Mandaris

In high school, I had to read a book titled “Go Ask Alice”. It was a book composed of journal entries of a young woman who get addicted to drugs and experiences a lot of misfortune before ultimately dying from an overdose.

One of the interesting things about it was during the class discussion, we talked about how the book wasn’t actually real and that the accounts in the book might be a composition of different stories put together. An allegory of what could happens if you do drugs.

I used to think that something like that would do the opposite of keeping kids off drugs. Once you know that “Alice” wasn’t real, then what else isn’t real in the story.

It was disingenuous.

A similar book recently came out about “A million little pieces” and it was worse as the author at first claimed it was his own story and was even in the Oprah Winfrey’s book club.

But, now I think I can look upon these works from a different view point.

These stories don’t have to be 100% accurate.

It’s because we see them time and time again. Different names, different faces.

Same out come.

My daughter was telling me about a classmate at her school who was bragging about how she was high during school.

Does it matter if her name is “Alice”?

I just pushed a point release of the theme to GitHub. The majority of the changes are related to colors and line adjustments based off of reading 12 Modern CSS One-Line Upgrades by Stephanie Eckles.

Crossing the line

Years ago, I read an article stating that although it’s good to underline links, it can be difficult in some circumstance because certain characters like q, j, p will touch the line. Some developers used box-shadow get around this and I had taken that route for this theme.

When I read Stephanie’s article, I came across a section I learned about text-underline-offset. I also checked that I can use it in most browsers before I let myself get excited. I spent the last couple of days refactoring my CSS to use this finally posted it.

There are still instances where the text intersects the line, but during writing this post, I came across this article on styling with underlines by Ollie Williams. In it, he mentions that the property text-decoration-skip-ink is on by default.

…

Well, I’m hoping that this understanding of how these things work lead to a better site in the future. Although, I still use box-shadow as a makeshift highlight for hovering over links, removing it from link underlining reduces complexity.

The space between us

Other than that, I’m doing some adjustments to line-height. Elements such as ruby, rt, sub, and sup can cause the linespacing not to be uniform within a paragraph. I adjusted the spacing by doing this in the root element but I do not like the way that it added space between all the other block elements on the page.

I pushed this change but it’s probably moving to the top of the list of priorities after I do some more research on the rhythm of line spacing.

Another coat of paint

I’ve decided to change the color for the headings so that it is closer to the basic font. This will increase the contrast ratio and make it easier to read.

For this, I learned to let go of trying to make everything pop out at you and let my readers enjoy reading the site.

The ReadMe

When I do a point release, I update the README.md on the GitHub project page.

Here are the release notes for this point release.

• Improve h* tags by changing color to --text-alt
• Make changes to text-decoration inspired by 12 Modern CSS One-Line Upgrades to various elements
• Turn on debugging by default temporarily
• Modify cursor on <abbr>
• Adjust line-height to make sub, sup, and ruby elements less obtrusive
• Add accent-color to root of CSS

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments!

This is the 1991 debut album from Color Me Badd and one of my favorites. This is a page where you can find links on where to listen to it.It’s not for kids and this post might be the most risqué thing I have ever posted. But, the world is kind of crazy, so I’m hoping that this entertains at least one more person than myself.

I probably listened to this album way before I should have, but it really highlights the innocence of youth in that I had No idea what most of these songs were about. They had good beats and harmonies that kept me holding on to my father’s scratched CD long after I had something to play with it.

I was getting tired of some of the regular albums that I jam out to. I thought I would give this one try and write down how it makes me feel as an adult.

1. I Wanna Sex You Up

“The ticktock you don’t stop”. I had no idea what this song was about. What were they doing and how come they wanted to do it all night long?

Still love the harmonies of the group and I found myself getting back into the groove.

I now understand why people would want to unplug their phones so that they aren’t disturbed, but for completely different reasons.

2. All 4 Love

This one makes me think of malt shops and quartets. Probably the most “innocent” of the songs on this album and a nice balance from the first track. I don’t think I’ve ever chosen to play this song. It usually comes up because i am listening to the whole album. Not bad, and kind of cute.

3. Heartbreaker

Harmonies and a dance beat. A song about how some people will take advantage of you.

“You’re just a using girl, you’re driving me like a car”.

4. I Adore Mi Amor

Seriously one of the best songs on the album. This is the first album that I ever had with a language that wasn’t English. When I would sing along, I just mumbled in this part and waited for the last line Te quiero mucho, me amor.

This ballad is amazing.

I was thinking about making this my karaoke 🎤 song, but I only know the chorus.

5. Groove My Mind

Classic 90’s R&B song theme. Not much to note. If I hadn’t listened to this album dozens of times, I wouldn’t have remembered it. I think this was song I would listen to to make me feel that I could listen to music and do other things.

6. I Wanna Sex You Up (reprise)

My first time listening to a reprise. Countless moments of disappointment when it comes up randomly on instead of the real song.

A whole minute to contemplate skipping or finding the full song.

7. Roll The Dice

This one just gets me into the groove! I don’t have a lot of notes, because I found myself dancing in my seat.

Mostly chorus and bridge, but if you haven’t understood what this grove is about then I can’t explain it to you.

8. Slow Motion

Another song where 12-year-old me had no idea why doing anything slowly would be worth it.

“I want to love you so slow that you come before I do.”

I sang that line loud in front of my parents at 12 and thought love meant thinking fondly of the other person, and they would come over to your house.

9. Thinking’ Back

My favorite song on the album.

Also, the only track that I would skip near the end due to a scratch.

I’m glad I didn’t have access to this CD when I was going through a breakup.

It was in heavy rotation.

Listening to it now, I can feel my body tense up right around the time that the cd would skip.

10. I Adore Mi Amor (interlude)

Two teases in this album!!

45 seconds and this one is hard for me to determine if it’s the true song before it stops.

It’s more of a reminder that I need to get ready to push the button to restart the album.

11. Color Me Badd

Title track.

This is similar to Motownphilly; an introduction of what the group can do and how they can sing together.

12. Your Da One I One Love

“Love” means sex in this one.

I don’t think I need to explain.

The young version of me took it literally and knew that it was time to get another CD to play or restart this one.

In summary

Well, now I don’t feel that I can complain about modern music lacking innuendo. Most of the tracks are so thinly veiled, That it makes the emperor’s new clothes look like winter wear.

Still, I love it. I especially loved writing about it here. Let me know if you have a similar album in your life or suggest other albums.

Template uses lantern by Robb Knight

it seems like lots of folks get caught up in blogs being the easiest setup to get started creating a website, but this seems to only work if the bulk of the content is your words and thoughts.

I've been so focused on blogging that I haven't thought about the other things that I can do with my website.

Found this article via Robb Knight

There are those who believe that we just have to present them with facts and then they would understand that they are on the wrong track. But they have their own reality and they look down on us for being weak and naive. They truly believe that we are the ones on the wrong track.

I came across this article a couple times on Mastodon. I feel that it's a very good read.

In my last post about the labarum theme, I ranted about how I wasn’t going to re-invent the wheel. In this post, I’ll be talking about how I made some minor tweaks and decided to update the version to 1.3!

This post is mostly a “why did I do this” versus a “how did I do it”.

On the Edge of obscure

When I first started working with static site generators, I used a tool called Pelican. The site is still up at https://mandaris.github.io, but I had messed up the layout in the last couple of commits and haven’t gone back to fix.

I have a tendency to focus on details that don’t really matter to 90% of most readers and (I’m assuming) most writers of HTML.

If you were to look at a list of personal blogs, I doubt that you’d find more than a handful that use esoteric tags such as <dt> or <rt>.

I continued this trend with this release by adding some tweaks to <ins>, <del>, and <s>.

At this point, the changes are direct by me loading the page up and making adjustments in the browsers inspector.

Part of the reason that I keep looking into this is that goldmark/commonmark define strikethrough as a delete in the resultant HTML.

Obscure Examples

Here are some example paragraphs with the styling mentioned above.

This is a paragraph with deleted text.

This is a paragraph with inserted text.

This is a paragraph with strikethrough.

And just for giggles here is a ruby(ruby) example.

Toggling Debug

Early on in this project, I enabled some debugging from Hugo. It was really useful when making the theme, and hidden by default.

As the template has become more stable, I want to reduce the amount of text that is being sent over. Yes, I know that text is almost negligible but why generate it if I’m not using it.

As a user, you don’t need to do anything. Generating the debug output is optional and toggled off by default.

I’ve added the following to the plugin.json file to make it an option.

"field": "params.themeDebug",
"label": "Generate the debug information",
"type": "boolean"

And then I have if statement in front of the corresponding debug code

{{ if .Params.themeDebug }}

Can I has?

This is the most exciting part of this release for me!

During the discussion of implementing the table of contents, I had written that I about using has but couldn’t because it wasn’t supported in Firefox.

Well, the feature is now available to anyone using version 121 or newer of Firefox and other popular browsers¹!

This came at a great time as I wanted to better integrate the plugins that Micro.blog offers. I wrote about the plugins late last year. That solution seemed to work for a while, but the <div> would sometimes render when it was empty. I was counting on Hugo’s handling of whitespace to remove any spaces and thus making the browser skip over rendering it.

I created a class in my CSS that would default to hiding things.

.optional {
  display: hidden;
}

I then follow this directly with code that makes it a block element if it has certain elements in it.

.optional:has(a, p, img) {
  display: block;
  margin-top: 1rem;
  padding: 5px;
}

After that, I added the optional class to the <div>in _default/single.html that contains plugins.

<div class="[ style-box ] [ optional ] [ text-center ]">

Next steps?

I don’t know.

Seriously.

I could add some styling to the optional components. Some of the other themes make those components look really good and was tempted to use something similar.

But, I don’t have the energy anymore and I want to focus on my writing. In fact, this release was mostly done a while ago and I’ve just been waiting to write up the changes.

If you have anything that you’d like to comment on, please feel free to email me at info@MandarisMoore.com.

I got curious, and added some CEO salaries for comparison. The vast disparity is nothing new to me, but seeing it like this...

It’s fucking sobering.

I came across this the other day.

I met James in one of the IndieWeb digital meetups and he was very personable.

He’s been doing a series of posts on technical writing and this last one was pretty good for those who would like a structure for their own documentation.

How do I turn my notes into an article? For this post, I am going to focus on the "how-to".

This is sometimes how I think about my posts on the labarum theme.

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.

A year-end celebration of fundamental web technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

I'm always on the look out for distractions cool new things! This is the third year, so you can also checkout the examples from before.