A couple of days after completing the London Marathon, I’ve had only a little time to process the experience. Not only is it an assault on your body, but also on your mind and senses for hours on end. I’m very thankful to those who have supported me through sponsorship, donations, or just words of encouragement. It was hard to get to the start line, but if you know me, then you will already know that nothing would have kept me from reaching the end.
Unfortunately, there were people who didn’t make it, including some very ill individuals who needed urgent medical attention, and I really hope they are okay. So this is nothing negative toward those who needed to pull out, but it’s only when you take on these kinds of challenges that you realise just how much mental power it takes. I honestly think that just about anyone, given enough time, can physically push themselves, but it’s the mental toughness that gets you to that point.
For much of the run, your whole body is screaming at you to stop. It takes real energy to push that “monkey brain” out of the way and just keep going. I hadn’t realised how much effort this takes until I couldn’t even concentrate enough to order food later that day. I had to keep turning to my wife and asking her to do things. As bizarre as that sounds, it’s the truth; I was done. After the stress of training, raising money, traveling to London, getting to the start line, and everything else. As soon as I crossed the finish line, my brain just shut down for a bit.
The biggest message I get is congratulations on completing the marathon. It’s true, as my grandad would say, that wild horses couldn’t have kept me away from the finish line, but it still took a deep effort to get there—and I owe a lot of it to the people who read my blog and follow me on social media. Thank you. Honestly. You all mean a lot to me.
Over the last few months, it has been challenging to balance my interests and focus. Indeed, I have wasted a lot of time moving things around and messing with my websites, but along with this I have found it difficult to do more than one ‘thing’ at a time. There’s something to be said about putting all your effort one way, but I enjoy lots of different creative things and don’t like neglecting other areas.
Take my blog writing for example. It comes in waves of inspiration and I can post lots of them for a few days straight, perhaps a few weeks if I am lucky, and then it dries up again. This usually co-insides with me doing something else, like developing things for my blog. Or perhaps spending some time taking photos. It appears that my brain cant be creative in more ways than one!
I decided a break away from social media was best for me, and along with it came numerous blog posts because it was my only outlet. Since posting more to micro.blog I have developed three plugins and so writing stopped almost all together (unless readme files count). This week I went to London and took plenty of photos, so I have no doubt that writing will take a back seat again for a while.
It is as if something triggers in my brain and I can only see things one way for a while. When I am writing, my camera sits there gathering dust. Should I try to develop anything in that time, it often doesn’t go very well, and I have to push through it. The main thing I want to keep doing is posting to my blog, whilst trying to find a way to balance my varied interests, but currently it’s hard.
Display your omg.lol Statuslog on a micro.blog page.
Install the plugin from the official plugin page, or from Github by clicking design, edit theme, and then add new plugin. This will be available as an official plugin, but the submit page is currently broken.
Call the plugin anything you wish, copy in the URL from the Github page, and click Add Plugin.
Add the shortcode to the page you wish this to show on, for example, I have placed this on my home page but you could do this wherever you like.
Simply add the statuslog shortcode to your page wherever you want the updates to appear. I cannot put the shortcode here, even in a code block because micro.blog renders this! For a copy and past option, head to Github.
You must change the account name in the plugin configuration to your own, otherwise Adams statues, as great as they are, will appear on your page! Whilst you are there you can choose how many statuses you want to appear on the page.
There is absolutely no styling applied to the div elements placed on the page. This is to give you the most choice possible for how it looks. In my example screenshot above I have some very simple flexbox styling as shown below.
#omg_statuslog {
display: flex;
flex-direction: column;
gap: 20px;
font-size: 80%;
}
#omg_statuslog > div:nth-child(1) {
background: blue;
border-radius: 11px;
color: white;
}
#omg_statuslog > div {
display: flex;
justify-content: space-between;
padding: 10px;
flex-direction: row;
flex-wrap: nowrap;
gap: 20px
}
#omg_statuslog .status_emoji {
font-size: 50px;
}
#omg_statuslog .status_content {
flex: 80%;
}
This plugin uses on page javascript so there are a few things to bear in mind.
Thanks to Adam for creating such a great service in omg.lol. The statuslog is just a small part of the service, check it out here.
This plugin allows you to display how many replies your micro.blog posts have - it’s a vanity metric, nothing more.
You can install the plugin from the plugins page, or feel free to get it from Github by clicking design, edit theme, and then add new plugin.
Call the plugin anything you wish, copy in the URL from the Github page, and click Add Plugin.
Add the partial to the place you wish this to show, for example this may go in the meta information for the post. This can be used in a single post, or in a loop of posts. Each reply count is place in a unique div element so feel free to experiment.
Simply add { partial "replycount.html" . }}
to your page and the number of replies to that specific post will appear.
You can style the block however you like using the class replies
. The count number itself sits inside an inline-block class reply_count
.
To aid styling you can add in your own emoji to appear before the number, as well as your own text to appear afterwards. If thats not your thing then either options can be toggled on/off in the plugin settings.
Thanks to Manton for creating micro.blog and for making the API so well rounded and easy to interact with.
In my work to recreate my 11ty blog on micro.blog I wanted a better search experience for readers, and also myself when searching for posts to link to. Manton did a great job with his search page plugin, so I adapted this to be able to appear on any page.
This plugin for micro.blog will allow you to add a search bar to any page you wish.
This plugin is available from the micro.blog plugin page, or feel free to install it from Github by clicking design, edit theme, and then add new plugin.
Call the plugin anything you wish, copy in the URL from the Github page, and click Add Plugin.
Add the partial to the page you wish this to show on, for example, I have placed this on my home page but you could do this wherever you like.
Simply add {{ partial “search.html” . }}
to your page and the search bar will show as 100% width of the element it is placed in.
When searching, an HTML element will appear and show the results, linking to pages that contain the searched for words.
You can customise the number of results shown on your page by heading into plugin options and changing the default from 5.
The styling of the search bar will be depend on your theme, I have added in some basic styling as follows.
.field {
width: 100%;
height: 34px;
border: 2px solid #eee;
padding-left: 10px;
margin-top: 20px;
margin-bottom: 20px;
border-radius: 11px;
}
#list_results {
padding: 2rem;
border-radius: 11px;
box-shadow: rgba(60, 64, 67, 0.3) 0px 1px 2px 0px, rgba(60, 64, 67, 0.15) 0px 1px 3px 1px;
}
.field
is the search box itself.
#list_results
is the results box that only shows when search results are found.
The basis of this plugin came from Manton search page plugin.