, without any deeper reason. In the summer, I wrote down my ideas on a few Obsidian pages and looked around to see what options were available for data visualization. It’s nicer and more intuitive to display some of the statistics as bars and pies than just in boring numerical columns. I’m more of a visual person… “Everything is so colorful here.”

One research find stood out from the crowd of the usual JavaScript tools: ChartsCSS by Rami Yushuvaev and Lana Gordiievska. It promised to bring classic number visualizations such as bar and pie charts to a web page without a single line of script, but exclusively with CSS styles!

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While preparing this new AppDefaults post for the passing year 2025, I took a look back at the two previous posts from 2023 and 2024 and find it exciting to see how my behavior has gradually changed over time.

A slight shift away from the tools offered by large American companies towards small European alternatives or OSS, which is likely to intensify in the future. I also have less and less patience with software that is going down the path of enshittification. I don’t care how long I’ve been using it or how much work is needed to make the switch; it just has to go, even if it hurts, like Plex. I’m not going to be taken for a ride … just die.

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Since I decided in 2019 to use the static site generator (SSG) Hexo as the foundation for my blog, I have been struggling with the fact that it works with the CSS preprocessor Stylus via a pre-installed plugin. I thought I just needed some time to get used to the simplified but unfamiliar notation and take advantage of features such as functions, mixins, variables, and the like. Over time, however, the functionality of native CSS grew to such an extent that I started to implement workarounds for new and unsupported features in my Stylus code, which made it significantly more complex and confusing. I didn’t get used to it, but instead just got annoyed by Stylus for quite some time.

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I have been working with OpenStreetMap for a while now from the developers’ perspective, who can use it to conjure up attractive maps, such as my Photo Map, on the web free of charge. However, I am not part of the community, nor have I given much thought to where all the data comes from and how it finds its way into the maps. Until recently… when I stumbled across an app review of StreetComplete by chance and installed the Android app (iOS is planned) out of curiosity.

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