On this page you will find Atom feed variants for my last 20 posts (Articles and Notes), but also some in the good old RSS 2.0 and the JSON feed format.
A list of all feeds can also be found via my .well-known/feeds endpoint, which I wrote about here. You can find more feeds, including from the people I follow on Fediverse, at rss-is-dead.lol.
Posts
HTML Feed
As an alternative, that can be read by humans and machines, here are the posts (articles with excerpt only) in the form of a microformat-based h-feed.
TownSquare - Chatting with Strangers
New Web Widget for Blog Interactions
You stroll around a traditional market in town, stop at a stall and have a look at what’s on offer. You’re never alone, as others are doing the same. Unless you’re in a hurry and you like people, it’s quite common to strike up a casual conversation with other stall-goers or even the stallholder. “The stand is quite busy.” “The product is rather expensive, though.” “It’s hot today, but it’s finally supposed to rain this afternoon.” Conversations that we usually forget quite quickly, but which make us social beings.
One problem with the traditional internet, on the other hand, is that you usually ‘surf’ the web on your own. Reading a blog post is a passive activity, and contact with the blogger, if possible at all, is asynchronous. Social networks are somewhat different in this regard, but the platforms usually operate in a silo, acting in their own interests – with all the associated excesses – and outside the confines of your own blog. The latter can be mitigated somewhat, for example, by using tools such as Mentions United to bring platform interactions ‘home’, but these interactions are still asynchronous and merely link content to comments, likes and the like.
Miniatur Wunderland, Hamburg @ 2026-06-04
Visiting Germany's most popular attraction ... again
Many, many years ago, my darling and I planned a long weekend in Hamburg, including a sightseeing bus tour, a harbor cruise, and all the other things you typically do in Germany’s northernmost metro area when you’re there together for the first time.
Since even as a grown man, I can hardly shake off my inner child, I suggested visiting the famous Miniatur Wunderland (Wikipedia) in Hamburg’s Speicherstadt, and she didn’t mind, even though she seemed skeptical at first. Girls just don’t usually play with model trains, but what Gerrit and Frederik Braun, the founders of Miniatur Wunderland, have built there in the space of a 150-year-old warehouse has since become famous far beyond the borders of Hamburg, so she let herself be persuaded.
Now we’re both die-hard fans of this XXXXXL model train layout (biggest in the world!), because what sets it apart from others isn’t just the size, but also the attention to detail and the humor of its builders, who are also too stubborn to give up when something seems technically impossible. Just think of the 10 years it took to develop real Formula 1 races with miniature race cars in the Monaco section.
We try to visit Hamburg once a year, and this year, combining our trip with the Linkin Park concert made it the perfect opportunity for our fifth (or sixth?) visit to Miniatur Wunderland. I’ve taken lots and lots of photos of the exhibit in the past, but I’ve never posted them here before — until now.
Hamburg Views
Monochrome Beauty of the North
The first settlement, known as Hammaburg, dates back to the 8th century AD. What developed over the following 1,200 years is what we know today as Germany’s second-largest city: Hamburg.
My partner and I go there for two or three days every year because we simply love the city, the harbor, the nearby sea, and the city’s vibe, as well as the Miniatur Wunderland located there, which is a once-a-year fixture on our travel calendar.
There’s never enough time to wander around the city and take photos, but I snapped a few this time as well…
Linkin Park, Hamburg @ 2026-06-03
From Zero World Tour
It’s been 25 years since I first heard Chester Bennington growling into a microphone, and ever since then I’ve been a fan of both hard rock and crossover. My goodness, what gems these guys from Linkin Park delivered in the 2000s. “Crawling” isn’t just on my all-time best playlist, but I can sing along to it at any time (or so I like to think ;)
Of course, I too was saddened in 2017 when the news of Chester’s tragic death broke, knowing for certain that there would never be any new music from this extraordinary group, because their music was – and still is – defined by his incredible voice.
When Mike Shinoda announced in 2024 that Emily Armstrong would be taking Chester’s place in the band and that new material was on the way, I was sceptical at first… but the guys – and now the lady too – have proven me wrong. The NEW Linkin Park are brilliant, and Emily brings a fresh, positive touch to the mix.
So I just had to get tickets for myself and my girl for one of the concerts on their tour in Germany, and we chose Hamburg… at the stadium with around 50,000 other fans. If we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it right … … and it was just awesome!
Blooming Velmede
The mother of my sunshine has a beautiful garden behind her house, right by the river Ruhr, which her son tends with great passion. There are quite a few gorgeous flowers in bloom at the moment and it’s simply lovely. I had to made some photos, even with my crappy smartphone. Here are a few shots. Enjoy.
Junited 2026
A month of sharing blog posts
Back in the day, there were only hunters and gatherers, and I would certainly have been in the latter group. Collecting things is satisfying.
This month, I’ll be collecting links to blog posts as part of Robert’s Junited 2026 campaign on this page. Keep an eye on it …
Crochet Monsters
To me, my sweetheart is a phenomenon. With two needles and an indefinite amount of wool in various colours, she whips up all sorts of little marvels at a speed that would take me just to get my fingers back in order.
Most of the things she crochets are made for her children, or for the fund-raising efforts of the kindergarten where she works, as every now and then the parents’ support group organises a children’s bazaar and all the earnings go to the little ones. And soon these little monsters will disappear into the pocket of another little monster in exchange for a fiver from their parents.
Belated May
Start of a new season at Thomas Garden
This year, I was late getting started with taking photos in Thomas’ garden. Whereas I’m usually out and about as early as March, I only managed to take the first pictures of his extraordinary plants this weekend, and I’ve probably missed the early bloomers this year.
There were plenty of reasons: holidays, bad weather, lack of time and so on, but now the season has kicked off and you can look forward to new photos from the Thomas Garden series every month.
Integration of the Byline Feed Extension
Lately, there’s been a lot of buzz in my tech bubble about good old RSS/Atom feeds. Not only are people rediscovering them and making them available on their blogs, but new services are also popping up around this 30-year-old technology. It’s just so wonderfully independent and fits the trend of moving away from increasingly terrible platforms at the protocol level and returning to the free, open internet.
A good example of this is, of course, my new daily companion Bubbles by Ben, but also initiatives like Sourcefeed by Terry Godier, which rely on RSS-based content publishing WITHOUT a dedicated website. Write, Feed, done.
Terry recently published another project that Ben had addressed in a similar way a few days earlier. Ben’s was about integrating a Fediverse address into the commenting process on Bubbles via a meta tag on one’s own blog. In other words, enriching the posts extracted from the feed with additional information about the blogger.
Mentions United Loves Bubbles
Aggregation, Syndication, Interaction and back ...
As I wrote recently, I Love Bubbles. The new blog post aggregator (based on the RSS feeds of a curated list of blogs) has become part of my morning routine: making coffee, browsing my blogroll, opening Bubbles, and discovering new posts from blogs I’ve never heard of before — though that’s about to change ;)
Since my blog is also included in Bubbles’ list — and I imagine others are in the same boat — I suspect the reach of my posts will increase somewhat. Previously, I could only achieve this by manually syndicating my posts, primarily on Mastodon and IndieNews, and my photos on Vernissage and Pixelfed.
Now Bubbles helps me on that, by automatically syndicating its entry to its own GoToSocial instance in the Fediverse. And of course, I’m interested in bringing the interactions with my post, that accumulate there, back to my site, just as I already do with the other platforms through my Mentions United project. That’s why there’s now a new Bubbles plugin …
I Love Bubbles
Bringing the IndieWeb and the Fediverse together
Any new way of interconnecting websites and users on the IndieWeb is not only welcome but also vital for a stable counterbalance to Big Tech’s shitty walled gardens. Yesterday I stumbled across a really good and new one, that integrates also the Fediverse: Bubbles from Ben.
We monitor thousands of independent, personal blogs via RSS. Every new post appears on Bubbles automatically. Nobody submits individual links.The blogs were hand-picked from various curated sources and individually reviewed.
There are currently around 5,000 blogs and I was surprised to find my own among them.
Versengold, Wiesbaden @ 2026-04-09
Eingenordet Tour @ Schlachthof
It was time to see Versengold again… and for the first time in my hometown of Wiesbaden. It’s great when it only takes a 10-minute bus ride to see your favorite band.
Stickers
... and a whole lot of nonsense
I’m 57 and currently hooked on stickers, and AI isn’t entirely innocent in this, combined with a bit of a guilty conscience - but it’s a lot of fun.
I recently “retired” my old business laptop after just two short years, with a battery life of 28 minutes after a full charge, and somehow I felt sorry, because the best thing about that otherwise junk of a Dell laptop was the lid with the stickers (see header image). Everything started with the “truck” in the middle, which ended up on my desk one day and seemed to be yelling, “Stick me on your laptop!”
IndieWeb Carnival: Museum Memories
It seems like fate that James chose Museum Memories as topic of this month’s Indieweb Carnival, because just recently, by chance, I visited one of the most impressive places from my childhood after more than 40 years: the Deutsches Museum in Munich. My wife and I had traveled to the Bavarian capital for a rock concert by the band Alter Bridge and actually planned to spend the rest of the weekend enjoying the city’s atmosphere, but as February in Germany sometimes goes, the weather was, to put it mildly, lousy, and my wife came up with the idea of going to the museum.
Alter Bridge & Deutsches Museum, Munich @ 2026-02-20
What Lies Within Tour and Tech Culture
It’s not every day that one of our favourite bands tours Germany and brings along guests that we like just as much. We last saw Alter Bridge in Frankfurt 2016 and had never seen Daughtry before. So there was no question about whether we would go to Munich. Of course we would. And since the concert was on Friday evening, it was also the perfect opportunity to enjoy beautiful Munich for a weekend.
IndieWeb Carnival: Intersecting Interests
Complementary and Contrary Passions
When I read about this month’s Indieweb Carnival topic (Intersecting Interests by Zachary Kai), I initially misunderstood ‘intersecting’ as interests that cross paths and thus get in the way, but what is meant is rather overlapping interests. As a non-native English speaker, I lack a feel for the nuances of the language. But basically, it doesn’t matter, because I knew immediately what I wanted to write about, and my interests actually include both aspects: contrary and complementary.