Jason Snell had been promoting this book on one of his podcasts. Luckily it was available via Libby from my local library as an audiobook and I devoured it in a few days.
Truthfully, it has a lot of things that I have seen in other books but the way that it’s combined is done very well. I can see this being turned into some kind of tv mini series.
The only complaint is that it feels somehow too short and too long at the same time. I think it’s because it seems to drag after the first 3rd and then the conclusion seems to wrap up so neatly and quick that it kind of makes you wonder.
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 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!
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.
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.
Sorry, no luck to those using Internet Explorer. ↩︎
I showed my daughter my website and she said “it looks like one of those accessible sites”.
It’s exactly what I’m going for.
I was going over a draft that I wrote almost a month ago. It’s BAD. It’s why people should use drafts. All in all, still better than starting from nothing.
This was a very beautiful film. Dan Levy allows for some quiet moments where the viewer gets to see some delightful views of Paris. I enjoyed them but I could see where people might scoff and complain about the film not getting on with things.
I think that this is part of the point.
Grief is something you don’t “just get over”.
In the end, another reminder that we don’t know what will happen in the future. This one sweet in that we don’t have to dread and showing that we can move forward.
Description from The Movie Database
When his husband unexpectedly dies, Marc’s world shatters, sending him and his two best friends on a soul-searching trip to Paris that reveals some hard truths they each needed to face.
I’ve never been so relieved for being reminded that I’m going to die.In fact, there is humor found throughout the book related to this very topic.
Truth is, we don’t really know how much time we have and with this world. You only have this moment in time, make the right choice for you. If it doesn’t work out, you have to accept it and make another choice another action.
Mandaris
