Mandaris

I had made a declaration about restarting theme development and I’m pretty happy to have finished it before my self imposed deadline. This is post is mostly about why I changed things versus how I changed them.

Changes to workflow

I spent some time experimenting with git and codeberg to see how I could integrate it with Micro.blog, but wasn’t successful. But, as James mentioned no work is wasted and I was able to take the research about multiple remotes.

git remote add lab-play https://github.com/mandaris/lab-play.git

Looking back, I probably should have made a different name and started the repository as empty versus having GitHub place some defaults that I had to --force to be overwritten.

This allows me to branch, merge, and test on my test instance without worrying that I’ll mess up publish to the main site.

There was a significant amount of trial and error related to having to merge main into the two remotes, but it was mostly me having to learn the new tools.

Performance Tuning?

I removed the link to the tabler css file that would allow me to more easily use the font in my writing. I’ve decided that I’ll go through and just add the ones I specifically want for the interface. I feel that some people will probably use an rss reader and won’t be able to see the fonts anyway.

In addition, I used the font-display attribute for my font definition.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Atkinson";
  src: url("/fonts/AtkinsonHyperlegibleNext-Regular.woff2") format('woff2');
  src: url("/fonts/AtkinsonHyperlegibleNext-Regular.woff2") format('truetype');
  font-weight: normal;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: fallback;
}

I choose fallback despite the recommendations to use swap or optional because I want the user to continue to read without the blip of the page being repainted to adjust for the new font.

I did not minimize the css or remove any classes other than accent-color. The place I was referencing it was marked as not having enough contrast. I’ll have to rethink this as it was there for decrotive purposes.

This is a good time to say that just because something is marked as an issue, it could be a false positive or a way to make something better. In this case, it’s better by not being there.

Where am I?

The moving of the About me section was the easiest part. I removed the media query section in css that would place the section to the side on larger screens. I then made the width larger of the initial 1 column layout.

grid-template-columns: minmax(300px, 75ch);

I choose 75ch because my research had stated that between 70 to 80 characters was the ideal line limit for reading. If you see something different let me know.

What about the transition?

I’m still working on that. Part of me wants to throw my hands in the air state that it’s just bugginess from it being a new thing, but I think it might be because the URLs on the server end with .html and my local instance has /.

I’ll continue working on this throughout the month.

Various other tweets

I made the h1 smaller in order to reduce focus on it. I really want people to come into the site and just start reading the content. That’s part of the reason I moved the About me section.

I also removed some of the links at the top of the page. I’ve been debating a hamburger menu, but have decided against it because I don’t want navigational items to be hidden from the user.

Pretty much the opposite of Liquid Glass.

My youngest daughter told me that this is her favorite horror movie. I think it's a great movie that has really stood the test of time.

Speaking of time, I feel that it’s probably the scariest part of this movie. I remember watching this movie when I was younger and being introduced to the idea of living forever and not liking it. I was lucky enough to only know death as taking those that I didn’t know or interact with on a regular basis. The idea that someone close to me wasn’t a possibility at the time. I was understanding of my own mortality but not of my friends and family. To have them gone and for me to go on and on. That was scary.

Anyway, back to the film.

I’m happy that Maryl Streep and Goldie Hawn were in it. They had charisma and power that never made me doubt that they could have THE Bruce Willis wrapped around their fingers. Bruce does a great job of being the undesirable object of desire for Maryl and Goldie.

Overview

Madeline is married to Ernest, who was once her arch-rival Helen's fiancé. After recovering from a mental breakdown, Helen vows to kill Madeline and steal back Ernest. Unfortunately for everyone, the introduction of a magic potion causes things to be a great deal more complicated than a mere murder plot.

As I was about to post, I thought about how it compares to The Substance…

This was a good season of TV that concluded with a finale that just left me with questions.

One of the things I’ve appreciated about the show is that it focuses the story about the people more than science fiction. I love what the actors have done, year-over-year and tune in just to see what’s going to happen next. That being said, I don’t know where this series is going to go from here. They’ve had so many questions not so many answers. I’ve never really felt that with the show when we first started, I knew that there was an overarching plan, but I didn’t really care too much about the details.

So I don’t know if I’ll sign up or be around for the fourth season but it’ll be interesting to see.

Overview

152 years after the events of season two, The Foundation has become increasingly established far beyond its humble beginnings while the Cleonic Dynasty's Empire has dwindled. As both of these galactic powers forge an uneasy alliance, a threat to the entire galaxy appears in the fearsome form of a warlord known as "The Mule," whose sights are set on ruling the universe by use of physical and military force as well as mind control. It’s anyone's guess who will win, who will lose, who will live and who will die as Hari Seldon, Gaal Dornick, the Cleons and Demerzel play a potentially deadly game of intergalactic chess.

Watched: Casablanca 🍿

I think knowing too much of what was going to happen at the end may have affected the way that I felt about this movie. I knew that there was going to be a plane and it was just a question of how we would get there.

Honestly, I can see a lot of troupes that we would see in other films later on and I have to say thank you for that. But, I don’t think I would watch this again.

"Harder To Breathe" by Maroon 5

Listen on Apple Music

A song from college or early adulthood.

I distinctly remember having an opportunity to see these guys in concert for free.

I chose to hang out with some friends and those plans fell through.

I kick myself on a regular basis because of it.

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"Somebody's Watching Me (Single Version)" by Rockwell

Listen on Apple Music

A song from the 1980s that you like or means something to you.

Tis the season! I like this song more because I know some of the history behind it. Rockwellwas actually the son of Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown and used this name to get signed.

Michael Jackson sings the chorus but isn't credited and I like to think of it as the Halloween Michael Jackson song that isn't Michael Jackson.

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"Achy Breaky Heart" by Billy Ray Cyrus

Listen on Apple Music

What's a song that you like but most of your friends don't.

I'm just going on a limb here. In all honesty, I don't talk to my friends about music that they don't like.

I like this song it's fun and light. I think there's also a line dance as well.

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This post is a bit of a ramble and more for documenting my thinking.

Things have been kind of hectic in my personal life and I’ve been taking a step away from creating and interacting. In the time that I’ve been away, there have been changes to Hugo and the Micro.blog. In some ways, it’s been a relief that Micro.blog is using v0.117. Other than the changes in v0.132 (The introduction of alerts although v0.140 and v0.142 has some significant fixes to this), I haven’t really seen anything catches my interest.

Still, I have seen some interesting things being done with blogs and want to be able to take advantage of the newer versions of Hugo when Manton and crew make it available.

I thought I would document what steps I went through. I’ve begun writing this on September 24th and worked on it in my spare time until clicking the publish button.

Environmental Setup

At the beginning of this process, I had Hugo v0.146.3 installed on my MacBook Air running Tahoe 26.1. I want to be able to test in different versions of Hugo so did a search and found several article pointing to hvm (Hugo Version Manager). The tool was created by Joe Mooring who is very active on the Hugo Forums and you can go to the GitHub repository to review the code.

The first thing I did was use Kostas’ instructions for using brew to get a certain version of running a specific version of Hugo and then I downloaded the v.117 hugo ruby installer.

That didn’t work.

So, I downloaded the homebrew-core from the GitHub repository and then changing to the commit that has the version I want.

git checkout e243fd4

That didn’t work for me as well and I grew tired of trying to find the right combinations of brew commands.

So, I followed the directions and ran the next step to see an error

mandaris@skylite ~ % hvm gen alias --help
zsh: command not found: hvm

That’s when I realized that my system is almost a clean install other than the installation of the command line tools and brew, I didn’t have things like /usr/local/bin or anything else that I had taken from granted in my previous setup.

I set up oh-my-zsh and kept the defaults. I forgot why I use this but not how. I added the following to my .zshrc

export PATH=$PATH:$(go env GOPATH)/bin

Then new shell instances will be able to find the executables from GO.

➜  ~ which hvm
/Users/mandaris/go/bin/hvm

When I ran it the first time, I didn’t see my option and asked on the forums before I went through the associated documents to see that I could add the specific version to a .hvm file that I can put in the root of the folder I’m working with.

➜  local-hugo hvm status
The current directory is configured to use Hugo v0.117.0.
Cached versions of the Hugo executable:

v0.151.0
v0.117.0

Now I’m able to switch between the versions easily.

The only problem is that some of the plugins that I use locally are not compatible with that version. For example, the stoot plugin to embed mastodon post.

Hashtag Goals

Other than the work to keep the theme ready for newer versions of Hugo, I’ve identified a couple other things that I want to work on.

1. Increase the performance of the site
   I don’t want to remove styling or minimize the file because I feel that it will help others learn and I’m too afraid to kill my darlings.
2. Move the About me to the bottom
   I feel having it on the side on larger screens draws focus away from the writing on page.

In addition, I have to figure out why @view-transition doesn’t work on the server but works on my local copy of the site.

The goal is to get this all finished before Thanksgiving break. So if you’re reading this please feel free to bug me about it as my self imposed deadline draws near.

Take Care!

I've heard the phrase The Clothes make the Man and I really liked this example that David wrote about discussing how his costume helps him.

I think the correct costume helps make the task “succeed” - lowers the friction point of the task at hand.

I’ve heard people talking about using certain kinds of music or sections of their home to get in the best headspace for different things.

"Ain't No Sunshine" by Bill Withers

Listen on Apple Music

A song from the 1970s that you like or means something to you.

I like this song because my wife likes it when I sing it to her.

She deserves every love song and more.

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