Mandaris

Hello, good evening, good morning, and good afternoon.

I hope this podcast finds you well.

It’s been a very long time since I posted something new.

The last time that I posted, I had every intention of making this a weekly podcast, but things happened.

I got a little sidetracked and I got lost in what I was doing, and I want you guys to know that if you need help, please, please, please go out and get it.

There are resources available to you, and even if the first door is locked, there are other doors.

Go online, find your insurance if you have it, and get someone to talk to.

There are these things called warm lines here in the States, and I know here in, I don’t know who’s listening, but here in the United States of America, especially California, there are these things called warm lines where it doesn’t have to be an emergency, but it’s just someone to talk to.

If you want to, and you have, and you feel that there’s no one else to talk to, you can talk to your phone.

Take a voice memo.

A lot of times it’s just getting the thoughts out, having a way to see where you’re at.

Sometimes the thoughts you are thinking are not your thoughts.

Sometimes they’re not even real thoughts, they are fragments, and when you speak them out loud, you can either give them power or figure out, hey, this should not have as much of an impact on me.

In a way, it’s your left brain and your right brain and everything in between talking about what is going on.

For me, I had to find someone, I had to find a therapist to talk to for a little bit in order to come to grips with some of the things that are happening to me.

I want you to know that you are not by yourself.

This is a crazy, crazy world.

Things are happening left, right, and center, so reach out.

If you want to even reach out to me, go to where this podcast was posted, and there should be a link to email me or send a message.

I might not be able to be as helpful as I can, but you’re not alone in this, okay?

Next up, I’m working on my website.

I have a release that I am putting the finishing touches on.

It is going to allow for diagrams that are created using Mermaid.js.

Mermaid.js is this JavaScript library that pretty much takes a declaration or a definition of what a diagram is supposed to be.

Say you have text or a sequence diagram is one of the ones that they like to use.

You can say, this component connects to this component using that syntax, and what it will do is it will generate a diagram for you.

I’ve written up a little bit on my, well, it’s actually a draft at this point in time, but why would someone want to do this?

It’s sometimes easier for us to have an idea of how things are going to go, and then just put it into a structure, and then put it into a diagram.

For example, if I had a sequence of steps, and I said, A goes to B, goes to C, I could do that using a lot of these graphical tools of putting the boxes and connecting the lines myself, but what if I take that sequence A, B, C, and I say, oh, well, A actually goes to G, and then from G, we have a decision of going to B or C.

This could be, for some of us, a little more difficult to navigate or to make changes to.

With this, you have a defined structure of like, hey, this is how it goes, and then you let the computer make the diagram for you.

I love diagrams, so anytime that I can get a diagram on something, I love it.

My family is sick of me doing diagrams.

When this is complete, and I roll it out, I will think or I’ll be of the mind that Labyrinth, the name of my theme, will be feature complete, and it’s been pretty much feature complete for a while now.

With this, I have all the major things that I can think of that a theme on micro.blog needs.

It’s got open tags.

It’s got bookmark, not bookmark, it’s got the block quotes, which people love.

It’s got categories and comments.

It’s got pretty much everything you want.

It allows you to have plugins, which is another big thing, especially on micro.blog, because you can just plug in everything else that you want.

It’s got a light mode and a dark mode.

I’m pretty happy with it.

It’s the one that I use, partly because I made it.

Other than a long time restructuring of the CSS, which no one will actually see, it’s pretty much feature complete.

Another thing regarding the post there, I was actually feeling kind of down about it.

I didn’t know if anyone else was using it.

It took me a while to realize it doesn’t matter if anyone else is using it.

It makes me happy to see it.

There are things that I want to tweak about it, but I feel that every artist looks at their work and says, you know what, I could probably do X, Y, or Z.

But for the most part, when I look at it, I do kind of smile a little bit.

I’m happy with what I did.

I even asked Manton, I said, hey, is anyone using this?

It turns out there were a couple people using it.

So, hey, Yahtzee! Feel free to take the theme, take whatever you want from it, because it’s pretty much a lot of it is taken from other places and just changed to meet my criteria.

And I will probably make changes as well.

So if you want to look into it, go ahead.

The Labyrinth theme is there and look for a post sometime this week or this weekend saying hey, this is how you use Mermaid in the latest version.

Next up, if you have come to my website in the last couple of weeks, you probably have noticed that on the very bottom, there should be a place for a portrait or a profile picture.

Mine has been absent for the last couple of weeks.

I don’t know how it happened or when it happened, but something happened and it no longer shows me.

It didn’t show anything at all, but there was a point release of maybe about two weeks ago that enabled it for everyone who wanted to have their profile picture on the bottom.

And I’m kind of paralyzed because I want the quote unquote perfect profile picture.

No such thing exists or nor should exist.

I am a human being.

I have imperfections and not every picture is going to get my good side.

That being said, I’m still looking for a picture that I want to put there.

I’m hoping that before this goes live, I actually have that picture in place.

If not, feel free to ping me and say, hey man, you could do this.

It’s just a picture.

I don’t really get that much traffic on the site to begin with.

So hey, be open to us.

This is what the picture is.

In fact, when it comes to site traffic, I enabled tiny analytics, hoping to get an idea of how many people are using Firefox or any or whatever browser that they choose to get to my site.

Turns out, I got about 20 people coming to the site on a regular basis.

And I told my wife, yeah, I got 20 people coming to the site, I don’t know what’s going on.

And she’s like, 20 people?

That’s amazing.

And I was like, yeah, that is amazing.

That means there are 20 people who check the site out on a regular basis and are just coming by and saying, hey, what’s going on and reading what I have to say.

And I want to say thank you, because it’s nice to know that I’m talking to someone else other than myself.

I’m not saying that it isn’t wrong to talk to yourself, but it’s also good to know that there are other people out there.

So with that being said, I hope to hear from you guys soon.

And let’s make this a regular thing.

Bye.