#grafikdesignfeed

Even today, we spent a few more hours refining our research and information tool we call Grafikdesignfeed (I have written about it here before), to cover some more topics and to improve our custom search queries with filters as well.

On the topic of filters: I usually do not have any blocks in place on any social media website (i.e. usually I do not block people/accounts), but I am under the impression that, should I want to use social media as a research tool in the future (looking for what people do and say about certain topics), then I should start using filters there as well.

Because I want to do that.

Also, I am adding more books I want to read in 2025 from my Bücherregal page on my website to my Goodreads “Want to Read” list as well, which I originally started out doing, but then some ideas for our FreshRSS service came up… you know how it is: it is not procrastination, it’s more like cleaning up after having ceased to be a perfectionist with a really long to-do list: you work through these things so they don’t occupy space in your mind any longer.

Speaking of Goodreads: being the way things are, certain books (mostly ones written in German) can’t be found on Goodreads, so I eventually had to decide to add them there myself. By joining the Goodreads Librarians Group, I can add a book missing from the database myself (a thing I remember having done for the first time some ten years ago now).

So, scrolling down the page on which services are supported for both book data and cover images, I found that the German Deutsche Nationalbibliothek is supported, which is Germany’s national library (everything published in Germany is most likely there), but which in my case led nowhere. So I went with the publisher’s website instead as the source of book data and cover image. Fingers crossed the people at Goodreads accept this contribution (found it on Amazon as well, after looking for it on WorldCat, did not find it by searching for it on Amazon directly, using its ISBN though – odd). You can see my book request here, if you are into that.

From my bookshelf page on my website, I copy and paste the titles into my Zotero, copy the ISBN from there (to make sure I add the right version of the book on Goodreads to my “Want to Read” list; there are versions of books 😖) and drop it into Goodreads.

Ideally, I can move on with the next book right away, but otherwise I need to do the extra step described above.

In the end, there is only one more book left over which I need to add the same way as above. And that book is very special, in a lot of ways (but not special in the way Knauer’s Transformation is: as much as I enjoy ergodic literature, when the ergodism leaves the page and starts to format the book, things get really unusable really quickly), so I will add it after my first request goes through.

Just something to add to my ever-shrinking to-do.

Neat reading list. Looks like I moonlight as a librarian of sorts, as well as moonlighting as a hacker and illustrator.

Due to the world’s toughest internet laws, running a service which posts the best graphic design articles in Germany is not an easy thing to do.

Things like self‑hosting, reposting on your own domain, and so on are absolutely out of the question, unless you are really keen on testing out the limits of your (legal) budget.

So we slowly started rebuilding our project grafikdesignfeed using freshrss, ifttt, buffer and free socials.

The logic is as follows:

freshrss gathers all kinds of rss‑feeds, we favorite the articles we think are cool, these get sent to IFTTT where an applet takes these favorites, sends them to a buffer account which sends these favorites to (as of now) our account on Bluesky and our account on X (we are working on more socials as well, but that takes time; not work, just time, so we are waiting) and that is the whole machine called grafikdesignfeed.

We are doing this because we want to provide a service to the German‑speaking part of the (not only graphic) design world, and because we really like building useful little machines like this one.