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Monitor The first release of Monitor as an elementary OS default app is here! Monitor is an app for monitoring your system resources and running processes, including with optional panel indicators. Since its last release, we’ve completed the port to GTK4, rewrote the settings menu, and a ton more under the hood. Massive thanks to Stanisław, Ryo, and more for their hard work here. Monitor running processes and available resources Monitor should be automatically installed on your next update, but if you for some reason don’t get it, you can install Monitor with the Terminal command sudo apt install io.elementary.monitor. Window Manager & Dock Another massive bug fix release of our Window Manager has landed with 19 fixed issues including improved performance, fixes for HiDPI, and better animations. We’ve fixed issues with dock menus sometimes appearing behind the dock, apps will now launch correctly when you switch between Classic and Secure sessions, and more. Blur effects have landed in the window switcher and are coming to the Dock Plus, this release introduces a new blur effect. You’ll first notice it in the Alt + Tab window switcher, but in future updates we will also blur behind the Dock and Notifications. Big thanks to Leo and Leonhard for their hard work on this release. Icons We landed a highly requested redesign of folder icons thanks to newhoa. The new folder design is more rounded and more closely matches the design of the Files app icon. Folder icons have been redesigned with rounded corners Icons featuring a computer mouse have been slightly redesigned to include a scroll wheel. And, icons featuring a mouse pointer have been updated to match the new pointer design, thanks to William. Mouse and Pointer icons have been updated Plus a number of smaller clean ups including adding missing sizes for certain icons, adjusting lighting, and rounding a few edges. Finally, we now fall back to Adwaita icons when an app is missing a non-standard icon name, thanks to David Lapshin. Code In the symbols sidebar, tooltips for C language symbols are now more information like their Vala counterparts. When you clone a git branch, we now send an unobtrusive toast to let you know cloning has completed. Global searches now respect your search case sensitivity settings. Opening a second window no longer results in duplicate project entries in the project chooser. And the “Open Folder” keyboard shortcut has been fixed. Shoutouts Jeremy for his hard work on Code. Files Jeremy also fixed a number of small issues with Files including expanding trashed folders in the list view, refreshing views properly when files are deleted, and preventing a potential freeze when the Templates folder contains too many files and subfolders. Plus, Files now shows a setting for Date & Time format. And More In Power settings we now show a small warning about increased energy usage with certain options. The Sound menu now uses a toggle icon like Quick Settings instead of a switch to quickly mute. And media keys for volume now work on the Lock Screen thanks to Leo. Get These Updates As always, pop open System Settings → System on elementary OS 8 and hit “Update All” to get these updates plus your regular security, bug fix, and translation updates. Or set up automatic updates and get a notification when updates are ready to install! Early Access We’re laser focused on preparing to release OS 8.1 so big new features will almost exclusively be targeted to OS 9 from now on. We don’t have OS 9 builds available yet for you to try, but we are working on them already! We’ll let sponsors know first when OS 9 builds are available in Early Access to test. But for now, we have just one more thing. 64-bit Universal ARM builds from the stable updates channel are now available on our Builds website. These builds replace the old device-specific builds for platforms like Raspberry Pi and Pinebook, plus they add support for other ARM devices supported by Linux. This is thanks to the hard work of NN708 who has been dedicated to seeing this project through over the several months it took to complete. Sponsors At the moment we’re at 24% of our monthly funding goal and 324 Sponsors on GitHub! Shoutouts to everyone helping us reach our goals here. Your monthly sponsorship funds development and makes sure we have the resources we need to give you the best version of elementary OS we can! Monthly release candidate builds and daily Early Access builds are available to GitHub Sponsors from any tier! Beware that Early Access builds are not considered stable and you will encounter fresh issues when you run them. We’d really appreciate reporting any problems you encounter with the Feedback app or directly on GitHub.
Hot off the release of OS 8.0.2, we’ve got a great new batch of feature updates for you as we get closer to the release of elementary OS 8.1! Maps The first stable release of elementary Maps is now available for download on any Linux OS. For now we’ve focused on some of the basics like showing your current location, searching for locations, and handling geo:// uri links. You may recall that Maps evolved from the Atlas code base originally written by Steffen Schuhmann for elementary OS. Ryo has worked hard to maintain the code and update it for the latest platform libraries like GTK4. Since the rename, we’ve updated the app to match the latest elementary styles and design conventions. We’ve also added an illustrated view switcher between Explore and Transit maps and when you search you’ll see color coded place type icons next to search results. Keyboard navigation,screen reader accessibility, and performance should also be slightly improved. Plus we have a modernized app icon, shoutouts to Micah for providing art direction. Get Maps on AppCenter AppCenter On the Home page, the “Updates & installed apps” button is now properly labeled for screen readers. We’ve fixed a minor visual bug with banner shadows. And the “Education” category now has an icon. In app info views, we now show a simple percentage-based app rating when ratings are available from ODRS—the same ratings server used by apps like GNOME Software. Expect future versions of AppCenter to expand our support for ratings and reviews, but for now we have some groundwork laid out. App info views also now show content warnings with a more compact layout. Italo updated our “End of Life” warnings to contain more accurate language, and licensing information now shows more detail and a simplified summary. Plus, we now show when a game supports playing with controllers. Leonhard added support for app addons, and we’ve simplified the “What’s New” section to show just the latest release, with the option to view more releases in a separate version history window. Apps now show ratings, controller support, simplified release notes, and license summaries Leonhard did a ton of work in this release to make app updates faster and more reliable. The code has been massively streamlined and we’ve resolved reported crashes that some folks were experiencing while checking for updates. Plus we’re now using GTK 4’s FilterListModels for improved performance. The “Last checked” time is now updated every minute while the updates view is open and the gear menu can now be opened with the keyboard shortcut F10. We’ve made a few changes to the way installed apps are shown to make it easier to keep up with what’s new when you have automatic app updates turned on. Installed apps are now sorted by release date instead of alphabetically. The Releases dialog got a slight redesign and you can now see recent releases for all installed apps. And we’ve adjusted where the version number and store origin labels appear to clean up their layout. You can check past release notes for all installed apps. Occasionally, app icons can take a little longer to load; When this happens they’ll now fall back to a nicer placeholder and cross fade into their proper icons once available, thanks to Italo. We’ve changed the label of the action button for free apps from “Free” to “Install”, according to your feedback. “Recent” apps in Category views should feature a more up-to-date selection and be a bit faster to load. And Search Results will now show in two columns when enough space is available so that you can see more results at once. Dock When we ran our desktop survey 75% of you told us that you expected to see background apps in the Dock, so we now have Background Portal support in the Dock thanks to Leonhard! Here you can see a list of apps running the background without a window, their supplied reason for running the background, and you have the ability to force them to quit. You can always further manage app permissions in System Settings → Applications and choose which apps are allowed to run in the background. Background apps now show in the Dock New contributor Sebastian fixed issues with the placement of app name tooltips, added a shake animation when you try to open a new window on a single-window app with middle-click, and fixed an issue where re-arranging app icons in the dock could cause them to shake indefinitely. Leonhard fixed an issue where maximized windows would be behind a portion of the dock when hiding is turned off. And William improved the color of the indicator dot for apps which are active on another workspace. Panel & Settings In Quick Settings, we’ll now show a message when you try to turn on the onscreen keyboard in a Secure Session since it’s currently only available in a Classic session. And we’ve added a couple of nice animations when you toggle Dark Mode or Rotation Lock. Some toggles—like Rotation Lock—are now animated Vishal fixed a potential crash when using the network indicator on the Lock Screen. And we’ve improved Airplane Mode: it will now only disable networking radios, not Bluetooth or wired networks. Plus you can now jump to System Settings when middle-clicking networking toggle buttons. Application settings now has a setting to select your default Maps app, and you can start typing to search apps right away instead of having to select the search icon first. Login & Lock Screen Leo put a ton of effort into this latest release of the Login ∓ Lock Screen, including support for the automatic accent color and Dark mode! We now also sync more of your settings like panel transparency and power settings. We’ve improved keyboard navigation, and will automatically select the Classic session if accessibility features are used, for example, during Initial Setup. We’ll also do a better job of remembering your last selected user card and their session type. And More Jeremy also pushed another round of maintenance updates for our developer tools!. Files now does a better job when drag-n-dropping files into other apps, and Properties windows now show a more precise date and time for file modification. Code’s terminal pane now does a better job syncing with your Terminal app settings, and he fixed an issue where exiting a shell would break the terminal pane. In the Terminal app, he improved unsafe paste warning detection for commands that contain newlines, and the search bar now takes up a more appropriate amount of space. Get These Updates As always, pop open System Settings → System on elementary OS 8 and hit “Update All” to get these updates plus your regular security, bug fix, and translation updates. Or set up automatic updates and get a notification when updates are ready to install! Early Access We landed blur-behind in a couple of more places in Early Access! The Dock is now slightly more transparent and things behind it will be blurred. This improves legibility when for example busy text is behind the dock. And we’ve also merged some updates styles for Notifications including slight transparency, blur-behind, more rounded corners, and softer shadows. Plus Leo cleaned up Notification close animations. If you’re not a fan of transparency and blur effects, you can always turn off “Panel Transparency” in System Settings → Dock & Panel. The Dock and Notifications now have transparency and blur-behind effects Subhadeep has merged in initial support for fingerprint enrollment in User settings. We’re still working out the experience for fingerprint authentication dialogs for example, but if you have a compatible fingerprint reader you should be able to start testing support and send us feedback about what is and isn’t working. Initial support for enrolling fingerprints was merged Plus, daily and release candidate quality builds will now use the Secure Session by default. We’ve received a ton of feedback that since the updates we’ve made since the release of OS 8 have made the experience of using the Secure session much better than the Classic session for most people, including improved performance and fewer bugs encountered. So we’re really excited to make it the default experience going forward. Sponsors At the moment we’re at 24% of our monthly funding goal and 321 Sponsors on GitHub! Shoutouts to everyone helping us reach our goals here. Your monthly sponsorship funds development and makes sure we have the resources we need to give you the best version of elementary OS we can! Monthly release candidate builds and daily Early Access builds are available to GitHub Sponsors from any tier! Beware that Early Access builds are not considered stable and you will encounter fresh issues when you run them. We’d really appreciate reporting any problems you encounter with the Feedback app or directly on GitHub.
It’s been about 6 months since our last minor release and the team has been busy! For all of the details about what’s new since OS 8.0.1, make sure to check out our posts from May until now. In this post I’ll just be covering our progress over the last month up until the release of OS 8.0.2. OS 8.1 is due to be released before year end and that post will be The Big One™ that wraps up every change since OS 8.0. So without further delay, let’s dive into what we did last month that made it in OS 8.0.2! Installer & Initial Setup The latest Installer incorporates fixes for a number of issues raised during accessibility testing. The “Before Installing”, “Try or Install”, “Choose a Disk”, and “Encryption” views should all have much improved accessible labels, things like password quality feedback will now be read aloud by the screen reader, and we fixed a couple instances where the screen reader would announce text style markup. Plus, Leo added a few more safety checks for the custom install view that should prevent crashes with certain complex partition layouts, and the Installer should now always appear centered on screen. Initial Setup also includes the same password quality feedback improvements for screen readers and it will always appear centered on screen. Plus trailing hyphens and underscores are now allowed in usernames and we use a more reliable source of information for keyboard layouts, thanks to Ryo. Music The latest release of Music includes a number of important new features for managing the queue, including performance improvements for large queues. You can now remove individual track from a track’s context menu or clear the entire queue thanks to Oowoosh0. Jeremy and Leonhard implemented searching by track name. The queue and the last played track will be saved and restored thanks to Stella, and she added the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+O to add new files. Ryan added the Ctrl+Q shortcut to quit, and album art will now show in media controls in the panel and elsewhere. Plus Oowoosh0 fixed a couple of issues with long artists names or when using large system fonts. Terminal Leo Fixed an issue that caused keyboard focus to not be inside the first tab when opening a new window, and he fixed an issue where dropping in text that contain # would be cut off. Jeremy also fixed an issue with incorrect line breaks when pasting or dropping text while a process is running, made sure to always clear process finished icons when a tab is selected, and removed an old misfeature that would cause window sizes to be odd on certain display sizes. Hardware Enablement OS 8.0.2 includes the latest long-term support Hardware Enablement stack from Ubuntu, including Linux 6.14. This new version of the Linux kernel brings improved performance—especially while gaming, reduced power consumption for certain AMD and Intel chipsets and GPUs, new security features, and support for more gamepads, wifi devices, microphones, and more. And More Main menus are now properly marked in Camera, and Videos and can be opened with the keyboard shortcut F10. In Calculator, Alain replaced the “Del” button with an icon, and the “New Window” action now shows in icon in places like keyboard shortcut settings. Trevor fixed a crash with screenshots which are much taller than they are wide and Ryo fixed an issue that caused screenshots not to be saved to custom locations. Get elementary OS 8.0.2 elementary OS 8.0.2 is available as a pay-what-you-can purchase at elementary.io today. Localized direct downloads and a torrent magnet link are provided. OS 8 FAQ Download elementary OS 8.0.2 Sponsors have been able to download OS 8.0.2 release candidates since the beginning of the month, so if getting things before anyone else is important to you, consider sponsoring us on GitHub And Even More Expect another blog post soon detailing all of the new features that have been released since OS 8.0.2 was built and what’s available to test in Early Access—there are a number of big ones!
Your monthly updates post is here! This month we have a couple of releases for our developer tools, plus plenty of improvements to Bluetooth, as well as a hardware enablement boost from Ubuntu and plenty to talk about in Early Access. Let’s dive in! System Settings The previously mentioned redesign of Bluetooth Settings has arrived! This redesign not only brings a bit more visual separation between paired devices and nearby devices, but also improves the keyboard navigation and screen reader experience. Plus, you can now double click rows to activate them. We resolved an issue where sometimes devices would be duplicated in the list and fixed issues when a pairing request requires entering passcodes—like with some keyboards. You’ll now also see fewer unnamed devices when discovering, enabling and disabling Bluetooth on devices that have been hardware locked should now work reliably, and to top it all off performance when listing lots of devices has also been improved. Bluetooth settings has a new design Leonhard and Ryo fixed a couple of issues with sidebar selections when navigating directly to a setting from search. Ryo fixed an issue where Sharing Settings lost its window controls when a network was not connected. And there’s now an action to jump directly to the System Updates page from the context menu in the Dock or Applications Menu or via search. Code Working with Git projects continues to get better thanks to Jeremy! There’s now a new feature to clone git repositories directly from inside Code via the projects menu in the sidebar. The item for opening project folders has moved there as well, so managing your open projects now happens all in one place no matter where they come from. You can now clone Git projects in Code He also fixed an issue with blank tooltips appearing in empty sidebar folders, a crash when deleting selected text while using the “Highlight Selection” plugin, and a freeze when editing lists with the “Markdown” plugin. Plus, the Symbols sidebar now shows a loading spinner when searching symbols takes longer than usual, and filters have been fixed for C symbols. Terminal Terminal will now warn about pasted commands that include options to skip confirmation like -y, --interactive=never, and --force. Plus we now make sure to show all found warnings about a pasted command, not just the first one found. For example, if a command like sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y fuse is pasted, we will warn about use of admin privileges, multiple commands, and that it skips confirmations, not just that it uses admin privileges. Terminal warns about more potentially dangerous commands Corentin fixed an issue where long commands could resize windows. Jeremy fixed an issue where tab labels didn’t properly update when using screen or ssh. And he made sure we properly close tabs when using the exit command. And More A few small bug fixes for our Window Manager: Corentin resolved a potential crasher, Leo improved dock hide animations, and Leonhard fixed an issue with revealing the panel over fullscreen apps. A new Hardware Enablement stack has arrived thanks to Ubuntu! This includes Linux 6.14 and Mesa 25 which brings support for newer hardware as well as some big performance gains and potential battery life improvements. OMG! Ubuntu! breaks down all the nerdy details here Get These Updates As always, pop open System Settings → System on elementary OS 8 and hit “Update All” to get these updates plus your regular security, bug fix, and translation updates. Or set up automatic updates and get a notification when updates are ready to install! Early Access Maps Last month, Ryo made the last release of Atlas on AppCenter because we’ll soon be shipping it by default in elementary OS as Maps! As part of our work to improve the experience on computers you take with you—like notebooks and tablets—we’ve been working on features that use your location, and shipping a Maps app is part of that work. An in-development version of the new Maps Our hope with Maps is to improve support for mapping and location features in our platform libraries and to improve experiences in other apps like Tasks and Calendar as well as 3rd party apps in AppCenter. We’ve also already made a tiny improvement to the wider Freedesktop ecosystem by documenting a standard location icon used across desktops and in Portals. We’re really looking forward to getting your feedback and learning how we can improve experiences for apps that use your location in elementary OS. Window Manager & Dock First up is some new eye candy. We’ve heard requests for transparency and blur over the years and I’m happy to report we’re now experimenting with some new effects in shell elements like the alt + tab Window Switcher. We want to make sure to carefully balance shiny effects with performance and legibility, so be sure to send in your feedback. We’re also on track to apply some blur behind the Dock soon, so watch out for that. Blur effects have landed in the window switcher and are coming to the Dock Speaking of the Dock, you may have noticed that it’s now sticking around when in Multitasking View! We’ve replaced the old workspace switcher and you can now launch apps from the Dock directly into different workspaces to quickly get things set up exactly how you like. We’ve also merged in a new feature to monitor background apps that use the cross-platform Background Portal. Here you can not only manage background apps, but also see an explanation of what exactly they’re doing while running. With these features, we’re seeing years of design and development work come together: an improved way to multitask on elementary OS whether you use a mouse at your desktop, multitouch gestures on your laptop or tablet, or rely on keyboard shortcuts to get the job done. I’m extremely proud of what the team has done here and look forward from hearing more from you about it! Background apps now show in the Dock And that’s not all. Building on the previously mentioned Gesture Controller, the new Touchpad backend for multitouch gestures has also landed. This replaces Touchégg in the Secure Session as the way to track multitouch gestures, fixes bugs, and enables new features like two-dimensional swiping between workspaces and the full Multitasking View. So if you are a fan of gestures on your notebook, we’d love for you to try it out and report back before we ship it for everyone. Hardware Support Last but not least, we’re now building Universal EFI install images for ARM64 processors. This means instead of building unique ARM images for every hardware platform, we can build a single universal image for platforms like Pinebook, Raspberry Pi, and M-series Macs. These builds are still experimental and come with a few bugs, but we’d love folks to give them a spin in a virtual machine or on a spare computer and report back. If everything looks good, we may be able to offer stable ARM64 downloads starting with OS 8.1 later this year. Sponsors I want to give special thanks this month to Ryan Prior for his extremely generous one-time sponsorship! Ryan noted that this sponsorship was dedicated to the hard work of Renato who has been translating elementary OS into Brazilian Portuguese. Thanks a ton for your work Renato! At the moment we’re at 22% of our monthly funding goal and 332 Sponsors on GitHub! Shoutouts to everyone helping us reach our goals here. Your monthly sponsorship funds development and makes sure we have the resources we need to give you the best version of elementary OS we can! Monthly release candidate builds and daily Early Access builds are available to GitHub Sponsors from any tier! Beware that Early Access builds are not considered stable and you will encounter fresh issues when you run them. We’d really appreciate reporting any problems you encounter with the Feedback app or directly on GitHub.
July is Disability Pride Month, an opportunity for us to consider how we’re serving our disabled community and work on breaking down barriers to access. Last year we had the pleasure of being introduced to Florian—a fully blind cybersecurity enthusiast—and thanks to his feedback we completely rewrote navigation in Onboarding to be more keyboard and screen reader friendly, as well as took another look at Installation and Initial Setup to vastly improve our entire first run experience for blind folks. Plus, we implemented the screen reader interface in the Alt + Tab window switcher. Thanks to this feedback, elementary OS 8 can be installed and set up completely blind, an important win for maintaining your independence as a person with vision disabilities. Danielle Foré Founder & CEO Wed, Jul 3, 2024 7 min read Since the release of OS 8 we’ve been working on things like improving contrast, support for Dark Mode screenshots and brand colors in AppCenter, turning on or snoozing Dark Mode without canceling your schedule, expanding the scope of the “Reduce Motion” setting, and adding more options to reduce distracting notification bubbles. Plus, thanks to feedback from Aaron who you may know from his blog series on Linux accessibility, Notifications and the Shortcut Overlay both got releases that add screen reader support. As a community that includes folks with a range of disabilities ourselves, we’re deeply invested in improving access to Open Source software. We succeed at our mission when we build open computing experiences that are available regardless of ability and fail when accessibility is considered an afterthought or a nice-to-have. This month and always, Inclusive Design is at the core of what we do and we will continue to strive towards that ideal. If you want to follow along or help us address accessibility issues in elementary OS, we’d love your help! We’re tracking issues in this GitHub project. If you discover a new issue—accessibility related or otherwise—we’d love to get your feedback and we have a handy contributor guide to help you file a report here. Code A big new release of Code is here, thanks primarily to Jeremy. This release closes 19 reported issues including a couple of crashers. The “Open in…” menu is now sorted and includes an option for the Terminal pane. Plus the Terminal pane now follows Natural Copy/Paste settings from the Terminal app. The Vala symbols pane now shows a lot more information about symbols in their tooltips. Numbered lists are now handled correctly by the Markdown plugin. The Highlight Word Selection plugin now works with selections of more than one word. Several enhancements were made to managing git branches including sorting branch names alphabetically, the ability to switch to remote branches, and you’ll now be asked how to handle uncommitted changes when switching branches. You can now create edit marks by clicking in the source view gutter. They can be jumped between via the context menu or with the keyboard shortcuts Alt + ← / →. If you’re using the Flatpak version of Code on another OS, the “Open in…” menu is no longer empty and operations that require a network should now work. Plus performance was improved in several cases. Window Manager & Dock This month Leonhard and Leo closed another 19 issue reports in our window manager, including several issues related to multi-monitor, the Multitasking View, and Dock behavior. A crash that could occur when closing LibreOffice windows was fixed. Picture-in-picture will now select the correctly window when its area selection is drawn over an app’s shadow. Non-flatpak apps that don’t correctly match their launchers can now sometimes be matched by the Dock anyways. If you have “activate hotcorners in fullscreen” turned on, you can also now access the Applications Menu with Super while playing a fullscreen game, for example. Plus we made some performance improvements to drawing shadows. System Settings In Keyboard → Shortcuts → Custom you can now choose from a list of installed apps and their actions—in addition to being able to execute custom commands—thanks to Leo. This makes it super straightforward to add a keyboard shortcut for your most common workflows like composing a new email or adding a new Calendar event. You can now create custom keyboard shortcuts for apps and their actions System Settings will also now warn you if your desired keyboard shortcut conflicts with a common system shortcut like “Copy”, “Paste”, or “New Tab”. Plus we fixed an issue that would prevent certain Housekeeping configurations from running, and the “Automatic” accent color option now works more reliably. And More The Screencast Portal now features an improved design for selecting which display or window should be captured, as well as respecting options for capturing the pointer. Plus we fixed issues that prevented screenshots from including window shadows in some cases, and screenshot notifications now open the Image Viewer when clicked. Screencasts portal has a new design Jeremy fixed a number of issues in the latest release of Files including issues related to file renaming, drag-and-drop, ejecting removable drives, and an issue activating context menus from certain parts of the sidebar. And he also fixed an issue preventing bluetooth file sharing from working. Plus, Leo made sure that panel transparency and orientation lock settings get synced to the Login & Lock screen. Get These Updates As always, pop open System Settings → System on elementary OS 8 and hit “Update All” to get these updates plus your regular security, bug fix, and translation updates. Or set up automatic updates and get a notification when updates are ready to install! Early Access Bluetooth Settings got a redesign and a reworking of its list sorting logic that should improve performance, reliability, and its screen reader experience. Especially of note, we now sort out more bluetooth devices so the list of nearby devices should be more concise and useful. Plus we fixed a few issues related to devices that require a passcode to pair, like some keyboards. This includes some fairly large changes so we could really use help testing for regressions before releasing this update for everyone. Bluetooth settings has a new design We’re also now building daily ARM64 Native images thanks to new contributer NN708. This is a universal ARM UEFI image, which means it should be a single image that runs on platforms like Raspberry Pi, Pinebook Pro, and Apple M-series Macs. This makes it a lot simpler for us to support ARM processors in future releasses of elementary OS. Please test these images on your ARM devices and report back! We now include additional processor architecture options in our issue report template to track any problems you experience. Download ARM64 Builds Sponsors At the moment we’re at 23% of our monthly funding goal and 322 Sponsors on GitHub! Shoutouts to everyone helping us reach our goals here. Your monthly sponsorship funds development and makes sure we have the resources we need to give you the best version of elementary OS we can! Monthly release candidate builds and daily Early Access builds are available to GitHub Sponsors from any tier! Beware that Early Access builds are not considered stable and you will encounter fresh issues when you run them. We’d really appreciate reporting any problems you encounter with the Feedback app or directly on GitHub.
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It's time for a dev blogger's favorite topic: blogging about my new blogging setup. After migrating my blog from Hexo to Eleventy, building a photography website and creating a personal one-pager, it was time to find a new digital home for all my projects. If you notice any issue after the migration, please let me know. I redirect the RSS feed to the new domain, but you might want to update the feed URL in your reader. Motivation I've been maintaining three different websites under two different names: a mostly developer-oriented blog, a photography portfolio and a one-pager gluing everything together. When I started blogging about my sabbatical journey, I was thinking about making yet another page to create a clear separation. I've decided to do the opposite and merge all my websites into one instead. As I further reduce my dependency on social media and third-party services, it has become even more important to have my own space and practice POSSE. Every decision I've made was driven by two main goals: simplicity and personality. Setup I've stopped chasing the latest and greatest. I want to keep the setup as clean as possible, which means pulling fewer dependencies. Every package adds complexity and maintainability costs, so I've only added what was necessary — no more Gulp, Sass or Tailwind. Instead of taking one of my existing websites as a starting point, I created this project from scratch. I reused some of my previous code, but I didn't want to take over any technical debt (especially with the advancements in CSS). The foundation of this website hasn't changed: Eleventy (Build Awesome). It covers the fundamentals of a static site and offers a great level of customization. I've made my project more and less dependent on Eleventy at the same time: I replaced Gulp as my build pipeline with pure Eleventy processing. I replaced most shortcodes with Markdown alternatives (and markdown-it plugins), which are better supported by editors like Obsidian. I've also replaced the Nunjucks template engine with Liquid, which comes with a few trade-offs. The main reason was to avoid creating a new collection for every set of posts I render. With Liquid, you can apply array functions like filtering or sorting in the template itself: {% assign drafts = collections.all | where: "data.isDraft" | reverse %} {% for draft in drafts %} … {% endfor %} Another advantage is having date formatting included, so I don't need another library or custom code. You can even set a default date format, so you don't have to provide it each time. What I don't like is the verbosity of the template language, although I've gotten used to it by now. Nunjucks: {{ "/tags/" + tag + "/" }} {{ modified or created or date }} {% set perspectives = ["dev", "photography", "life"] %} Liquid: {{ "/tags/" | append: tag | append: "/" }} {{ modified | default: created | default: date }} {% assign perspectives = "dev, photography, life" | split: ", " %} After migrating my existing content, I've noticed the build taking way too long, both in the dev server and the production build. I've found out that the Eleventy template cache is turned off for Liquid by default. This was useful during development, but when updating actual content, it caused every template and partial to be constantly recalculated. After turning the cache on, this issue was resolved: eleventyConfig.setLiquidOptions({ cache: true }); Check the colophon for the full tech stack overview. Perspectives The main challenge was finding a way to separate and present my main personas. The Venn diagram intersection of people interested in software development, photography and my personal life is probably small. I could use tags, but they don't offer the level of personalization I was looking for. Most personal blogs separate the content by post type (blog post, note, photo), but this doesn't fit my use case. Instead, I've decided to structure my website around three perspectives, a term I have borrowed from the Eclipse IDE. Each perspective comes with its own avatar, tagline and bio. If someone is interested in everything I share (hi Mom!), they can still view all my posts. Design Since building my photography website, I've made many changes, but I never got around to share an update. The biggest change was the design, which I have used as a blueprint for the new website. I've decided to mimic a social timeline/feed, which most people are familiar with. At the same time, it should be clear that it's a personal website and not yet another walled garden. Typography is an important part of every design. The first step is to choose between a system font stack and a custom font, which comes with the usual performance vs. personality trade-offs. I've decided to go with a uniform look across all devices. I've settled on Source Sans 3 for copy text and Hack for code. Another big change was introducing a sidebar. I always felt like the empty horizontal space was "wasted" on a desktop device, but getting the sidebar UX right is challenging. I'm happy with the result, especially with the last two panels adding a personal touch to the design. Images I've made several changes to the handling of image files. To make them compatible with Markdown editors, I had to replace my custom picture shortcode. The official Eleventy image plugin is a popular choice, but it violates my simplicity goal and doesn't support everything I needed. I've decided to go with a plain Markdown image markup and a single image file (no format fallback or 2x version for retina displays). Additionally, I wrote a markdown-it plugin to turn the optional title parameter into a caption. As for the file format, both WebP and AVIF have excellent browser support. For each image, I select the format based on the quality and file size. For my photos, I'm using WebP for the timeline thumbnails and JPG for the full-size version. Theme picker There have been some recent discussions about dark mode toggles, and I considered going for a light/dark solution based on the user's OS preference. Driven by the personality goal, I knew I had to add at least one more theme, so a proper theme picker was necessary. Similar to navigation, people like to hide the theme selection on mobile devices behind a burger menu or a dropdown. I prefer the solution by Sarah L. Fossheim, where all available themes are displayed above the page footer. A friend was scrolling through my new website, and their first question was "Why is the theme picker in the footer?". This tells me the solution was a good idea — I don't think he would have noticed a typical theme button in the header. The implementation follows standard practices: Use the light or dark theme as default based on the user's OS or browser preference. Store a selected theme in the local storage and use it as the single source of truth. Prevent a flash of inaccurate color theme. Make the theme play nicely with bfcache. I might have slightly gone overboard with my third theme, but the nostalgia kept me adding more and more features. Enjoy going back to the 90s: Feeds As browser vendors decided to remove XSLT support, I didn't bother to style my feed. Instead, I've created a new web feeds page, listing all available feeds and a short explanation. I provide one feed for every perspective and one with all my posts combined. I once offered tag-based RSS feeds. This was useful for my sabbatical, but even there I had only a single subscriber. Now, all tag feeds redirect to their main perspective feed. I've also dropped the JSON feed, despite having at least 16 subscribers. Given that every web feed reader supports Atom feeds, I don't see the value of providing a JSON alternative. A JSON feed doesn't add much complexity, but handling different media types (post, photo) and properly escaping the content is one more thing to implement and maintain. Quality assurance I've put a lot of effort into my new digital home, and I want to make sure it stays in good shape. I've included several tools, most running automatically as part of the CI pipeline: eleventyDataSchema — lint Eleventy data values like titles or dates markdownlint — format/lint Markdown files Vale — lint content (grammar, writing style, formatting) Lychee — find broken links (internal and external) Evaluatory — check accessibility and validate HTML Oxlint — lint JavaScript files Eleventy linters are another option to analyze a template's output, but I haven't found a use case for it yet. Not everything can be automated, so I also did the following manually: Test with Chrome, Firefox and Safari Test with Polypane Test with Google Lighthouse Test with a screen reader Test with JavaScript disabled Test with CSS disabled Test at 200% zoom Test with a bigger browser font size Test with custom fonts disabled Test with delayed assets Performance It's difficult to compare the performance of two separate websites with that of a combined one. Some parts got worse, e.g. bigger font files and more CSS. At the same time, I've noticed that gzip compression was turned off for anything but HTML for a few years now (I must have missed it when upgrading nginx) 🙈. One improvement was to implement on-demand assets. For example, the lite-youtube-embed CSS and JavaScript is only loaded if a <lite-youtube> element is present on the page. As before, JavaScript is fully optional (except for interactive demos in individual posts). I've been using a mix of <noscript> and CSS to hide elements that require JS (like the theme picker). I don't like the user experience of pagination, so I avoided it for years. But now that I have almost 300 posts, I've decided to finally add it. I display 30 posts per page, with images further down still being lazy-loaded for better performance. I haven't applied pagination to tag pages, as that's more complex with Eleventy. Bits and pieces Here are some other noteworthy changes: I've removed post-specific social share images and use a single WebP Open Graph image instead. I've dropped JSON-LD. Open Graph and microformats are sufficient. "Naming is hard" is a common expression in software development, but it also applies to photograph titles. I've decided to use a counter as the title, e.g. #0100. Sometimes I do come up with a title that I love, like the Castle in the Sky, so I might mention it in the description. On a photo page, you can now open the previous/next photo using the left/right arrow keys (in addition to the existing navigation buttons). It's now possible to filter photos by date, gear, or location. Check the explore page for an overview. I've learned about and used some experimental CSS features (with progressive enhancement), like scroll-triggered animations or squircle corners. I've added an AI statement on my LLM usage. I finally have a proper about page. Cool URIs don't change, but it's inevitable when moving to a new domain. All my previous URLs are redirected, except for some assets that are no longer used. I will keep the old domain, so the redirects will continue to work for a foreseeable future. I've kept my previous Easter egg and added a few more. Have a happy hunt! 🕵️♂️ Inspiration I visited hundreds of personal websites looking for inspiration. Here are a few that I kept coming back to: Emma Goto. I love Emma's approach to presenting the variety of her interests, even though I went a different route. Brennan Kenneth Brown. This website has so much to offer. It's a great example of what the open web looks like. Rex Barrett. The sentence "Collecting hobbies is my hobby." hit home — so much that I had to steal borrow it for my short life bio. Conclusion This project was mostly about merging the content of two websites into one. I knew this would take a considerable amount of time, but I still greatly underestimated the effort. In the end, it was all about the journey, not the destination. I loved fine-tuning the design and tweaking little details that probably no one will ever notice. I still have many more ideas left in my backlog. How do you like my new digital home? If you have an opinion, let me know! Reply via email
New electronica album by Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan
To protect against link rot and disappearing content, I save local copies of web pages I like into my web archive. Ideally, this archive is completely self-contained. I want a local copy of each page’s HTML and all the assets it depends on (CSS, images, scripts, and so on). I don’t want my archived pages fetching resources from the original website, which could disappear at any time. Initially, I was verifying self-containedness by hand. I’d open each saved page in a web browser, and check the browser dev tools. I’d check the Console tab for errors and failed requests, and watch the Network tab for requests going out to the internet. That approach was tedious and error-prone, and I wanted something better. I now automate the process using Playwright, a testing framework that allows you to control web browsers. I open each page using Playwright, and check if it’s making external requests. Detecting external requests in Playwright When you open a page in Playwright, you can subscribe to request events which tell you when the page issues a request. In this Python snippet, we start Playwright, start a WebKit browser, and open a new page. We tell the page to append external requests to a list, and then load example.com. We see that example.com makes two requests on page load: one for https://example.com, and one for a JavaScript file. from contextlib import closing from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright with ( sync_playwright() as p, closing(p.webkit.launch()) as browser, closing(browser.new_page()) as page, ): requests = [] page.on("request", lambda msg: requests.append(msg)) page.goto("https://example.com") print("requests:", requests) # requests: [<Request url='https://example.com/' method='GET'>, # <Request url='https://example.com/s.js' method='GET'>] In a more complex scenario, we might use Playwright to interact with the page after loading – for example, clicking a button or filling in a form, and then we could see the requests triggered by each action. Once we have a list of requests made by the page, we can inspect the url property to check if any of them were fetching from an external website. I wrote a function is_external_request to carry out this check: from playwright.sync_api import Request import urllib.parse def is_external_request(req: Request, original_url: str) -> bool: """ Check if a request has a different origin than the original URL. A request is considered internal if: - it matches the original URL exactly - it has the same scheme, host, and port as the original URL - it uses a `blob:` scheme (for example, in-memory media representations) """ if req.url == original_url: return False # Compare the scheme/host of the request to that of the original URL. org_url = urllib.parse.urlsplit(original_url) req_url = urllib.parse.urlsplit(req.url) if org_url.scheme == req_url.scheme and org_url.netloc == req_url.netloc: return False # Ignore blob: URLs, which are in-memory representation of some data, # and not an external request. # # Playwright detects blob: URLs when loading media files; for example # using the <audio> or <video> tag. if req_url.scheme == "blob": return False # Fail open: if we can't decide if a request was internal or external, # assume it was external. return True assert_page_is_self_contained(ctx, url) I’ve wrapped these two steps in a function assert_page_is_self_contained(ctx, url), which is part of my chives utility library. The function takes a Playwright Browser (or BrowserContext) and a URL, then: Opens a new page in the browser Loads the URL in the page Checks what happened when the page completes loading It throws an exception if there are any: Uncaught page exceptions or errors Console warnings or errors Non-GET requests Requests targeting external resources The function tries to trigger important network requests that might be skipped on the initial page load. For example, it evaluates the body’s offsetHeight to force a synchronous reflow, which causes the browser to request any lazily loaded images or fonts that might otherwise be missed. Here’s an example which verifies a file example.html from the working directory: from chives.browser_fixtures import assert_page_is_self_contained, file_uri from contextlib import closing from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright with ( sync_playwright() as p, closing(p.webkit.launch()) as browser, ): assert_page_is_self_contained(browser, url=file_uri("example.html")) I originally passed a Page as the first argument, but changing the function to take a Browser or BrowserContext lets it manage its own pages. It gets a fresh page for every verification, and closes it when it’s done. (The first time I ran this, I created a new page for every verification, and never closed them – my computer ground to a crawl as my script opened hundreds of browser tabs.) If you create a new context, you can emulate different browser settings, like location, locale, and window size. Here’s an example where we use contexts to test the same page in light/dark mode: with ( sync_playwright() as p, closing(p.webkit.launch()) as browser, ): with closing(browser.new_context(color_scheme="light")) as light_ctx: assert_page_is_self_contained(light_ctx, url=file_uri("example.html")) with closing(browser.new_context(color_scheme="dark")) as dark_ctx: assert_page_is_self_contained(dark_ctx, url=file_uri("example.html")) In my web archive, I check every page in light/dark mode, and at 1×/2× pixel densities. It takes at least a second to run each verification, so I cache the results. As I save new pages, they’re added to a verification queue, and I’m warned of any missing assets. Unsurprisingly, the first run flagged many missing fonts and images, which I added to my local archive. Every saved page now passes cleanly. Browser is best-effort, but may still miss things Even with automated testing, it’s difficult to guarantee a completely self-contained archive. Different instances of a browser might load different assets, and a single page load might miss different variations: Responsive images – web pages can offer different sizes of an image, and the browser chooses a specific size based on the current window dimensions Appearance settings – a browser might load different fonts or images depending on light/dark mode Interaction-dependent assets – a web page might have assets that are only required on hover or user action You can mitigate some of this by testing with multiple contexts or adding post-load interactions, but every step makes the process take longer. Fortunately, most of the pages I save are simple, blog-style pages where I’ve stripped out the JavaScript. For my specific use case, initial load verification is more than good enough. Other uses for this code There are other projects where it could be useful to intercept and audit the requests made by a web page: Verifying your Content Security Policy (CSP). The CSP header restricts what resources can be loaded by a web page, and you could check that your configuration has the correct effect. Auditing login screens. You could check that sensitive pages don’t load any external scripts, which mitigates the risk of credential theft via a compromised third-party. Testing analytics and tracking. You could script user flows, like a shopping cart checkout, and confirm that tracking events fire correctly. I don’t do much front-end web development, but Playwright has become a key tool in my toolbox. I read a lot about people using AI agents and MCPs to interact with websites, but I prefer Playwright. It’s more fiddly and requires explicit instructions, but it’s constrained, deterministic, and I never have to worry about it doing something unexpected. [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]
It’s four years since I bought a printer. I thought I would provide an update on running costs, print sales, and profit. I’m happy to be completely transparent about all this as I know it can be difficult to figure this out if you are thinking of creating your own printing business. January 11th 2026, 11:30am All the photos here are work shot in the last twelve months. Year Four Investment? Nothing other than consumables this year. I did purchase a high-spec film scanner last year, detailed here, but don’t consider that as part of this. The scanner has paid for itself several times over, and it may become a factor in future years (see below). Income Income is made up of sales through a local gallery that I am part of, along with web sales: 5,940.- CHF - sales through the gallery 80.- CHF - sales through web shop = 6,020.- CHF total income Total income is down about 50% compared to 2025. Costs I had to purchase consumables (paper and ink), at a total of 957.- CHF. That cost is included in the total here under the “print consumables” category. January 11th 2026, 3:30pm Rental cost of space in the gallery was reduced due to having overpayments of rent and my loan to the gallery, from the previous year(s), paid back to me. -1,500.- CHF - rental cost of space in the gallery -957.- CHF - print consumables (paper, ink) -1,138.- CHF - framing/mounting/postage -1,135.- CHF - commission to the gallery -300.- CHF - web shop subscription 0.- CHF - stripe / paypal fees 0.- CHF - advertising (none this year) = -5,030.- CHF total costs Total costs are down by about 60% compared to 2025. Total Profit 6,020.- CHF total income -5,030.- CHF total costs = 990.- CHF total profit A Quiet Year? Actually an average year. The previous couple of years were outliers, due to large orders, so really I’m back to normal in terms of sales. The key factors in managing to generate a [small] profit this year were: 1) no longer having to pay back the loan used to finance the printer, and 2) reduced rental cost of space in the gallery due to a previous loan to it being repaid. Also having to spend almost 1,000.- CHF on ink this year ate into profit. This is probably a “once every three years” cost given the rate I print at. The principal cost is rental of space in the gallery - in a normal year this would be 3,000.- CHF. Essentially this means, given the material cost of printing and framing/mounting and commission to the gallery, I need to make about 5,500.- CHF of sales to break even. Solar Eclipse, August 12th 2026 That’s a grind. However I did receive two substantial orders at the end of October, which haven’t made it in to this year’s figures and should boost next year’s. Maybe even a good sign for the year to come? At least now the original investment loan is repaid, the printing costs cover themselves in most years. I may look at offering scanning services now that I have a high-spec film scanner, which could become a scan + print service. More thoughts about that next time.