Trying to Clout Coffee Bourbon Whiskey barrel-aged espresso this morning. Strong Bourbon smell on the beans.
All five of the Weekly Thing Christmas Blogs are now created!
- Phil Rodemann @See3p0
- Marcos D Alves @mdalves
- David O’Hara @davoh
- Jesse Lang @jesselang
- Eric Cohn @ercohn
Next step is to introduce each of these blogs to Weekly Thing readers over a few issues. Love that “new blog” smell! 😂
I’ve been sharing my 53rd Birthday POAP with friends and family all day today. I thought it would be fun to share a few with readers of my blog.
We had a fun visit to Bell Museum this morning. We saw Mars: The Ultimate Voyage in the Planetarium and then checked out all the dioramas.
It’s my birthday tomorrow! Noting my rings and version number the day before. 😊
I’ll be sharing my 53rd Birthday POAP. Want one? Just ask.
We watched Fly Me to the Moon tonight and I thought it was a great movie. Tammy liked it too and Tyler was a bit bored. Enjoyable movie with a fun story all in the context of the Apollo program and landing on the moon!
POAP Event Trends
It has become a tradition for me to create a POAP for my birthday. I’ve been doing it since my 50th Birthday and now have 51st, 52nd, and now my 53rd. Since POAP uses a simple sequential number for events I can easily see how many POAP events have been created for those years.
| Year (Approx) | Events |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 74,298 |
| 2023 | 71,285 |
| 2024 | 16,826 |
That is a big drop in 2024, however it is still 46 events a day. I love what POAP is doing and they are slowly getting their whole offering easier to use and more streamlined. My guess is that they are not actively pushing to create more events right now while they improve the product. I’m rooting for them to be massively successful. I think POAP could be one of the products that shows the path for blockchain adoption.
I’m “all in” on micro.blog collections. I have 61 collections with 936 images. My Collection Creator Shortcut was key to that. Nearly all Gallery posts have been updated. I migrated Adaptive Photo Layout posts to Collections.
Top feature ask: rename collections and modify order or images.
2024 in Blogging
With many thanks to Amit Gawande’s fun Post Stats Plugin and a recent discussion to add some more information to it — I’m sharing some perspective on my blogging from 2024.
In 2024 I published 701 posts with 51,905 words. Of those, 529 had photos and 157 of them had titles.
June had about triple the normal blogging activity which was from our trip to Ireland. Over the last few years I’ve done daily travel logs on those trips and usually write a blog post for each activity. It can be a lot, but I value what it creates and know that in future years I will revisit those posts with many fond memories.
Zooming out I now have a total of 9,111 posts containing 574,102 words! My blog posts have come along many migrations:
.Text → WordPress → SquareSpace → Pelican → Jekyll → micro.blog
On top of that I imported my Twitter archive and curated and improved that. Since April 2017 I’ve been publishing on micro.blog and you can see that it has enabled me to post even more. To me, this is one of the best ways to evaluate a blogging platform — does it enable you to “just write” on the web.
Happy 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣5️⃣! 🎉🥂 Wishing everyone a great New Year!
It was Mr. Green with the Revolver in the Hall. Tammy won!
Enjoying one of our New Year’s Eve traditions, a delicious pot of fondue. So good.
We went to A Complete Unknown today at the iconic Heights Theater. I thought the movie was great and Timothée Chalamet did a great performance as Bob Dylan. Now I want to listen to Dylan music for the next several weeks. It was also great to hear a couple of Minneapolis callouts. Great movie! 🍿
Cool to see the new Mimi Uploader out with support for Micro.blog collections! This along with my Collection Creator Shortcut gives me a lot of options.
I’m still wondering how to name collections. It seems if you have 100 or more collections it is going to get unruly, similar to Pages. 🤔
I’m excited to welcome Jesse Lang @jesselang to Micro.blog! Along with Phil Rodemann @See3p0, Marcos D Alves @mdalves, and David O’Hara @davoh that is four of the Christmas Blogs. 🎄🎁🎁🎁🎁
The fifth winner changed their mind so I extended the offer to another. 🤞
The New Standards were at The Dakota tonight for their regular Preener’s Eve Show! We are fans of the band and of this show specifically. Tonight seemed even a bit better than they always are. Such a wonderful evening. 🎶
Tried a new cocktail at The Dakota tonight — Back to Black. King County Coffee Whiskey, Irish Cream, Cold Press, and Smoked Whip. Was very good but you need to like coffee.
We went to Puttshack today and loved their “enhanced” take on minigolf. We also had lunch and the food was good and the dessert even better. It is fun that the scoring is all done for you and they introduce other dynamics into the course. Fun time!
We had a great time at [Activate] in Roseville today. The games were great. All of the tech worked flawlessly. We were challenged and got our heart rates up playing. Super fun! Highly recommend checking this out! Wear clothes like you are going to the gym!
Micro.blog Collection Creator Shortcut
Recently micro.blog added a powerful new feature to create photo collections. Using this feature you can group photos together and then use a special micro.blog shortcode to reference that collection in a blog post or page.
This is a powerful feature and one of the things I wanted to do with it was create collections for the “gallery” blog posts I have on my site, posts that often have six or more images as a collection. However, there is no way to easily create a collection from a list of uploads that already exist. That is the gap this shortcut solves!
Collection Creator is intended to take the contents of a blog post, find all referenced images on that post, and then add them to an existing collection! The shortcut structure is straightforward:
- Receive the text, expected via a copy/paste.
- Find all referenced uploads in the text.
- You pick an existing collection.
- It adds each image to that collection.
After it is complete you can remove the image references from the blog post and replace with the collection shortcode.
There is a newer version of this Shortcut!
Notes
- This shortcut requires two constants to be set: the base URL of your site and an App Token to authenticate to the Micro.blog API.
- This shortcut has a dependency on the very powerful Logger for Shortcuts app. This is particularly useful when adding several uploads to a collection since you can see the progress and it takes several seconds per image. I’ve had this shortcut take over a minute to run and watching Logger is helpful to see progress.
- This shortcut will not create a collection for you. You should do that in the Micro.blog Uploads interface before running the shortcut.
- If there is an error and you process 10 images but the API fails and only 9 are added to the collection you can simply rerun it again with no issue.