Labarum: Do Not Reinvent the Wheel

I’ve been working on this theme for a while. Marking things off and adding things to a list in my head of different things that I want to do in order to scratch my own itch.

The truth of the matter is that I may never be done done with this. There are edge cases that I can envision, those that I never thought of, and those that are so minute that it’s not worth putting the effort into.

With that being said, I can’t do everything.

In fact, I should not do everything.

Case in point, I was looking into getting my mastodon account verified and I was attempting to pull the host and username from the metadata that Micro.blog provides.

Otávio created a plugin [GitHub Repo] that references $.Params.mastodon.hostname but this is only available on the post level. I’d like it in the head so that I can get associated accounts validated and for other tools like browser extensions.

I sent an email to @manton and he verified this behavior. I put some code into the theme and it will eventually work without users having to do anything more.

But, what can I do until then?

I thought about making my own plugin that a user can put in the values for hostname and username. I could make my own separate branch of the theme that would have this hard coded. Since I’m working on this, maybe I could also add a separate piece to add more control over avatars and images.

I could … I could … I could …

No.

I know that I’m not the only one who feels that they could implement things to make things better. But, this isn’t my specialty. This is a fun project.

I quick search of plugins and I found the Meta tags plugin [GitHub Repo] by Manton.

I put the snippet that I wanted in and boom!

Problem solved.

The lesson?

I, you, and everyone out there don’t need to make everything.

Don’t let your perfect vision of what things are supposed to be stop you. Use the time that you have now to make and do something else.

Happy Holidays.