Excursions

Whatsapp is following Facebook’s footsteps — fighting fake news problem with full page ad in news paper. Wish these ads reach the victims — I myself know few and I know they can’t be convinced so easily.

Update: I had sent these questions to David, the developer behind Blot, on the support email address. And of course, given how gem of a person he is, he did address all of them quickly. I am updating the original post with his responses. This dedication of David makes me love this service even more!

I have some questions I need to explore and find answers for some issues in using Blot. Just jotting them down for reference. The list may continuously grow and shrink as I find the answers.

1. What’s going on with \{\{Summary\}\}? I do not think it generates what it says it does - “first line”. It ignores lines with links, it ignores codes in the line. So what’s outputted is something inaccurate.

[David]: You can override summary in the metadata at the start of a file. If you know a little javascript, you can read the rules for how the summary property is generated automatically.

2. Can we override the behaviour of \{\{title\}\}? It is especially important for title-less posts as currently, the file name gets used by default. You need to explicitly set Title: to blank.

[David]: You can also override title in the metadata. However, based on what you are trying to do, I’d make use of the property. This refers to a markdown or HTML title tag in the file itself. For example:

3. Point 2 is also important for posts via just the image files. As of now, it adds the image name as the title. I would prefer not the post to have any title at all.

[David]: I think I have solved this point in #2, please let me know if not.

4. Can we override the behaviour of \{\{\{body\}\}\}? Just want to explore possibility to modify behaviour of URLs of image sources. Currently, relative URLs to blotcdn without scheme are added.

[David]: No, it is not possible to modify body. Please can you explain what you are trying to do? Would you like Blot to stop uploading your images to blotcdn? You can disable this behaviour on the settings page under Images > Cache and optimize images

5. How can we make reference to any Post parameter in a post? If we include the parameter (for example , it gets converted to the title on build? Can we escape the { and }?

[David]: This is not possible right now, it is a bug, I will fix it. Sorry!

It’s fascinating when you find art all around you. And some looking down at you. Inspiring.

★ Liked Privacy Policy for ascraeus.org

When you send a webmention to this site, you are explicitly providing metadata in your site’s markup, and this information is used to display your comment/reply on this site.

Webmentions is one aspect I need to call out that I collect information via, even though I do not persist any of the information. I think I may stitch something up inspired by this.

So, I had recently got a blog created with blot.im. It will continue to exist in parallel to existing site built with Hugo. And as @jack recently wrote, it’s fine. Hope is eventually one will get tiring.

I think I may have hit the right ingredients to what I want to achieve with my blot blog. Look wise I am surprised the default theme suited me the best. Minor modifications with styling and I was good to go.

Content wise, I will use this space to record my experiments, thoughts I want implemented.

I read this nice article on how being a parent might (or might not) affect one’s writing. It made me think hard if parenting does affect my creativity. I just could not let the thoughts linger. So here’s a response.

h/t @herself

@colinwalker Do you have a different feed that is fed to micro.blog than your exposed rss? Your titles are shortened for longer posts in your rss, while not in m.b. I was recently exploring the option to control the titles in my feed.

‪This how-to series from Apple on Twitter is brilliant marketing. Showcases the product, ‬guiding users at the same. Done well too.

★ Liked “An Interview with Andy Hertzfeld - Architect of the original Macintosh”

We’ve all seen the legendary Apple keynotes and how personal computing has transformed the way we live and work, but what I was really interested to learn from Andy was what it was like to shape that vision from scratch, what it was like to work as an engineer when most people didn’t even really understand what a computer was, when the frontier of what it could become was wide open.