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.
I’m very excited to welcome David O’Hara @davoh to micro.blog. David shares great images, essays, and thoughts and I’m hopeful he will find micro.blog a great platform to host all of that. One of the Christmas Blogs! 🎁
Tammy and I took Lucky for a walk to celebrate her 5th Birthday!
I just got the first version of Micro.blog Collection Creator shortcut working. It allows you to paste in the contents of an existing post, or any text with a list of urls on your site, and it will add all referenced uploads to a collection you choose. Will share after cleaning up!
One of the most impressive Christmas miracles is that LEGO sets miraculously are never missing pieces. 🤔
Tyler completed his Great Deku Tree LEGO from The Legend of Zelda. He enjoyed the build. It has two different looks to pick from — he picked the Breath of the Wild one.
A year of blogging for $12? I love this! 🤩
Several people have already correctly guessed that Micro.one will be a ridiculously low $1/month. I hope this helps it reach more people. It will also be a perfect gift subscription to give to friends and family.
Mazie completed her Christmas LEGO of Macaw Parrots this morning. They are designed to be hung on the wall and look great!
Completed my Super Mario World: Mario & Yoshi LEGO this morning. This was a very fun build and the movement is really fun! The surprise movement is Yoshi shooting a fireball out of his mouth.
I’ve been enjoying the Snow Fall plug-in by @manton on my website and it has me thinking that it would be really fun to have a web version of Simon Støvring’s Festivitas. A string of lights along the top of the browser with various configuration options would be cool.
I created a hierarchal view of my blog pages so that I could try to organize this better. This shows why I wish the Pages section of micro.blog was a bit more sophisticated. I took the outline and then gave it to ChatGPT and asked it to recommend a better way to structure it.
I make a recurring donation to Wikipedia but I figured I would make an extra donation right now. Wikipedia is one of the true wonders of the web and I’m very happy to support it.