‘Sufficiently Justified Who Is Himself In Love With His Theme’
This week I re-themed the blog, effectively conforming it to the design of my homepage which in turn picked up a couple of things that I developed for here, and I’ve also made a couple of other changes to how I’m using some OMG.LOL services and interacting with the local community here.
I’d initially thought that I couldn’t push this design update until Weblog.LOL added a Post Template so that I could distinguish the index page from posts. By default, the service uses Main Template for the index, posts, and pages but recently added a separate Page Template. As it turned out, I realized that since we can add a “landing page”, and use a custom template for it, I can use Main Template as the post template, Page Template as a page template, and Landing Template for the index.
As a sort of adjunct to this design reboot, I’ve also made some changes to how I use the Status.LOL service and the Social.LOL Mastodon instance. Recently, I again quit social media, although I’ve regularly been browsing the local timeline because it doesn’t cognitively tax me; I’ve also been using it to ask support questions, similar to how I used Twitter even after quitting that platform.
Going forward, my Mastodon account in addition to not following anyone now accepts no followers and is locked. My post visibility it set to unlisted, and I’ve linked my Status.LOL and Social.LOL accounts so that statuses get posted to Mastodon, too. Since they post unlisted they will not be visible on public timelines, but the new “respond” link on statuses will allow anyone in the local OMG.LOL community to reply to my statuses on Mastodon. I’m continuing to have Mastodon delete my posts at a threshold of one week.
One bit of housekeeping. Under my previous design, I did get a number of requests for how I did this or that. This is fine, entirely. That said, I’ve deliberately gone and added a design copyright notice to the footer here. It doesn’t bother me if someone peeks under the hood to look at one thing or another (as that’s the web I early adulted on), but please don’t wholesale gank the design.
One not insignificant reason for the re-theme is that I was feeling dissatisfied and frustrated and wanted to put together a design that at least somewhat stood apart. Hopefully it’s understood that one’s creative output sometimes is intimately linked to one’s mental health and sense of self-worth.
Finally, in addition to having added webmention I’m experimenting with getting microformats added to blog posts and pages, and just generally hunting for any rough edges or issues with the redesign. Feel free to reach out if you catch something I haven’t yet.
Addenda
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I’ve now also brought back the ability to reply to any given post via email; just click the envelope icon next to the timestamp.
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I should offer a bit more clarity on how I’ll be using Social.LOL. While I’ll have neither follows nor followers, since I browse the local timeline I’ll occasionally reply to things but with my post visibility set to Mentioned People Only.