Excursions

There are days when nothing you read inspires any thought in you. Or a curiosity to comment on something. It’s as if the whole world has decided to selectively pick topics that you have no interest in. I don’t like such days.

Museum of the World →

Welcome to The Museum of the World - an interactive experience through time, continents and cultures, featuring some of the most fascinating objects in human history.

I saw this hanging at the door of my daughter’s room today – am always fascinated by how creative the kids mind can get. She says she wants to hang such diaries throughout the house as she can’t carry her diary always along with her. Nice!

After all these years, the early morning cup of tea with my wife is one routine that hardly breaks. The best start I can have to my days 😊

Ben wrote a wonderful post suggesting, reminding, that everyone should blog, should write. I always connect, and have done so for long, with this specific sentiment.

There’s no such thing as writing too much: your voice is important, your perspective is different, and you should put it out there.

This reminded me of a post I had written that shared a similar sentiment — we all can, and should, write. This particular passage that I had written, unfortunately, still holds true for many.

It’s saddening to see people resist the efforts to pen the words they think of. They go after what others have written, beautiful nevertheless, but at the cost of it being not real, fake. They underestimate the power of conveying one’s own feelings in whichever way possible. The words, their structure won’t matter much then. And that is one way one can start writing.

I recently changed the newsletter to a weekly digest instead of every long-form posts with Micro.blog. A fixed schedule is better for me than thinking about whether to include as part of the newsletter every time I post a post with a title. Until there is a better control (via categories) on what posts I can schedule for delivery, I want to avoid risking this particular setting.

That said, I didn’t really like the way the first digest looked. It was… mhmm … messy. Maybe a bit more control over the elements, like title etc. would be good. Without that, to make the digest look slightly better, here’s the custom CSS that I have added currently.

You can apply this to your digest by including this CSS block to your custom CSS (‘Design’ ⇾ ‘Edit CSS’).

/* Set the font display */
.microblog_email {
    font-family: "Avenir Next", -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol";
	font-size: 16px;
	line-height: 1.7em;
	max-width: 600px;
	margin: auto;
}

/* Assign area and display for the blockquote */
.microblog_email blockquote {
	display: block;
    margin: 0;
    margin-bottom: 14px;
    padding: 0 20px;
    border-color: #E0E4E8;
    border-left: 2px solid #E0E4E8;
    line-height: inherit;
}


/* Assign area and display for the images */
.microblog_email img {
	display: block;
	max-width: 100%;	
	height: auto;
	margin: 0 auto 0.5rem;
  	vertical-align: middle;
  	border-radius: 5px;  	
}

/* Style links */
.microblog_email a {
	color: #4F8BCA;
}

/* Hide the profile image and header */
.microblog_email .microblog_header, .microblog_email p:first-child img {
	display: none;
}

/* Style the footer links */
.microblog_email .microblog_footer {
	margin-top: 20px;
    text-align: center;
    font-size: 13px;
    padding-top: 10px;
    padding-left: 30px;
    padding-right: 30px;
    line-height: 1.5em;
}

/* Styling for the separator */
.microblog_email hr {  
  margin: 12px 0;
  border: 0;
  text-align: center;
}

.microblog_email hr:before {
	content: "\2022 \2022 \2022 \2022";
    font-size: 20px;
    color: #4F8BCA;
}

/* Styling the links */
.microblog_email .microblog_permalink {
    color: #4F8BCA;
} 

I would like to avoid these :nth-of-type and :first-child blocks. But until the elements across the body are assigned classes, I will have to stay with this. Anyway, hope this helps. Or if there’s a better, simpler way to achieve this, I would love to hear.

Update [24 April 2022]: Fixed the issue with blockquotes being hidden due to the selection for headers being mistakenly applied to the blockquotes too. This uses the recently added CSS selectors for .microblog_header and .microblog_footer.

A minor styling suggestion while using Posts Stats plugin with Marfa theme in dark mode. Add this snippet to custom CSS (‘Design’ -> ‘Edit CSS’) to fix background of alternate rows in tables.

@media(prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
	tr:nth-child(odd)>td {
	  background: initial;
	}
}

Thanks to Andrew for bringing this to my notice.

Defensive CSS by Ahmad Shadeed →

Defensive CSS is a collection of snippets that can help you in writing CSS that is protected. In other words, you will have fewer issues in the future.

A good friend who has gone indie had once suggested I should provide folks online an opportunity to support me when they benefit from my work. So, after hesitantly considering it for years, I finally decided to create a Buy me a coffee profile. And include a link on my blog.

The Case Against Crypto →

These days so much of my free time is booked with calls to explain to people outside the software industry why crypto assets are such a destructive force and why I support forceful regulation to halt this financially corrosive enterprise from spreading further into markets.