I’ve added dark mode support to my custom theme, which I ported to Hugo/Micro.Blog from a previous one I made for 11ty, using Alpine Theme as a baseline.
I’ve pushed it to GitHub in case anyone is interested: crlzff/crlzff_theme: Hugo theme for Micro.Blog.
I have published a Books page with (most of) the books I have read in the last ~15 years or so. I collated the list from different sources and personal notes since I stopped using Goodreads & Co. a long time ago, and manually entered each book on the Bookshelf page here on Micro.blog. I thought it would have been a tedious task, but it was quite the opposite, almost funny to notice how my tastes and interest have shifted over the years.
I’ve spent one too many hours in the process of settling on a solution that I liked, design and functionality-wise, and during the said process, I’ve read many interesting articles and visited quite a few good personal libraries. Here are some links, that I’ve already shared with @matthiasott:
I decided to stick to the text-only experiences as with the rest of my website, and not publish the cover art of each book for now, even though that’s a nice feature of Micro.blog. Though the final output might be a bit underwhelming considering my initial grandiose plans, I liked its minimalistic approach.
For now, I avoided going too deep into this rabbit hole and adding highlights and personal notes for each book. Maybe that’s something for v2.0. However, I intend to share my process of curating and resurfacing my highlights in a future post.
I’m happy to have invested the time in doing this, because I think the books you’ve read are in no small part a piece of your own CV.
Going back to that conversation, @Moondeer would you feel like starting a plain ol’ webring between micro.blog users would suit some of your needs in terms of discoverability?
Hey, maybe that’s a plugin in need of development! 😀
Tried Bluesky for the last few days and.. meh. Can’t stand the firehose of memes and fake profiles showing up everywhere. I certainly didn’t miss those. The few profiles I knew of seem like they stopped using the service a month ago, after the media-hyped phase.
Thoughts? What has been your experience?
(Since this is going to be reposted on Bluesky, be warned that it was published first on crlzff.xyz through micro.blog)
The idea is to initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network. The tool helps get to initial critical mass. The network creates the long term value for users, and defensibility for the company. — cdixon | Come for the tool, stay for the network
I feel like this is loosely related to what we were discussing yesterday @Moondeer, @JohnPhilpin, @pratik. I mean, the dynamics of a fledgling platform.
Found this through another article by Benedict Evans, which itself contains some food for thoughts on the topic:
In every new, empty channel, the first people to offer something good are easy to find, and can get rich. Once the channel fills up, the dynamics change. This happened to SEO, SEM, Facebook, Instagram, podcasts, D2C, Youtube, Tiktok and now newsletters. — Notes on newsletters — Benedict Evans
Again, from yesterday’s link:
Hence, I always thought the most appealing part of Flipboard was the manually curated directory of sites to follow. It’s a list of lists, but it isn’t trying to encompass everything, and so, unlike Yahoo, it isn’t unmanageably big.
Right, and that’s why I like the Micro.blog UX so much. The discovery section feels manageable to read, not a firehose cranked up to eleven like other social platforms. Kudos to @jean for doing a great job curating it.
A challenge for future developments, @manton:
But that just relocates the problem - what if you want a list that isn’t on the list of lists? If you wanted to find 5 new sites to read about a topic you care about - ice-climbing, or vintage furniture, or experimental electronic music, or children’s picture books - where would you find it? Can you create a platform for all those lists without turning into Yahoo?
Wondering, while I’m settling on a workflow, what’s the % of people posting on Micro.blog through its website vs. those who use an app for that (official or not, like Draft + actions). @manton
When mentioning someone (like @manton or @help) in a post, if I then export my micro.blog from Design -> Export -> Export theme and Markdown (.zip) do I get a link generated in markdown for each mention? I’m going to check that out.
UPDATE: Yes, it does generate links in the .md file!