Brad Enslen - Thoughts from my stylish, mysterious, perilous mind.

Watch: Agatha Christie’s Criminal Games: Hickory Dickory Dock Sn 2, Ep 1.

Watch this series if you can. These are light hearted reworkings of Agatha Christie stories in French with English subtitles. I didn’t think I would like these when I first tried them but Season 1 completely won me over and this first episode of Season 2 continues the winning streak. The writing, charactors and cast are all supurb. And there is a real mystery in each episode and yet they manage to make it light hearted without getting smarmy.

My first post got eaten so I’ll try this again.

Upcoming Film: “Lancaster Skies” WW2 Bomber Command Movie

I really want to see this. I’ll even drag myself out to a theater to see this if they show in in the US. I really hope it is good so I can add it to my World War 2 Movie List. Which reminds me I need to add “Dunkirk” to that.

Like: Return to the Open Web! vs Join the Open Web!

It makes me wonder how we can bring others along with us. The people for whom it’s not a return, but striking out into the wilderness outside the walled garden they are familiar with. We say it’s easy to claim your own space, but is it really if you haven’t done it before?

I wish I had a good answer to this. I think Ton comes close in that I need to offer to help people get started.

I refer to Starbucks as “Fourbucks” because everything seems to start at about that price. It’s been years since I’ve been in any sort of coffee house so when I went into the local Starbucks I found myself totally bewildered by the terminology and jargon.

I had 2 goals: 1. get a fancy coffee to go, 2. NOT to be that person in line that takes 3 minutes to order a coffee.

I ordered a latte to take to my meeting. It cost over $4 with tax. I’m not sure it actually had any coffee in it.

I think I’ll stick with coffee from home.

Cloud Storage.

I have my cloud storage all mixed up in 4 cloud providers: Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Microsoft Live Windows Live Drive and it’s a pain in the rump.

I was looking at something self hosted on my own server like Nextcloud and consolidate all my stuff from the other services. It does not have to be Nextcloud but something like it. Is anyone doing their own self hosted cloud storage? How is that working for you?

I’ve been pondering on how to make a blogroll/following page on Micro.blog and sort of weighing different approaches. Here are a couple:

1. Static Following Page: Here is a big one. The problem I have with these is they become difficult to maintain. Everytime I make one of these I end up not updating it. However, as you can see from the example, it can be massive and you can easily subcategorize such a list. It’s also very durable - there is no moving script parts or database to fail.
2. You could make a “Following” category in Micro.blog. This is a variant of linkblogging except you are using a category for that purpose. Use one post per link followed and whatever description you want. Then link to that category in your main menu and you end up with a dynamic list of blogs or newsletters you are following. I’m thinking this might be easier to maintain on Micro.blog than a static page. However, a downside is you cannot sub-categorize and right now MB has no dedicated site search for each blog so finding something later might be difficult.
3. Another approach that would work for a shorter list on Micro.blog would be to use tiny type and put your list on the bottom of your index page or in the MB footer. Kicks Condor does this well in his right sidebar (scroll down a bit.) Notice how he actually makes it fun to explore while giving you a little context for each link.

None of these difficulties are exclusive to Micro.blog, blogrolls have always been work to maintain, but they are very useful in helping visitors discover new blogs.

This was also posted to /en/linking.

Is anybody using the new Arabica template on Micro.blog. By accident I switched to it for a little while and I think it’s really good looking. One thing I noticed when I switched to Arabica from Marfa is the custom changes I made to the Post template still showed up in Arabica. Nice. One change I would make is to try and put a site search form on it.

I also like the Typewriter theme. If I ever needed a short post blog, like a linkblog I think I would use it.

Some email contact resources for Micro.blog.

We don’t have CGI or Php for contact forms on Micro.blog, so if you have a hosted MB blog and you want a contact form it has to be remotely hosted.

Free Contact Form Providers

I’ve looked at a quite a few. Some I tried and didn’t work, others looked dodgy. Very few people ever used my contact form on Wordpress so I think most of us can get away with a free form. I have not used these or tried them yet, nor are they in any order.

Just remember that if you are getting it for free the provider is getting something out of it also.

• Squaresend
• Allforms Update 6 Feb 2019: I signed up, but once logged in, I got a notice that form creation was disabled for free accounts. Skip this one.

Email Address Encoders

Some people might want to place their email address in a mailto link but encrypt it so it is harder for email harvester robots to read.

• Mailto Encoder
• Email Address Encoder

Bonus Link: Other Remotely Hosted Do-Hickies

ScriptSocket

ScriptSocket stuff will have banner ads on them per their FAQ.

Stuff I need to work on:

1. Contact - this could be either a contact form or encrypting my email address in such a way that harvester bots can’t read it and putting that on my site. The lack of access to CGI or Php means I’m kind of back to static html website days and can’t just find a contact form script or plugin. It has to be remotely hosted which means either pay for the service or put up with data mining and ads. I’ll probably do the email thing. Fortunately I found an encoder
2. Hosted Comments: I at least want non-Micro.blog users to be able to comment on Posts. Micro.blog can send Indieweb notices but as far as I know it cannot receive them, or at least they don’t get displayed on the post so that is an obstical. Plus I’m old school, I believe blogs are more than just having a soapbox, they should be a place for conversation and that means commenting. Conversation raises my game, making me want to write better, clearer.
3. Now Page - it’s not a high priority but it would be nice.

Speaking of pages, I know I’m going to be adding more pages. Without a sidebar on the theme it means they all have to fit in the top level navigation menu. We shall see.

Things I am Missing from Wordpress

• Sidebars on Themes
• Widgets like Top Posts and Pages. These helped draw visitors in and get them to read more posts.
• Related Posts: displayed below each individual post, again this helped draw people in to seeing other posts I had written on the same subject. I really miss these.

Time for supper. At least I got to practice a little Markdown in this post with some help from this Markdown Cheatsheet

I just deactivated my Facebook account. I did not delete it (yet) I figured I would see how this goes for a few months. I really wasn’t using FB much, just to keep track of some good friends and neighbors.

Facebook sure does not make deactivation easy. If I use FB ID to login to a third party service it reactivates my FB account automatically. Not a problem for me but, beware. Also, FB deactivation does not deactivate FB Messenger. I was hoping to get rid of that but I’ll delete all Messenger apps instead.