Mandaris

Hello!

This episode is a small one about the upcoming election and some media that I’m doing.

Music by LofCosmos from Pixabay

Feel free to contact me with any feedback!… Well, almost any feedback.

Transcript

26. Are you retired or working? What are your plans for retirement?

I am currently working and having this constant dread that I'll probably have to do this until the day that I pass away.

Life has a lot of twist and turns. A lot of restarts and some plans that had not materialized.

So, I’ve moved all my available resources into making sure that my children have everything they need in order to succeed.

25. Is there a special food from your region or heritage that you a particular appreciation for?

I'm in California and there are a lot of different foods in our area that I get to sample. There are two foods that I find to be special and that I make for myself time to time.

The first is hot dogs and beans. I like to class it up a little bit by using lil smoky sausages that I pan fry before adding the Bush’s baked beans. Now, these are both processed foods and probably have the total amount of sugar for a whole week contained in one serving. I shouldn’t admit it but no one is going to read this and respond, but I eat the contents of both the package of sausages and can of beans in one seating.

The family finds out soon enough.

My second food is a pan fried baloney sandwich. There is definitely an overlap when it comes to the meat that I’m eating in this situation and I’m ok with that. I usually get the baloney from my local deli and then place a piece of cheese on top of the baloney.

24. Write a review of your favorite album. What lyrics mean something special to you?

A LOT of people love Michael Jackson's Thriller. It's got a lot of big hits on it and the title track is a halloween dance favorite. My favorite album is the one before it, Off the Wall.

I find myself really enjoying the entire album. It starts off with a bang with “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” that really gets the energy up. I feel that it’s more of an anthem at that point as it tells the listener not to settle.

Although, I do have a confession, I never knew the lyrics to that first song. I just groove with the vibe and I have that feeling about a lot of my favorite music.

The second song, “Rock with You”, starts off with a quick drumbeat and then a steady beat that contains some of my favorite lyrics of “relaxing to the beat”. I think this is a great song in that it highlights how you can be uptempo without having to be full force.

“Workin’ Day and Night” wasn’t a track that I understood until I was much older. It’s not so much of a song about getting out there and working as it is about why we do things in the “real world”.

I feel that “Girlfriend” is the embodiment of what it means to be “the other guy” in a relationship. Well, technically, not really in a relationship. Usually, you see this situation in media as someone feeling betrayed or hurt. In this one, I feel a sense of longing and hurt. If the roles were reversed and placed in a movie, you would hear a line like “oh, he’s just waiting for the right moment to tell his wife”. That hope that you just need to hold on for a little long and that person will be yours.

“Burn This Disco Out” is the last track on the album and it’s somewhat a wake up call to pay attention because after this moment, you’re going to have to start the album over.

23. What words of wisdom would you have appreciated from your younger self?

Sometimes I don't think I've become any wiser in my years. Just a little more patient in some areas and less in others.

But, if I could say something to my younger self it would be that I should be more present with the time that I have with those in my life. I would try to tell him about what things matter and what things don’t.

I would also tell him to buy bitcoin and get a state job as soon as I can.

22. Have you been to a memorable concert? What made it stand out to you?

My first memorable concert was the [Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Coming Out of Their Shells Tour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles#Concert_tour).

At the time, my school had a reading program where you could get a personal pizza if you read a certain amount of books. As a kid, these were my two favorite things pizza and reading! I don’t remember all the details, but I do remember that PizzaHut had tie in with the Ninja Turtle tour and that you could buy the sound track with the purchase of pizza.

I remember listening to the soundtrack on cassette a lot when I was a kid. I think this is the first time where I would listen to an album and want to skip to the next song. I don’t think I was allowed to do that at that age would have occurred sit through it.

I only remember one song from the cassette called “Tub-in” that I really liked but don’t really remember from the concert. In fact, I don’t remember a lot from the concert except that it was pretty loud and kind of slow in some places. I do remember the Shredder singing a song about hating music. That always stuck with me and I remember sharing a dorm room with someone who said he didn’t like music.

We weren’t roommates the next year.

Coming Out Of Their Shells was a studio album, and subsequent live musical tour that occurred from 1990 to 1991 (in 1992, it toured overseas). The tour was endorsed and sponsored by Pizza Hut. The very first showing of the tour was broadcast live on Pay-Per-View. A VHS recording of the broadcast was made released, as well as a "Making Of" direct to home video. The tour is generally lambasted for its terrible costumes and wafer-thin plot. The band featured Donatello on keys, Leonardo on bass guitar, Michelangelo on guitar/lead vocals & Raphael on drums/percussion/tenor saxophone/vocals. Guest vocalists include Master Splinter, April O'Neil, and The Shredder.

This was making the rounds a couple of weeks ago and I wanted to link to it, but it was sitting in the backlog as I was trying to make something else perfect.

I don’t remember what I was waiting for, but I’m hoping that you enjoy it.

So let's talk about monetizing a blog, starting with the most obvious and perhaps easiest avenue: display advertising.

Be sure to tap/click on the image for a good time.

Stoot now has an option that will remove the Open Graph / Meta Tags card associated with the first link in a mastodon post. If you are interested in the tags that Mastodon sees, you can go to OpenGraph XYZ to put in your favorite URLs. Here a direct link to your fifth favorite. Mastodon takes the information meta tags from the first URL and makes them look nice when you post. For example, I posted a toot¹ with a link to a post that created. I will get something like the following.

Summary

You can now add a toot to your blog without including the Open Graph tag.

{{< stoot instance="$InstanceTLD" id="$ID" enableOGCard="true" >}}

The new enableOGCard option defaults to true so that it doesn’t unexpectedly change on people who have an older version of this plugin.

Details about the HTML and CSS structure

About a week ago, I got a message asking why stoot would render the image twice for the same mastodon toot.

Honestly, I had no idea it was doing this and haven’t looked at the code since I had packaged it up two weeks ago.

But, I didn’t want to leave this person without any help so I started to look into the issue and was able to reproduce the problem with a toot from someone I was already following.

Here is the code to embed it if you are using the stoot plugin

{{< stoot instance="writing.exchange" id="113300475439404467" >}}

A very pretty picture, but I don’t know if seeing it twice in succession.

For me to understand something better, I like to diagram it as I step through the code. I’ve included this diagram that shows you what div tags are created when using stoot. If you can always check out the code on GitHub.

Toot-block

This is the CSS class in the blockquote element that contains the entire mastodon post.

Toot-header

The div contains the information about the account that created the toot.

Toot-profile

This is the profile image of the account that made the toot. I included this CSS from the original project to establish a baseline for styling.

Toot-author

This is a div that contains the two links toot-author-name and toot-author-name that go to the same account page.

Toot-author-name

The name that toot author is going by at the time of rendering. The names sometimes changes as decided by the person in charge of the account.

Toot-author-handle

This is the account name in the @name@server format that mastodon likes to use.

Content

This is the main text of your toot.

Toot-img-grid

Stoot includes CSS and logic to handle 1, 2, 3, or 4 images in a grid and render them properly.

Toot-video-wrapper

Behind the scenes, there are two possible wrappers that render depending on what kind of video media is included with the toot.

Toot-card

This the div that contains the Open Graph card of the first link in the toot. This will include an image, title, and description from the website in the URL.

Toot-poll-wrapper

This is the div that containers HTML <meter> elements to convey the

Toot-footer

Contains date and time of the toot.

The problem is coming from the toot-card and I didn’t want to change all the cards, because someone might have become reliant on this behaviour or worse - never noticed it.

Further CSS Details

I didn’t want to make people work hard to style the included card, so I removed some styling from the CSS.

There are two div tags in the toot card that you can use to make things work to your satisfaction.

Controlling the Card

The problem is coming from the toot-card and I didn’t want to change all the cards, because someone might have become reliant on this behaviour or worse - never noticed it.

After idenifying the part of the code that controlled the cards, I set a conditional around it.

{{ if eq $enableOGCard "true"}}
{{ with $json.card }}
  {{- $cardData := . -}}
  {{- with $cardData.image -}}
  
  <a href="{{ $cardData.url }}" rel="'noopener">
    <div class="toot-card">
      <div class="toot-card-image">
        <img src="{{ $cardData.image }}" 
          alt="Card image from {{ $masIns }} toot {{ $id }}" 
          loading="lazy" class="toot-card-image-image" />
      </div>
      <div class="toot-card-content">
        <p class="card-title">{{ $cardData.title }}</p>
        <p class="card-description">{{ $cardData.description }}</p>
      </div>
    </div>
  </a> 
  {{- end -}}
{{ end }}
{{ end }}

At the top of the file, we have the following line that sets the value to a default in case it is isn’t specified.

{{ $enableOGCard := .Get "enableOGCard" | default "true" }}

What is next?

Time to close all the tabs and call it a night.

I would like to change the alt text for the incoming images, but I think I would have to learn more about what is offered from mastodon using this API.

I want to that @lmika for giving me some advice about the go programming language. I also want to thank @DaveyCraney for giving me some feedback about stoot.

And I want to thank you for making it to the end of this article.

I talk a little bit about starting something new and then transition into the update to the stoot plug-in (or plugin, depending on how you spell it).

Music by LofCosmos from Pixabay.

Transcript

Just wanted to make a little something.

Music by LofCosmos from Pixabay

Feel free to contact me with any feedback!… Well, almost any feedback.

Transcript