Micro.blog on Jayeless.net

Sun, 15 May 2022 11:59:22 +1000

Liked “Thoughts on Micro.blog” by Robb Knight

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 11:25:38 +1100

It’s one year ago today that I decided to come back to blogging, and joined Micro.blog 😊 Honestly, it feels like it’s already been much longer! Blogging, and taking part in the great MB community, quickly became an integral part of my daily routine. Here’s to many years more!

Truncating Only Posts With Titles on Micro.blog

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 16:24:30 +1100

When I first got started on Micro.blog, one thing I wasn’t satisfied with was that my long posts appeared in full on my blog’s homepage. Really, I wanted to give people a way to quickly check out what I’d recently posted, and having to scroll the whole way through long entries that may not have interested them (considering I blog about an eclectic mix of things) wasn’t exactly ideal. Micro.blog Help has a guide to showing truncated posts on your front page , but for me this option was even worse: the truncated text shown is stripped of HTML, so my front page was left with link posts with no links in them, and photo posts with no photos in them. There had to be a better way!

And of course, there is! At least for my set-up, where all the long posts that I want truncated have titles, and all my posts without titles are things I don’t mind appearing in full. Your mileage may vary if this description doesn’t apply to you. The solution is to use an if-statement to display posts one way if they have a title, and a different way if they don’t have one. This change will apply to the homepage as well as your category pages. For this quick guide, I’ll provide examples from Micro.blog’s Default theme, but of course the principles can be applied to any other theme as well.

As with Micro.blog’s original truncation guide , you will need to create a custom theme (click through for more detailed instructions on that). You’ll also need to find and edit the layouts/_default/list.html file in your newly created custom theme. Look for the part of it that says this:

<div class="e-content">  
	{{ .Content }}  
</div>

Replace that with this:

{{ if .Title }}
	<div class="e-summary">
	{{ .Summary }}
	{{ if .Truncated }}
		<p><a href="{{ .RelPermalink }}">Read More</a></p>
	{{ end }}
	</div>
{{ else }}
	<div class="e-content">
		{{ .Content }}
	</div>
{{ end }}

The code is fairly self-explanatory, but if you’re not familiar with if/else statements at all and want a little extra explanation:

Everything between {{ if .Title }} and {{ else }} states what is to be displayed if a post does have a title.
Everything between {{ else }} and the final {{ end }} states what’s to be done in the “else” case, if a post does not have a title.
The class on the <div> changes if the post has a title, from e-content to e-summary. This isn’t strictly necessary, but it’ll tell any semantic parser of your front page that they’re not seeing the full post, just a summary of it.
In the case that a post has a title, {{ .Content }} changes to {{ .Summary }}, to display the summary (in this case, the beginning of the post) instead of the full post.
Under the summary, you’ll see another if-statement: {{ if .Truncated }}. This states what is to be done in the event that the post has been truncated – in this case, that is to display a “read more” link to the post’s permalink. If the post has not been truncated then we don’t need anything to be displayed here, which is why the if-statement has no {{ else }} and goes straight to {{ end }}.

If you want more control over where your post is truncated, you can insert a special comment tag between paragraphs to tell Micro.blog where that should be done. That special code is <!‐‐more‐‐>, as mentioned in the original truncation guide. You can technically insert it into the middle of a paragraph, but Micro.blog will interpret that as two separate paragraphs, one either side of the “more” tag, and display it as such. To avoid unexpected behaviour, just put it between paragraphs.

There is one other big advantage to inserting this break point manually: where by default, Micro.blog will strip HTML and Markdown formatting out of the summaries it displays, it will not strip formatting out of your summary if you use this “more” tag. This means that if you have a titled post with formatting (like links or photos, or even simple bold or italic) that you want to display on your home or category pages, you can make that happen by manually inserting this “more” tag. Make sure that any formatting is closed before the “more” tag though; don’t put it in the middle of a list or a multi-paragraph blockquote.

And that just about brings this tutorial to a close. For anyone else who’s wanted to learn how to truncate titled (long) posts while displaying untitled (short) ones in full, I hope this has helped you out!

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 11:03:45 +1100

Yooooo, I just found out what Micro.blog’s “New Test Blog” function under “Edit Custom Themes” does. Kind of obvious in retrospect… it creates a secondary testing blog for you so you can work on custom layouts and plug-ins without screwing up your actual blog. This’ll be handy 😎

Two Weeks on Micro.blog, and Some Discussion of “Likes”

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 22:07:07 +1100

As of yesterday, I’ve now had this site on Micro.blog for two weeks. So far, I’ve really been enjoying the experience. It’s been interesting to realise that I actually do have lots to share when I have a consolidated space that feels like mine to share them, and rather than letting those stray thoughts go, I’ve been typing them up and putting them into posts (or drafts) more often. In line with POSSE , this has also prompted me to post more things on traditional social media, which has made me feel a bit more connected with some of those friends and relatives I probably should’ve been making more of an effort with all along. Good developments! And I’ve also found that the Micro.blog community itself is pretty awesome – people are generally nice, post interesting things, and it seems to be the perfect size for the “Discover” page to work really well, as a kind of curated highlights of everyone’s posts.

One thing that I have been missing from traditional social media while over here is “likes”, or instant feedback buttons generally. Micro.blog has made the deliberate decision not to incorporate these, stating:

If you like something and want the author to know it, you can reply. We believe this encourages more thoughtful sharing.

…and this is fine; I mean, I understand this logic! I guess the struggle I’ve had is that when I see a photo I like of a cute animal or pretty landscape or something like that, I don’t usually have a whole enlightening response to type out in return. But I still do like the idea of the post creator knowing at least someone saw and appreciated their post. So, I’ve been making the effort to type out one or two-sentence comments, trying to tailor them a bit to the specific post (because something generic like “Great photo!” sounds like it could’ve been pumped out by a spam bot, you know?). I’m probably not replying to every post I see that I would’ve hit the “like” button on, but I’m feeling pretty virtuous nonetheless.

…and it is funny, in some ways, because when I was much younger and had a blog there were no “like” buttons then. You did have to comment if you wanted someone to know their post was read and made at least a momentary impact on someone else. It didn’t feel like a big deal then, so why does it feel like an effort now? Has modern social media changed our expectations, made us feel like we should be able to interact on a post with one click of a button? But then at the same time, honestly, is it really a bad thing to make interactions so easy?

I guess my feeling is this: if someone was wavering between leaving a comment or just hitting the “like” button, it’d be better to push them to leave that comment, because a comment is usually more meaningful to the post author than a mere “like”. On the other hand, if the absence of a “like” button would make that person not interact at all, then as a post author I’d kinda prefer they have a “like” button to enable that low-effort interaction. You could even offer a few different emoji reactions, as Facebook now does. The Micro.blog userbase seems actually pretty good at putting the effort into leaving real comments, but on some other sites (or if I had a blog that wasn’t integrated into a social media platform like this), this lack can result in people making post after post that gets no apparent response, and feeling like they’re shouting into the void. This is definitely something I’ve experienced when I’ve tried blogging on Dreamwidth over the last couple of years. Now, to be fair, I don’t know that “like” buttons would have fixed the problem, considering that finding blogs you actually want to read is also much harder over there, but it is a question they’ve grappled with more than once nonetheless.

Now, you can post likes with the Webmentions standard , but this isn’t an aspect of Webmentions that Micro.blog currently supports, and honestly the extent to which support for this has been implemented across different platforms looks so variable and messy that I think this would be hard for non-techies to use, at present. So for the time being, I think leaving actual comments on blogs is something I’ll have to reconcile myself to. And as I mentioned, there are plus sides to making myself to do this. However… I still kind of miss my “like” buttons 😭