🤓 Dev diaries

A quick video demonstrating the toolbar options in the Micro.blog Share Extension (for the 3.0 iOS Beta). Gonna be internally testing the extension this week and hope to get this out soon.

There are a few intermittent DNS issues with the shoutouts.lol zone. Hopefully will resolve itself. Will monitor in the AM and provide an update. Sorry if this affects you.

Deployed some tweaks to shoutouts.lol today. Mainly around themes, which I just announced.

I've added the ability to bring in your own stylesheet for the main Themes page preview. Super useful if you want to see what it looks like on your actual site.

I am happy to announce my first little plugin for Micro.blog, which allows you to embed your shoutouts straight into your site, may it be in the actual theme or on a page or post.

It's super easy to get started, and all you have to do is install it from here: micro.blog/account/plugins/view/92.

You will also need a shoutouts.lol account, so you can get your special embed code from the Embeds page.

The next thing you need to do is actually figure out where you want to put it.

Instructions are in the plugin Read Me to get you started. For the actual repo, you can find that here.

If you want to see a real example, head on over to my social microblog and have a look in the footer.

shoutouts.lol now supports the ability to create multiple themes. This has been on the drawing board since its inception, but wanted to keep it for another time. That time is now.

Having different themes allows you to create a Theme for that one-off website or page you have, without affecting your other embeds.

For example, I have a main default theme on my own website in the footer... but I also have another site, where I want to have it slightly different and bring across styles that I specified, without having to open up the sites code and change the stylesheet. Just let shoutouts handle that for you.

It's super simple and intuitive, with easy controls to copy your embed code and a simple preview window (which loads it in an iFrame).

This feature is labeled as "Preview" for now as I'm still making changes and am gathering feedback on ways to improve it (I have ideas, but so do you).

In the long term, I want to also add the ability to share your theme with other people. Because that'll be cool.

Hope you like it and thanks for using shoutouts! (and if you're not... ahem: Sign up)

A little bit more progress on adding theme support to shoutouts.lol. Quick video: You can see random coloured loading indicators, because it's nice. Click to copy the embed url. I reckon this will work well, depending how you style your site, or just how you feel on the day.

Good progress with the Micro.blog Share Extension on iOS today (for the new app). Still much to do!

Further progress with getting support for multiple themes into shoutouts.lol. I've been working on getting a preview to load, via an iframe, which uses the theme options you set. Pretty happy that it works.

Making a slow start to themes for shoutouts.lol 😋 My idea is to be able to use any theme by adding an extra parameter to the embed. You'll also be able to create as many as you want, to fit your needs, and as a stretch goal, the ability to share them with others.

A few minor tweaks to shoutouts.lol this evening:

• When you have more than 4 shoutouts, it'll hide the intro text on the list view.
• You can now hide the embed instructions (and toggle them as needed).
• The header navigation looks a little different, with pill shaped nav items.