Woah! Broke 10,000 lifetime views as tracked by Tinylytics on my site today thanks to @manton’s boost of my Micro.blog swag post. Not earth shattering news by any means, but it is a nice number to see.
Unoffically Official Micro.blog Swag
If you’ve missed my previous posts about the Unofficially Official Micro.blog swag available on Cotton Bureau, here they are all in one place.
I just added the mug as an on-demand option.
Enjoy!
So… Given the Meta news today, I’m 100% done with Zuck’s platforms and will be deleting accounts as soon as I’m home tonight. I think I’m going to ditch Bluesky while I’m at it since I’ve gotten nothing worthwhile out of that one either. Mastodon and Micro.blog is where I’ll be from now on.
AppleScript to Generate Strong Passwords
I’d totally forgotten I wrote this AppleScript until I needed to create a strong password this morning. If you’re a Mac user and need to generate unique strong passwords, give this script a try.
It works really well when used along with FastScripts by Daniel Jaklut.
property allowedCharacters : {33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 42, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122}
property givenPasswordLength : 21 -- sets the preferred password length
repeat while true
try
set givenPasswordLength to text returned of (display dialog "Enter desired password length:" with title "Password Generator" default answer givenPasswordLength)
set givenPasswordLength to givenPasswordLength as integer
if givenPasswordLength is not greater than 0 then error "Please enter a valid positive integer."
exit repeat
on error errMsg
display alert "Error" message errMsg as warning
return
end try
end repeat
repeat while true
try
set generatedPassword to generatePassword()
set dialogResult to (display dialog "New generated password:" & return & return & generatedPassword with title "Password Generator" buttons {"Cancel", "Refresh", "Copy"} default button "Copy" cancel button "Cancel")
if button returned of dialogResult is "Copy" then
set the clipboard to generatedPassword as string
exit repeat
else if button returned of dialogResult is "Cancel" then
exit repeat
end if
on error errMsg
display alert "Error" message errMsg as warning
return
end try
end repeat
on generatePassword()
set generatedPassword to ""
repeat givenPasswordLength times
set randomCharacterPosition to random number from 1 to count allowedCharacters
set generatedPassword to generatedPassword & (ASCII character item randomCharacterPosition of allowedCharacters)
end repeat
return generatedPassword
end generatePassword
It’s such a trip when I browse to a referring site I see in my daily Tinylytics stats and find the site using my mnml theme. Just… Wow. 🤯
My wife, son and I went to a local restaurant to have an early New Year’s Eve dinner. I was happy to see that the 20 or so TVs they had in the establishment were all VIZIO 65" P-Series models. Thanks to Mama’s on 39 for contributing to my paycheck!
New Year’s Day means three things in the Mitchell house: The Rose Parade on TV, a big bacon and eggs breakfast, and Chili con Carne simmering on the stove. I’m adding a twist this year and smoking a round cut first. I think it’ll add a nice twist to an already family favorite.
Happy New Year all…
Another mnml update to v2.1.1 that gracefully handles a “more” summary break added to content without a post title.
My wife and I walked downtown for coffee and to check out the waves. Since our beach is south-facing, the wrap around west swell is producing unorganized closeout mush. We decided it wasn’t worth the extra walk to the pier for a closer look. The coffee from Philz was excellent, as it always is.
Hmm… Seems there’s some banding issues with the two desktop images I created yesterday after downloading them to my work laptop. They look fine on the personal laptop where I created them. Will investigate once I’m home. I wonder if Micro.blog adds extra compression to .heic files when uploaded?
Even More mnml Updates
I’ve been a busy guy today. More updates to mnml are available for those using the theme.
This update adds compatibility for these Micro.blog plugins:
- Reply by Email by @sod
- Conversation on Micro.blog also by @sod
- Reply on Mastodon by @otaviocc
Thanks to @cygnoir for asking me to support them.
I made it through the certification bootcamp and actually learned some new things. It’s reinvigorated my interest for Apex and LWC on the Salesforce platform, which kind of makes me wish I could go back to just being a developer and create cool stuff again rather than being a nerd wrangler.
Pushed a few minor tweaks to mnml that should show up in Micro.blog installed plugins shortly (v2.0.8). Keep an eye out…
I’m second guessing whether I should have used the melodicmayhem.net domain I own for my Mastodon instance. That would have been a really cool instance name… But then, I really like being “on brand” with my jimmitchell.org subdomain. Makes no difference, I’m committed.
I’ll be doing an intense online bootcamp training for my next Salesforce certification all week long – eight hours a day for five days. It’s all stuff I’ve been doing one way or another for the last 15 years, but being a people manager for the last three has made my mojo rusty. This should be fun…
Another mnml Update
It seems I’m on a mnml theme development roll this weekend.
I don’t know why it didn’t dawn on me to do this yesterday, but I just added an option to easily set the Fediverse Creator meta tag in mnml – if you’d like to be able to do that sort of thing.
The version 2.0.6 update is available in your Micro.blog plugins area. This will probably be all the changes I make for a while. Well, maybe…
Enjoy! ✌🏻❤️
I made the switch to my own hosted Mastodon instance via Masto.host today. The process was super-simple. I’ve wanted my own instance for a long time and see it worth the $6 a month to have control.
Speaking of mnml, I’ve just added styles for Micro.blog’s new photo collections feature. Keep an eye out for that update (v2.0.3) in your plugins area.
A quick test of the new Photo Collections Micro.blog feature.
Micro.blog mnml Theme Updates
If you’re a Micro.blog user who uses my mnml theme, I made a few updates I’ve been ruminating on for a while that makes it a little more customizable.
Once you’ve updated from your Micro.blog plugins page, you’ll see a new settings option to manage the customizations.
mnml Settings
Each of these settings are outlined below…
The Custom Icon
Many Micro.blog themes are coded to use your main account profile photo for the header image. If you run multiple blogs on the Premium plan and want to use the same theme for each of them, your sites aren’t easily distinguishable.
If you do want to distinguish one site from the other, this setting is how you do it with mnml. It also saves you from having to use some weird image for your Micro.blog account in order to brand your site the way you want.
All you have to do is add the complete URL to any image, and it will display instead of your profile photo. I recommend a simple image no larger than 256 pixels square for this, but feel free to experiment.
If you leave the URL field empty, mnml uses your Micro.blog account profile photo instead.
Easy-peasy.
Categories on the Archives Page
Some people have asked how they can show their blog’s categories on the Archives page, while others have told me how much they like the fact mnml doesn’t do that.
Being the people pleaser I am, I came up with a way to make everyone happy. If you want to show categories, toggle the setting on and like magic, they’ll show up just like in the screenshot above. If you don’t want to display them, leave the setting off.
Footer Credits
Lastly, I’ve added a credit line to the footer of mnml to drive people to Micro.blog, the theme’s Github page, or my own site.
Some of you may not mind having something like this at the bottom of your site pages, and I’m grateful to those who leave it on. But some of you may hate it, so you have the option to turn it off completely. I won’t be hurt if you do.
Finally, if you’re someone who likes and/or uses mnml, consider supporting my development efforts. Just a buck a month from a handful of people makes all the difference in the world towards enhancements like these.
Enjoy!
Let me know questions or if you think of an enhancement I might not have.