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Feb. 13, 2026 » Matthias Kestenholz » [Archived Version]
Podcasts I like listening to (2026 edition) I have published another post like this almost two years ago. I like listening to podcasts even more than I did back then, when I only just started diving into this world. Sometimes I really like the silence. Other times, podcasts accompany my training regime, my chores and my (short) commute when I’m going to the office and not working from home. Let me say that I’m not going to differentiate between technology, society, politics and other topics. Ev…
Read MoreJan. 14, 2026 » Matthias Kestenholz » [Archived Version]
My 2025 in review I have been inspired by several posts where people reviewed the past year to write such a post too. Vacations I have been going snowboarding for the first time in many many years in February. I have been skiing and snowboarding a lot in my teens and twenties. After moving further away from the alps and also rupturing my cruciate ligament while playing Fussball (soccer) I have been less motivated to pursue these riskier sports and have instead mostly been running and biking. S…
Read MoreDec. 17, 2025 » Matthias Kestenholz » [Archived Version]
Rich text editors: How restrictive can we be? How restrictive should a rich text editor be? It’s a question I keep coming back to as I work on FeinCMS and Django-based content management systems. I published the last blog post on django-prose-editor specifically in August 2025, Menu improvements in django-prose-editor. The most interesting part of the blog post was the short mention of the TextClass extension at the bottom which allows adding a predefined list of CSS classes to arbitrary spans …
Read MoreDec. 5, 2025 » Matthias Kestenholz » [Archived Version]
Weeknotes (2025 week 49) I seem to be publishing weeknotes monthly, so I’m now thinking about renaming the category :-) Mosparo I have started using a self-hosted mosparo instance for my captcha needs. It’s nicer than Google reCAPTCHA. Also, not sending data to Google and not training AI models on traffic signs feels better. Fixes for the YouTube 153 error Simon Willison published a nice writeup about YouTube embeds failing with a 153 error. We have also encountered this problem in the wild and…
Read MoreNov. 5, 2025 » Matthias Kestenholz » [Archived Version]
Thoughts about Django-based content management systems I have almost exclusively used Django for implementing content management systems (and other backends) since 2008. In this time, content management systems have come and gone. The big three systems many years back were django CMS, Mezzanine and our own FeinCMS. During all this time I have always kept an eye open for other CMS than our own but have steadily continued working in my small corner of the Django space. I think it’s time to write …
Read MoreNov. 4, 2025 » Matthias Kestenholz » [Archived Version]
Weeknotes (2025 week 45) Autumn is nice I love walking through the forest with all the colors and the rustling when you walk through the leaves on the ground. Updated packages since 2025-10-23 feincms3 5.4.3: Small fix for the YouTube IFRAME; it seems that the referrerpolicy attribute is now necessary for the embed to work everywhere. django-json-schema-editor 0.8.2: Allowed forwarding more options to the prose editor component; specifically, not just extensions but also the undocument…
Read MoreOct. 23, 2025 » Matthias Kestenholz » [Archived Version]
Weeknotes (2025 week 43) I published the last weeknotes entry in the first half of September. Drama in OSS I have been following the Ruby gems debacle a bit. Initially at Feinheit we used our own PHP-based framework swisdk2 to build websites. This obviously didn’t scale and I was very annoyed with PHP, so I was looking for alternatives. I remember comparing Ruby on Rails and Django, and decided to switch from PHP/swisdk2 to Python/Django for two reasons: The automatically generated admin interf…
Read MoreOct. 22, 2025 » Matthias Kestenholz » [Archived Version]
My favorite Django packages Inspired by other posts I also wanted to write up a list of my favorite Django packages. Since I’ve been working in this space for so long and since I’m maintaining quite a large list of packages I worry a bit about tooting my own horn too much here; that said, the reasons for choosing some packages hopefully speak for themselves. Also, I’m sure I’m forgetting many many packages here. Sorry for that in advance. Core Django speckenv: Loads environment variables from …
Read MoreSept. 12, 2025 » Matthias Kestenholz » [Archived Version]
LLMs are making me a better programmer… I’m still undecided about LLMs for programming. Sometimes they are very useful, especially when working on a clearly stated problem within a delimited area. Cleaning the code up afterwards is painful and takes a long time though. Even for small changes I’m unsure if using LLMs is a way to save (any) resources, be it time, water, energy or whatever. They do help me get started, and help me be more ambitious. That’s not a new idea. Simon Willison wrote a po…
Read MoreSept. 10, 2025 » Matthias Kestenholz » [Archived Version]
Weeknotes (2025 week 37) I’m having a slow week after the last wisdom tooth extraction. Finally! I’m slowly recuperating from that. I’m trying to split up the blog posts a bit and writing more standalone pieces instead of putting everything into weeknotes. Publishing more focussed pieces sounds like a good thing and should also help me with finding my own writing later. Releases django-content-editor 8.0.2: I fixed the ordering calculation in the cloning functionality; the tests are a bit too …
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