Going back and forth trying to build a blogroll page, which I talked about Tuesday. The issue is with creating a shortcode for it in Micro.blog’s Hugo code.
It should be a rather straightforward process, but it doesn’t work as it should. I’m waiting for more feedback.
The Blogroll is now up…!
On my way back, I always enjoy crossing east to west through Central Park. How can you not? 📷
I couldn’t sleep so I’ve made some tweaks to the blog in the Archive & Search page. Most of these are documented in the CSS file in my repository.
Testing out Kagi, Seriously this time
You might have caught it in the screenshot from my post yesterday: a little G icon at the top of my Safari browser. Well, it’s true; I paid for my first month. I ran out of the free 100 searches in a matter of days, hardly enough to give it a real test drive.
So far I have been busy setting it up and bugging their support (in Discord of all places). I am curious about their FastGPT, an integration of chatGPT into their search results, and I wasn’t sure how to get it to work. It’s good that I asked because I learned some important things.
Kagi’s support is quick and responsive. A staff person was chatting with me and spent time answering my grilling question about their somewhat misleading advertising (unlimited FastGPT seems to only apply to the $10 tier, but this is also true for the $5 tier - as long as you don’t run out of searches). It left me with a good impression at the end.
Kagi is complex and has many tweaks that are not obvious immediately. For instance, I learned that FastGPT is the same as the “Quick Answer” button available on the search results page in Kagi, and you can integrate it with your search seamlessly if you end your search query with a question mark, which will give you a summary from FastGPT right the top of the results. This is a smart way of integrating it quickly without shoving AI in your face like the way Microsoft does with Co-Pilot, which you need to actively turn off (and then it still sticks out annoyingly right under your search bar - but we can file it under “normal Microsoft behavior” and move on). It will take me some time to learn about things and see if it’s worth the investment.
If you have any tips or other blogs and videos that helped you catch on with Kagi quickly, feel free to share!
You know, Compact Tabs on Safari are not half bad. I remember they caused an uproar back when they were first introduced, when I wasn’t using a Mac nearly as much and when I did, I used Chrome.
Today, I turned Compact Tabs on while looking at my blog, and I like the look:
There are other things that are nice too, like the tabs shrinking and expanding depending on the number of them you have open, or the arrow keys for back and forward a page on the browser getting out of the way if you don’t have a page to go back or forward too. This is a nice design idea.
Sure, it takes some time to get used to, and I can imagine the tabs getting crushed together is not ideal for power users who have 100 tabs open, but Safari is not my workhorse: for that, I have Edge with its vertical tabs, which works well.
This is yet another thing that makes the switch from Arc easier.
New Day, a new reason to scratch my head. This time, User Agent Stylesheet on Safari. It overwrites my CSS and makes my title bold. (This is now fixed, thanks to Christopher Kirk-Nielsen! see below)
Here’s my website’s title on Firefox, Edge and Arc (Chromium-based):
… And here’s my website’s title on Safari:
The issue seems to be rooted in something called “User Agent Stylesheet,” which, from my understanding, is a user-browser-made CSS stylesheet that comes on top of the website’s CSS and overwrites it. My website is not the only place, by the way. Certain websites I visit also seem to have too much of a font-weight, though most are fine.
It makes sense to adjust certain visual elements to the user’s liking, and I can stand behind that. Your browser, your rules.
However, I didn’t know this thing existed. I have no idea why Safari thinks I’d like all <H1> tags in bold and where to find this setting to get rid of it.
The fix: define the desired font-weight.
Why: I did not define my bold-weight for the site’s header because it looked fine as long as I used Arc and Firefox. Safari is a bit special, and it decided that since this looks like a header, it should probably be bold. With the font-weight defined, it uses what it’s told.
As I’m working on a Blogroll page, I moved the search 🔍 function to the Archive page, where it belongs with the rest of the TAONAW stuff with help from @sod . It still needs some tweaking to look better there, but it works nicely. Go ahead, search away!
This is just a geek announcement that my exploration into FFMPEG the other day paid off: a screencast of 27 minutes and 2.8 GB shrunk to 75 MB. Yep. It’s a bit fuzzy but still very readable and easy to follow. I 💙 FFMPEG.
The return of the blogroll
I wrote about trying out blogrolls last week, and the technicalities of how to customize blogrolls on Micro.blog are in my notes, in case you’re interested. I’m satisfied with how it looks on my archive page, and I want to create a dedicated blogroll page on the blog. But what’s a blogroll anyway?
Wikipedia explains it as “A list of other blogs that a blogger might recommend by providing links to them (usually in a sidebar list),” but I prefer indiweb’s explanation: “A blogroll is a list of other sites that you read, are a follower of, or recommend.” They have a dedicated page with more technicalities (follow the link above).
For me, a blogroll is a list of blogs (personal websites maintained by one person about their lives and what they do) that I visit often (I read every post they write or every other post) and publish content regularly (once a week at minimum). Popularity doesn’t really matter, though I find that most people I read regularly are pretty popular around these parts of the web: if you read my blog, you’re probably familiar with the “usual suspects” on my list.
In my opinion, that’s because these folks write often, and they write about interesting things. As a matter of fact, I have some form of undiagnosed dyslexia (I’m pretty sure of it), and I don’t remember people’s names easily. I’ve been following Kevin Quirk for months before I realized he’s actually one of the creators/admins of Fosstodon, believe it or not.
Right now I’m looking into creating a dedicated blogroll page on my blog. There are a few ways to go at this, and I’m asking around the Micro.blog support forum for some leads as well. We’ll see how it goes.
Helldivers 2’s So Big It’s Taken Over A Small Town
In a post to the Helldivers subreddit, the user—who goes by the username Kaleon—shares that they have bumped into people talking about Helldivers 2 all over the place. They have overheard everyone from the local butcher to their barista talking about the game, and apparently even seen a Helldivers bumper sticker in the wild.
This game is the biggest thing since WoW, if you’re asking me. It will get there. I am not sure why it’s that good and that addicting, but it is. Now if you excuse me, I gotta spread Democracy over here.
The issue I had yesterday with Elfeed-org is fixed. As it turns out, the parent headers for the feed have to be tagged with “elfeed” for the feeds to load correctly. It looks like this:
* Blogs :elfeed:
** Blog 1 feed here
** Blog 2 feed here
** Blog 3 feed here
* News :elfeed:
** News site 1 feed here
** News site 2 feed here
** News site 3 feed here
That’s all that was needed! Thanks again, takeonrules!
And here is what my RSS list looks like in action. It’s nice to sit back with a cup of tea (coffee is a morning thing!) during lunch break and see what’s up:
My morning sandwich is one slide of bread cut in half with vegan pesto, one slice of vegan Gouda cheese, one sliced cherry tomato, and Dijon mustard (Grey Poupon). 📷 🥗
Washing it down with fancy Borjomi carbonated water.
Today was a good day for a walk. I stopped for a sandwich from one of my local favorite stops, sat in the park to enjoy it with some water and cake, and continued to cross over the newly dubbed “we love you” bridge. 📷
Scratching my head at an Emacs issue: Elfeed-org doesn’t seem to load my feeds. I’m not sure why, everything looks OK. I have my feeds.org and I have the path defined in rmh-elfeed-org-files and it does show the value it’s supposed to have.
Does anyone have a working config I can look at?
I’m playing The Beast Inside 🎮, and I’m at the point I hate the most about games such as these: running away from a monster you can’t kill but can kill you. And when you die, you have to start again from the last save point, going through the whole thing over again, giving up any progress you’ve made.
As I was rage-quitting this time (identified by mashing Alt+F4 and getting up hurriedly with a mumbled cursed in my native tongue), It occurred to me that this sad clichè game developers force on me is the real boss I have to face. Not just in this game, but in all the games of this genre.
“Heh, Maybe I should just play Alien Isolation then,” I muttered to myself, and then, rubbing my beard: “You know, this is not a bad idea…” by which I mean of course it’s a bad idea. A horrible one.
For those who haven’t heard about this game, Alien: Isolation is all about escaping a boss you can’t kill, and one of the biggest bosses as well: the Alien from the movie Alien (a Xenomorph). The Alien, which was praised for its AI in the game, has the ability to search for you by sight and sound (and smell?); it kills you in seconds if it finds you. There’s nothing you can do. The whole game is built around this principle. So, if I manage to win this game, games that only have a segment of this kind of annoyance like The Beast Inside will be a walk in the park.
Image credit: rockpapershotgun.
Love me some hot sauce 🔥📷
You know what. This is not a bad way to ask for tips. I’m enjoying this.
Commander Keen is on Steam, and I didn’t know?! Hold my beer! Backlog shmaglog, this is one classic sonofamitch that needs replaying.
I know I have only myself to blame: I spent 20 minutes writing a post in the web-ui, and I clicked the timeline button by mistake. Poof, the post is gone. No draft, not nothing. Is auto-save really that hard to implement?
Manual of Style and Blogroll notes
I’ve added two notes to my stash: Micro.blog blogrolls and my manual of style.
Micro.blog’s blogrolls are already documented in the official help documentation, but I wanted to add my own experience and design aspect to that. Having a blogroll is a nice idea, and I’m thinking about my “rules” for those. For now, the blogroll is part of my Archive page, but I’m probably going to move it out of there.
The manual of style is something I have started to take more seriously for work and am now trying to implement across my notes on Gitlab as well. It is mostly based on the Microsoft Manual of Style, but there are some elements I have to come up with myself. It’s a constant work in progress that I will keep adding to.