Colophon
This website is now 0,000000135781 galactic years old and lives on this domain name since 8th of February 2001. The current iteration is artisinally built on vanilla PHP8.4 and uses a MYSQL database. No frameworks are used, everything is handcoded.
A lot of tinkering takes place in this website. Functionality tends to change faster than actual content being posted so I might as well just give you a global overview of the things I changed.
March 2026
- Removed that contact page and added the most esoteric contact options I could find to the footer.
- Added Mastodon comments to all pages.
February 2026
- Added Uses section
- Renamed this to colophon to conform to Indieweb conventions.
- Updated the backend interface.
- Created a script that pushes website content to Mastodon.
November 2025
- The photo gallery has been improved with some tweaks as to how photos are uploaded.
- There was an issue where dynamic content wasn't shown because of my draconian caching rules. It has been rectified.
- A wishlist? I was loving the scraping, so I created a whislist page that scrapes content from my bol, amazon, and lego wishlists, and puts it all in a neat little list.
Oktober 2025
- I bit the bullet and converted the reading section into a database application. It is now called the library, and accesssible from the main menu.
- While finishing the library, I decided to go one further and create a photo application based on the same technology. That still lives in the forge. When it gains some more data it will probably also move to the main menu.
- I activated the blogroll. Nothing special, just some links. I might add more later.
September 2025
- Fixed some issues with uploading books. Still looking for a way to make it a database application without making it a database application.
- Atom feeds are now available for articles and book reviews.
- Made some significant progress with filling out my library in reading. It has the makings of a proper primary navigation item. I've added all the reviews I could salvage from Goodreads. Still need to do some pruning, but things are looking good.
July 2025
- My blockquote styling issue has been solved by removing all blockquotes.
- Finally put the new site live. Mainly had to do with moving to a new hosting provider, so I still have a backlog of minor issues to fix.
- Atom feed for articles has returned.
- CSP issues are now fixed.
June 2025
- Sadly had to remove the atom feed. Code was seriously flawed. I will make a new attempt at some point.
- The travel and reading sections have been moved to projects.
- Blogroll has been removed again. Might return when I have the content to fill it.
May 2025
- I improved the caching mechanism of the site, tripling the performance. In a good way.
- The book section now has an Atom feed. Because RSS is lame.
- I added a book review section. Completely autonomous, it does include a simple function to gather metadata about a book from websites, and then generate a review from a template.
April 2025
- Added a travel section. I feel this may be a fun way to showcase some of my pictures. The original photo albums are a massive amount of data that no one actually looks at. So this gave me the opportunity to tinker with SVG maps.
- Added the privacy policy and terms pages.
March 2025
- The first coding for the all-new not-Wordpress based hayobethlehem.nl version 15 has commenced.
January 2025
- Unfortunately I had to say goodbye to my link log. I used to aggregate posts through Inoreader, but they decided to stop offering custom RSS feeds. Not finding any other easy mechanism, I decided to remove the functionality.
- I tried implementing security headers and CSP once again. Sadly, CSP is a nightmare in WordPress, and it lead to so much code that it started affecting the website performance. Security headers are fine now though.
- The Activepub integration is now gone. It didn't seem like the plugin was gonna be fully featured in the foreseeable future, and then it makes no sense to use it in a website.
- The Blogroll is back! Loosely based on websites I follow with my RSS reader. I wrote a small script to scrape the favicons once in a while for extra flair.