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Posted July 24, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Best Free Synthesizer Plugins in 2025 I am convinced that it makes total sense to spend a certain amount of your (spare) time on this planet tinkering around and exploring stuff that seems totally useless or silly compared to what you normally do. And without having a real explanation for why it happened, I’ve been starting to get interested in software synthesizers lately. I can barely play proper melodies on my Arturia MiniLab – seems like 10 years of playing the piano as a kid somehow mostly vanished from my brain cells – and I haven’t recorded anything that would be remotely useful or even worth... #audio #music #plugins #synthesizers #synths 46 Webmentions
Posted March 16, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes An Internet Archive Plugin for Craft CMS 5 Now that the Webmention plugin is finally Craft 5 compatible after last week's update, I jumped at the chance and updated another plugin I had once written for my personal site. The Internet Archive plugin automates the archiving of your posts to the Wayback Machine. Each time you publish or update a post, the plugin submits the URL to the Internet Archive, so that a new snapshot is saved. It’s a great way to preserve your posts for the – hopefully unlikely – event that your personal website is going offline one day, but it also creates a historical archive of... #Craft CMS #indieweb #internet archive #plugins #Web 32 Webmentions
Posted March 13, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Webmention for Craft CMS 5 Imagine my surprise, when, roughly two weeks ago, I received a direct message on Mastodon from Brandon Kelly, the founder and head of the team behind Craft CMS, opening with: 👋 I spent today working on a Craft 5 port of your Webmention plugin. My Webmention plugin? The one I always meant to rewrite? The one that was still stuck on Craft 2? The very reason why my personal site was missing all Webmentions after I had upgraded to Craft 5 towards the end of 2024? Yes, that Webmention plugin. So, naturally, I was thrilled! What followed were several days messaging... #Craft CMS #indieweb #plugins #webmention 29 Webmentions
Posted January 6, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Owning It For the second time now, someone mentioned to me that it is kind of paradoxical that my newsletter, which is called “Own Your Web”, is not hosted on my own server or under my own domain but on Buttondown. And yes, they are right. I realize that this is kind of not walking the talk. Do I really own my Web in this case? I thought about this as well and my plan is – and actually always has been – to first move the archive over my own domain and, eventually, to a completely self-hosted solution. In the past, I... #newsletters #ownership #ownyourweb #web 6 Webmentions
Posted November 21, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes Free Audio Plugins: Accusonus ERA 6 Bundle I’ve been down in an audio plugin rabbit hole lately. More on that in a later blog post. But I just stumbled upon a set of free plugins that might be of interest to you, if you are doing voice recordings of any kind – be it a podcast, voice over, or, let’s say, video tutorials. There are, of course, many more free plugins for that use case. Again, I might cover more of them in separate blog posts, also to document my own research. Let me know if that sounds remotely interesting. But back to the plugins I wanted to... #audio #internet archive #plugins #podcasting #recording #video #voice 1 Webmention
Posted November 1, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes How to Set Your Domain as Your Bluesky Handle As Twitter is (far too) slowly falling apart and more and more people are looking for alternatives, Bluesky is enjoying a surge in popularity at the moment. One neat little feature is that you can use your own domain as your handle on Bluesky. In a way, this is the perfect handle for this new era of decentralized social media. Your personal domain is part of your digital identity on the independent Web and uniquely yours. Your domain is owned by you and is under your control, which also makes impersonation much harder. And if you ever decide to switch servers,... #Bluesky #domains #social media No webmentions yet
Posted July 3, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes Highlighting Blogging on Mastodon In what looks like a very smart move, the team at Mastodon just released a very nice new feature for media organizations, journalists and bloggers: when someone shares a link to an article by certain news outlets like The Verge, MacStories, or MacRumors, the official Mastodon app as well as the web version will now show a direct link to an author’s fediverse profile. What is primarily aimed at journalists and news organizations for now, is a feature that might soon work for bloggers and anyone sharing posts on their personal sites, too. And it makes a lot of sense... #blogging #fediverse #Mastodon #personal websites #publishing 50 Webmentions
Posted March 19, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes Fixing the Logitech Spotlight The Logitech Spotlight presentation remote is a sleek piece of hardware. It is comparatively small, fits nicely in the palm of your hand, and the buttons come with a very satisfying, albeit for my taste a tiny bit too loud, click. But most importantly, the brushed aluminium design feels sturdy, high-quality, and elegant. Exactly the piece of gear that you buy because you want a reliable, long-lasting device that does not fail you. Imagine my irritation, when I pulled out my Spotlight after several months of not using it – and it just didn’t charge anymore. Not with the supplied USB-C... #fixit #hardware #Logitech Spotlight 16 Webmentions
Posted March 16, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes Making Own Your Web More Sustainable I just published the 11th issue of Own Your Web, my newsletter about designing, building, creating, and publishing on the Web. When I started the newsletter back in autumn of 2023, I didn’t yet know what form the newsletter would take on, if people would like it, and also whether I would like doing it or not. Eleven issues in, I can say with confidence that I enjoy researching and writing those issues a lot! And with more than 1700 subscribers via email and RSS after just a few months and after all the feedback I received via social media... #newsletters #ownyourweb #sponsors #supporters 19 Webmentions
Posted March 14, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes Welcome to the IndieWeb Imagine you post and make new friends on an online network for more than a decade – and suddenly, your account gets suspended for no apparent reason. And there is nothing you can do about it. Or imagine the online community you were an active part of for years just closes down and all user data gets deleted after a few months. And there is nothing you can do about it. Or imagine that a site you poured all your thoughts and writing into decides overnight that it might be a good idea to sell access to all user data to a... #indieweb #open web #ownyourweb #personal websites 27 Webmentions
Posted March 14, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes Links Worth Sharing Every day, we browse the Web and scroll our timelines. And every day, we find even more interesting websites, blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and other insights and ideas that we want to document, preserve, and share. The most obvious way to save something of interest still is to create a good old bookmark. And there are many different ways to do this. First of all, you could save your bookmarks in your browser. While there is generally nothing wrong about that and I know many people for whom this solution works well, it can still be a bit cumbersome to... #links #ownyourweb #personal websites 4 Webmentions
Posted February 14, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes We ❤️ RSS In the last issue of Own Your Web, we looked at blogrolls as one way to improve the visibility and discoverability of our sites. Whether or not you want to add a blogroll to your site is a matter of personal preference. But there is something else which probably everyone with a personal website should do: adding an RSS feed. What’s RSS? RSS, which stands for either “Really Simple Syndication” or also “RDF Site Summary” or “Rich Site Summary”, is a way to distribute the content of your site through a feed that people can subscribe to. Basically, you provide a feed... #open web #personal websites #rss #syndication #websites 28 Webmentions
Posted January 10, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes All Things Being Equalized For my birthday, I got a new pair of speakers for my home office / home studio. After looking around for quite some time, I settled on the ADAM Audio T5V in the end. The T5Vs are affordable, entry-level studio monitors with a 5“ woofer that are optimized for smaller rooms. And it doesn’t make sense to blast much more bass into my 3 by 3 meter office anyway. I’m still far from being experienced when it comes to judging the sound quality coming out of professional speakers, but I wanted something that would allow me to reliably judge occasional... #apps #audio #equalization #headphones #music #sound #studio monitors 15 Webmentions
Posted January 8, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes 42 for 42 I’m turning 42 today and yes, I am as surprised about that number as you are. If 42 really is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, then maybe it makes sense to look back on what the old lad actually learned in all those years. So, here is a list of 42 life lessons, similar to the one Chris wrote when he was still 40. Incomplete and mostly unstructured. For my younger self as much as for my children and anyone reading this. Don’t panic. Love yourself. Take care of yourself. You can only help others if you are strong... #life lessons #lists 69 Webmentions
Posted January 7, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes Tour De-Noise Whether you are running online workshops, hosting a live stream, or recording audio or video content, optimal audio quality is absolutely essential. People in your audience might tolerate if your video is noisy or not perfectly sharp. But if your audio quality is poor, for example when something is constantly crackling or whooshing in the background or your voice is distorted, it gets irritating and annoying for your listeners pretty quickly. I’m therefore constantly experimenting with various ways to improve the audio (and video) setup and the acoustics in my little home office in the attic. Last year, I added a... #audio #gear #recording #video 2 Webmentions
Posted January 4, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes What’s Too Good to Be True? The web platform is changing rapidly these days. With every major browser release, more and more powerful features get added, many of which are based on previous input about what web developers need to build better for the web. One way for browser vendors and developer advocates to get this useful input is to ask web developers about what features they are interested in or where their biggest pain points are. Last year, for example, many people shared their CSS wishlists. Brian Kardell, developer advocate at Igalia, just asked the opposite question: which of the features that got shipped in the last... #browsers #css #html #platform #web No webmentions yet
Posted January 3, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes The Best Comment Section on the Internet Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, recently sat down with Tim Ferriss to talk about a bunch of different things. One of those things: blogging. It might not come as a surprise, but Matt described blogging as one of the most rewarding things he did last year. Not only because blogging, or writing in general, forces you to clarify your thinking, or because publishing is such a vulnerable, scary, and thus brave act, but in particular because of what happens afterwards and how much you learn from it. All the comments, the interactions, the follow-ups that make blogging... #blogging #blogs #comments #personal websites #ux #webmention 2 Webmentions
Posted January 1, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes 2024: The Year of the Personal Website At the beginning of 2023, I wrote in a blog post which I titled The Year of the Personal Website: And, looking back at 2023, did we deliver? You bet. 😁 It all started with articles like Bring back personal blogging by Monique Judge for The Verge or the Bring Back Blogging project by Ash Huang and Ryan Putnam, who encouraged us all to get into the habit and publish at least three blog posts until the end of January 2023. Throughout the year, fueled by the further decay of Twitter and the ongoing reshuffling of power on the internet, heaps of us... #indieweb #ownyourweb #personal websites #publishing #web #websites 15 Webmentions
Posted November 22, 2023 by Matthias Ott in Notes Climate Optimism It’s not going well. After all-time heat records were shattered worldwide during heat waves across all continents and ongoing wildfires eradicated 5 % of the entire forest area of Canada, 2023 will be the hottest year ever recorded (1.43°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average to date). At the same time, it feels like nobody is really listening to the scientists who have been warning about the consequences of burning fossil fuels for decades. Greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than ever, the fossil fuel industry is making record profits (I don’t need to look for a link for that one,... #climate #climate action #climate change #hope No webmentions yet
