Matthew Lang

Last night I needed a much needed break from the usual Rails coding, so I worked through an example on the StimulusJS website so that I could add a “copy to clipboard” button for the displayed writing prompt on Writeabout.

For me, this is the ideal level of integration I need with JavaScript. A framework that does some of the heavy lifting on the user-interface without me having to re-write the whole front-end.

The end result is nice, but I don’t like the way the elements on the page move up and down when the copy button has been pressed. I’ve added a little div section with an indicator that the button has been pressed. It disappears after a few seconds, but it moves the elements on the page up and down when it changes its display state. I’ll fix it another day, but the first pass at this functionality is still good.

Over the holidays I mentioned that I was writing a blog post that I would publish this week. Well, after a delay thanks to the flu, I finally hit the publish button on my return to using my main domain. My first post, about my focus for 2020, is a return to building up some long form content that I want to reside on that domain.

Is this the end of my time on Micro.blog?

Definitely not. Micro.blog is a wonderful blogging platform that I will keep on using. This blog on Micro.blog will be my social feed to the net. It’s the one place that I will post to daily. Short posts, photos and links will continue to pour out from here.

So what’s the point of the new site?

For a while I’ve been trying to find a way of supporting short and long content. I’ve tried mixing these two lengths of posts over the years and it’s never sat well with me each time I have tried it.

Now that Micro.blog is my daily social feed, I can now focus on pushing longer posts through my main site again.

It’s been a while since I last did any mind mapping—a few years, in fact. I’ve probably doodled a few smaller mind maps in that time, but this is the first time that I have done anything more than a doodle.

The two-page spread of my notebook works quite well for it, and the paper is thick enough to cope with most of my markers, so there’s little chance of it bleeding through.

I can see myself doing more of this in the months ahead.