Something I have done, and planned to post about

A simple change which I am really enjoying. For Windows 10 users, the default System font is the new 'Segoe UI' font and its variants, all included in the default Windows 10 install.

However, it IS possible to change it, to whichever font you feel would be more readable, or prettier, or that you prefer for any reason.

A quick search will reveal many pages written about this topic, and even videos for those who prefer that form of presentation.

Why change it?

Because, there are better alternatives. Microsoft itself developed at least two families of Fonts in the 1990's which were specifically designed and optimized for on-screen reading. They are outstanding for that. These fonts are:

Georgia - a Serif font, which I would recommend as a replacement for your default Browser font, instead of the plain Times New Roman usually configured by their developer.

Verdana - a Sans Serif font which is an improvement on the Arial font, and could also be adopted as a better one for Browser default. (Arial and Sans being usually the browser predefined picks).

Both Georgia and Verdana do an outstanding job, and are readable in smaller font sizes than the regular alternatives. They do look pleasing, and when first installing a new browser, changing its configuration for the default Fonts is always the very first thing I do.

Changing default Browser Fonts

This is VERY simple, and done via Browser settings. Here's a snapshot of mine, in Dark Themed Brave browser :

Other Browsers have the same controls

...although they might look a bit different. Here is the same settings area for Firefox in a Light theme configuration:

...and once there, change to these:

How about changing Windows 10 System wide font?

That can be done too, but there's no MS provided control. Never fear – it is still a simple task, and there are many pages in the Net describing this.

The change would need to be done via Registry editing. This is fine for more advanced users, but the Registry is a place we need to be careful with. So, a better way is simply to use a text file with the needed key changes, and apply those from the comfort of your file explorer window.

This is safe and fool-proof. A reboot after and the system will re-start with the changes applied and enabled.

What does it do?

The registry patch we are applying will redefine a couple of the keys inside it, pointing to your preferred font as the default for System UI use.

The patch file is simply a text file, readable :

This is the same text as shown in the many webpages describing how to make this change. The screenshot is from this Windows Central page .

What font to use?

I would recommend the 'Verdana' font. And better yet, the Verdana Pro font you can get from Microsoft Store, a newer and improved variation. FREE for Windows users.

Windows 10 Default is 'Segoe UI' – a Sans Serif font, like Arial, or Helvetica. We should use a Sans family to keep it more or less standard.

If you never installed any enhanced Fonts, you will have Verdana already – and could use the “VERDANA” word instead of the “NEW-FONT-NAME” mock text above.

Creating the Registry patch in your own machine?

• Easy, copy the text by highlighting it, right click, Copy.
• Open a text editor, even Notepad will do.
• Select Edit, Paste. The copied text will be applied in the editor window.
• Now edit the Mock text with your desired Font name, eg “VERDANA” .

Or, if you are using another one, use its name.

If there are spaces in the name, include them also, eg : “VERDANA PRO” (which is my own choice, and the best replacement for Segoe UI imo – Verdana Pro font you can get FREE from Microsoft Store )

Here's my own screenshot :

Save the file, and name it Font-Change.reg or similar.

The filename extension is important – it should be .REG so we can easily apply the patch from Windows explorer, as .REG is recognized as a Windows Registry patch file.

Pre-made patch files?

Sure, it's simpler for you, why not. The same text you see in the screenshot above is saved and shared on my Neocities.org 'shared-files' folder.

• You can easily click on the links, which will open them.
• Then right-click, and select Save As.
• edit the 'save as' filename — I was forced to add '.txt' at the end to host the files here.
• just backspace a few times, so you shorten the filename to the proper '.reg' extension.
• Click on save and you have it, ready for use.

Windows System Font patch for Verdana

And if you already installed the Verdana PRO variant, a better choice, you can use it with this patch :

Windows System Font patch for Verdana PRO

Applying the Saved file?

Easy as pie. Open a Windows Explorer, aka File Explorer, and go to the place you saved the .reg file.

Right click on it, select 'Merge'. Confirm, and it will be applied.

Done, all you need now is a restart of Windows and this will be in place.

Enjoy – I can really notice the change, it's so much smoother and easier to read in Slowly Web Client for example.

See also...

My detailed Blog post about the benefits and greatness of Verdana, Georgia, and their PRO newer variations, in comparison to the usual fonts.

Any questions or comments, feel free to see my contact details below.

Enjoy this simple change – the benefits are VERY sensible. Slowly Web Client is a place I spend a lot of time, and it's been a joy.

@rgx@write.tedomum.net

This page created entirely in MarkDown language. Thank you for reading, feel free to comment about this post – reach me at my Writer's Lounge.

R.G. @rgx@muensterland.social Top ▲

In the lovely Pinafore client.

As a laptop user primarily, it's been an uphill battle getting good clients for #fediverse which recognize and respect the fact we have lots of pixels.

Responsive Design is great – I have started learning and practising it, understand the logic. Good stuff.

But, honestly – the internet has too much to offer for real work to be performed in a mobile device. Content creation, we need better software that allows us to use what's in our chosen platform.

Case in point, Wide Screen Displays.

Which I have made various attempts at getting improvements for. The default Mastodon web client is not very friendly to wide screens. Yes, there's the TweetDeck like AWI, and I have written and spoken to Eugen with some requests.

Here's the Mastodon web client, with the Advanced Web Interface (AWI) enabled. It defaults to those dreadful, skinny, non-resizeable columns. TweetDeck inspired, as Eugen was a Twitter user for many years and freely admits the AWI provenance. 😉

A proposal, presented.

Eugen and I chatted in a topic I started at his own instance. He couldn't understand my wish of having TWO wide panels in the AWI setting, yet those two using the full width of my screen.

Not much success there. 🙄😕

Then, a solution was found. Until, it broke.

Independently, I found a great way to use wide screens with the Collapsed Mastodon Firefox add-on. Worked wonderfully, and was so productive for me that I left aside #Pinafore, my client of choice – other than the small question of it using a single column content panel.

Here's what it looked like :

Shown above – Todon.nl's local timeline, via Mastodon web client. Browsed via Waterfox (Firefox family variant) with Collapsed Mastodon Firefox addon enabled. Two Wide panels chosen, other layouts possible, as desired. This is very unique and the most efficient workspace for Fediverse I ever had.

Writer's delight

That layout is perfect for someone reading and writing long form content, which is my case. It was possible, with Collapsed Mastodon, but changes in mastodon code starting at v.3.1.4 broke the add-on. What it did was no longer possible, so game over there.

Since AWI was no more...

...I now had no reason not to use the superior, fast, elegant Pinafore. Other than the OMG, so much screen area not being used, it's the very best client I know for the Fediverse instances. Mastodon and Pleroma are both supported.

There's the small question of maybe using a little MORE of my screen, though.

(centered on the screen. On my 1600 pixels wide display, that is using 600 pixels, about 40% of my screen's width. Only. Arghhhhh)

@nolan@toot.cafe is a talented programmer, and gracious in listening to the Pinafore users. He accommodated many requests to make Pinafore the best client for people using Screen Readers, for example.

Widen up the content panel?

Now, I am tinkering and trying things out. Posted some screenshots yesterday here, with a comparison – the current layout, and a tweaked, wider content panel, showing 800 pixels screen width.

Wowa! Much more information now. 50% of my screen in use!

This 800 pixels content panel was done by a on the fly css edit, manual. (I scrolled around in the css code until found the right property to change. Worked!!)

Sadly, hitting a Refresh wiped out my handy work. Oh, my.

Is it too wide? Maybe, it's a question of taste; it makes sense to me.

Twitter supports wide screens better

For comparison's purpose, I did some testing, and on the Twitter web client I was able to get this :

Screenshot above shows what their client can do, off the box, just by manipulating the provided controls. Screen scaling to 125%, and the font size reduced to the smaller setting. Snapshot taken in the Bravo browser.

Result? The central Content panel is shown here – at 750 pixels width.

Twitter does use the right side area for various boxes, like the Trending and Who to Follow shown. So it's not unreasonable that it has the width shown.

(Detail – my scaling up the whole screen in the browser was intended to collapse the labels for the icons in the left panel; which are superfluous for regular users, who know what they do)

Pinafore Responsive Layouts

Shows 3 classes of devices, see screenshot above.

• Mobile ( 320x480p) portrait/landscape
• Small Tablet (600x800p) 2 modes also
• Tablet (768x1024p) standard iPad res, 2 modes also

If we could get a couple of added new classes it would be wonderful. Could we, please ??

Desired new modes :

• Laptop with MDPI screen at 1280 x 800 p.
• Laptop with HiDPI screen at 1440 x 900 p.

With these two added, I would be able to see Pinafore in all its elegance and using my screen more efficiently.

I have spoken extensively with @lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me about getting this kind of support in place for #pleroma #mastoFE. He understands, and is working on it; being the only person maintaining that branch of Pleroma's FE project isn't easy, kudos to him.

Now, maybe Nolan could accept this request ? It would be wonderful.

Maximum Characters per line?

As Lanodan pointed out on a reply to the original Toot which is now this post, there are criteria for how many characters to display, per line.

We got to consider that too.

There is a time tested optimum width for text readability. The Write.freely blogs css code shows 50 em setting, for example.

I have been customizing my own blog, will try at up to 80 em like you suggested. That applies to a new wider Pinafore class of devices too — appreciate the insight!

Famous Last Words

Thank you all for the work you do in benefit of the many fediverse users.

#FediReporter on the crusade for better wide screen devices support.

(Uphill battle, but we shall persevere) #mastodev #UI #UX

Banner Photo by Alejandro Escamilla on Unsplash – Thank you!

@rgx@write.tedomum.net

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R.G. @rgx@muensterland.social Top ▲

Need a better one?

An update I will share with friends, I have been looking for an alternative to my previous favourite browser. Waterfox, which I have used for years now, is itself an alternative to Firefox, developed based on it, and improved.

But – it has been laggy and acting up on the most recent releases. See the many new topics and people complaining about problems, in the Reddit Waterfox sub-forum. Time to look around for a better tool.

I tried a couple of alternatives, and here there's a summary of info and impressions.

GNU IceCat

IceCat is a fork of Firefox, developed by the GNU Foundation, and removes some of the tracking and things Mozilla includes in the regular Firefox releases.

Getting a recent version for Windows machines is not the easiest thing – searching for a source, I came across it as one of the many packages supported by Chocolatey, a package manager service for Windows architecture that is similar to the ones running in the various Linux distributions.

Another alternative is using the unofficial Win64 builds, offered in this GitHub site: GitHub – muslayev/icecat-win64.

Debian IceWeasel

IceWeasel is also fork of Firefox, developed by the Debian Foundation, and removes some of the tracking and things Mozilla includes in the regular Firefox releases.

Although officially deprecated as obsolete in 2016, there are teams working on it and posting newer versions. I found a Windows 64 bit version and installed it, labelled version 83.

Sadly it does not include the nice screenshots built in feature that Waterfox Current and the latest Quantum family FF releases have.

Searching for good suggestions?

I was, and found some good pointers in a couple of pages. Like this one.

A better page, with a shorter list – The 5 Lightest Web Browsers – November 2020

Some alternatives mentioned, in various sites

I did read a few pages, and downloaded various browser packages for testing, including :

• Comodo : Comodo IceDragon Browser
• Brave : Brave browser
• Midori : Midori browser

My downloads so far (IceCat is not included in this list)

From the articles I read, Comodo could be a good one, but its Comodo IceDragon Browser | Secured Internet Browser by Comodo is based on Firefox ESR 68, and a bit behind the current versions. Not ideal for me, as I need the screen capture feature frequently, it's so handy.

So far, I like Gnu IceCat, although it required some tinkering (importing bookmarks took an export/import manual operation).

And Bravo is surprising good!

And I am writing this in Bravo, which surprises me with a light working variant of the famously demanding Chromium project variants (most well known and used of which, also the worst, is Google Chrome browser.

I am happy with it, and tuning the settings you CAN keep the memory usage in check – important to anyone running many tabs and multiple programmes at the same time. Chrome is famous for hogging all your RAM – “Why Chrome Uses So Much Freaking RAM” for itself, I have not used it for maybe 8 years now.

Bravo, well behaved though

Here's a snapshot of my current Task Bar – and Brave is showing remarkably well — with the heavy Reddit site loaded and working, as I am writing this post.

Conclusion ?

I am liking Bravo and thinking of switching it to my Default daily driver, as it seems quite fast, light and modern. Nice work, thanks Bravo!

Will update this post with more impressions and any other alternatives I find.

Famous Last Words

Banner Photo by Richy Great on Unsplash – Thank you!

@rgx@write.tedomum.net

This page created entirely in MarkDown language. Thank you for reading, feel free to comment about this post – reach me at my Writer's Lounge.

R.G. @rgx@muensterland.social Top ▲

Glitch-Social — Instances list is really needed!

On June 3, I wrote a Toot at my new account, found late on the previous night. (the busy tabs list mentioned is the banner above)

A picture of my busy Tabs list in #Waterfox browser shows that I really was looking for some good GlitchSocial instances.

Had been intensively searching for a list (non-existant, afaik) of Glitch-Social instances. They tend to be blended in with generic mastodon ones, so it was quite a chore. In a Blog page about this, I wrote:

[ I WILL provide that list soon — there is a need ]

And now, here it is.

Thanks to the extensive listings of all Mastodon nodes at The-Federation.info, I managed to sort all of them by software version.

And then copied out all the 'glitch' ones. [ as listed, December 27, 2020 ]

Why I had been thinking about a better Instance. [Part 3]

Back in June, 2020 I had decided to look for a better instance for my main account. I had various reasons for that, one of the most important being I wanted an account at a Glitch-Social instance, which supports many advanced features, compared to the plain Mastodon ones.

Things like : MarkDown text formatting support. Larger maximum Toot sizes. Finer UI controls and many other advances not present in the main Mastodon branch.

I found one – and wrote a nice Blog page about it, which has been popular. It has been my Home in the Fediverse since the June. Many thanks to Niklas, @nipos@muensterland.social for the service. 👍🙂

@rgx@write.tedomum.net

This page created entirely in MarkDown language. Thank you for reading, feel free to comment about this post – reach me at my Writer's Lounge.

R.G. @rgx@muensterland.social ^—top of page

A Powerful and Light, FAST client for Mastodon, etc...

Originally posted as a sequence of Toots from my account at Koyu.Space, this was well received, appreciated by the Pinafore client's Author and I think is quite informative.

There's a lack of good reporting and documentation on many projects in the Fediverse.

But Pinafore is beloved of its users – see screenshot above, from the #Pinafore fediverse hashtag. And some others below too. 👍🙂❤

From Toot sequence to Blog page...

I wrote the Toots un-edited, from the hip, and the sequence came out pretty good.

Now it's time to collate them and add some polish, some extra reference links, to make a shiny Blog post. And here it is.

Explainer – the 'Nomad Living' mention refers to my love of seeing the many instances in the Fediverse first hand, by myself, to learn about each and see their Local timelines.

The Instance we Choose to use in the Fediverse is Important — I have written about that in a popular post in my Tech blog.

The sequence follows, lightly edited for style and for in-line images placement. I have also expanded some sub-topics and added extra links.

Pinafore makes Nomad Living a joy

Adding one more to the list. 17 in it, CDrom.Tokyo joins at no. 18 spot. 😎

Many thanks to @nolan@toot.cafe">@nolan for the wonderful #fediverse #client that #Pinafore is.

The BEST, ask your geeky friends.

Speed, lightness. Functional and elegant Design. Free, not in your face design impositions.

No freaking character limits, Pinafore allows use of whatever your instance allows.

AND — it also accepts MarkDown posts, which are joy for me as a writer and content producer.

Same client, visits mastodon, or Glitch-Social, or Pleroma, or Misskey instances. All without leaving the same screen.

Power user?

For those with accounts in multiple instances – You can run multiple Pinafore copies -side by side in the same browser window, each tab a different instance.

Won't I get confused or lost, where am I?

No, no fret — Pinafore allows a big range of Themes, pre configured Colour Schemes so you can keep track of where you are, even in multi tabbed, multi instance moments.

Quick snapshot of the Colour Theme selection panel here, for illustration.

See this post with a full Gallery of #Pinafore Themes :

Pinafore client – A sampler of all the Colour Themes available

...at the little known Pinafore subforum at another instance.

#Recommended #Client — #Fediverse #nomad Friendly.

#FediReporter on the Beat. Frontline reports return...

And to find out more about #Pinafore ?

Visit the Author's blog post, written after one year working in the project.

One year of Pinafore

Read the Tea Leaves

Or, Ask me!

I love it, and be glad to oblige and answer questions. Reach me at my Writer's Lounge.

Also, check out the glowing user commentary — see : Pinafore Love – User’s Impressions from the Hash Tag

How To install Pinafore ?

Simple, visit Pinafore · Home — which is one of the various possible web hosts for Pina.

( More instances are also available, listed here for us geeks : Listing of Known Pinafore Instances you can connect to.

We really don't install Pinafore — you simply open the Pinafore instance in a Browser tab, and from that moment on, your client loads and communicates directly with the Mastodon (or Glitch-Social, or Pleroma) instance.

Client Side Data – session authorization, themes, etc...

No data is saved at the Pinafore home instance – it is all on the client side. Awesome, isn't it?

If you change to a different browser, even in the same machine, the logged-in instances list and your colour theme selections are not there yet. The price of keeping your data private. So, stick with a good browser and enjoy it.

Pinafore can also be run on mobile devices – simply open the site in your favourite Browser in the mobile. Save a bookmark and enjoy it.

It was tested and built from the ground up to perform well even in less powerful devices. In a good laptop or desktop, it flies.

This post brought to you by the letters MD, P and K.

Even Eugen R. recommended it! 😉😙

See screen capture below – from this Toot.

For those who might not know him, Eugen Rochko is the lead Developer in the Mastodon project. And that endorsement is important.

@rgx@write.tedomum.net

This page created entirely in MarkDown language. Thank you for reading, feel free to comment about this post – reach me at my Writer's Lounge.

R.G. @rgx@muensterland.social ^—top of page

This started as a reply in my Fediverse account:

@joaopinheiro@libranet.de And I came back, on a quiet moment to read your new blog page. Very nice – I really enjoyed it, and think it can be useful to other people as well.

Same as you, I first learned about MarkDown upon getting started with blogging – using the Write.Freely software, which is the free open source version of the Write.as blog.

Both Write.Freely and Write.as are superb tools for writers – as they were designed to simplify things, avoiding the complications and excess luggage that the major blog platforms (WordPress, etc) have.

I love working in the Dark Theme screen of my WF blog editor. A black screen and crisp white text, me and my words, no distractions.

We both owe @matt@write.as a big thank you, as the creator of this project.

After starting typing the reply above, I thought I could write a blog response page.

On getting started in MarkDown

I was lucky, as things go – to stumble upon a post at Todon.nl, with a pointer to a blog page talking about an interactive MarkDown Tutorial. Both the blog page and the tutorial linked were in Spanish, which I do have a degree of fluency on.

And better yet, upon visiting the MarkDown Tutorial site, I realized it has the same content in English, French and Spanish – serving many people at once.

Same as my friend João, I have worked many years in Education, love reading and writing, and also think great documentation is an incredible asset for any project.

This tutorial was impressive, I started into it and worked thru the lessons. In each you are introduced to a small concept, like how to apply Bold formatting. Then you have a small practice exercise, where you type in the text with the needed commands (for Bold, it's either ** or __ , both work. Asterisks are easier so I use them).

Until your typed command can produce the same text output as the example above, the tutorial will not show you the next section, so you work at it, focused, and not scanning and skimming the content. Points here for focusing and avoiding distractions.

Once your text matches the example, the next section is disclosed. And so on. When a full lesson is complete, you will have learned quite a bit, and I jumped straight into my blog editor to try out these new commands. The best way to store new knowledge, practice until it becomes natural.

Honestly – I think this tutorial is the best example of technology applied to education and learning that I have seen so far. That good, and I have taught Computer Tech and Networking at the high school level for many years.

A personal note:

The project's Git hub page has a topic with a list of all the needed files to create a translation to a new language. Currently offered in 6 languages, up from the 4 we had last year.

Can I make a Portuguese (Brazil) version? · Issue #75

MarkDown Editors, the quest

I enjoyed reading João's most recent page, detailing his needs and wants for a markdown editor package. They make sense, I use very similar criteria for finding good software when I need it.

Small and simple, efficient and fast are best. Eye candy, I am not interested in. Free is best if possible, and since there's so much great software created by the open source free software communities, there are many options.

I tried a few tools. Typora, which João also tried, had a temporary free license during its Beta development period, but eventually would become a paid product.

Other Free Editor alternatives?

I used the StackEdit in-browser app João also tried and liked. I still have it, and have some simple files saved there. Here's a screenshot – it has two panes, one with the MD raw code, and the other one a Preview pane. You can turn off the preview, and have more space for editing, or work in visual mode directly.

More recently I found another package called Obsidian, which had some good comments in a Reddit thread about MD editors. I downloaded and installed it. but never went deeper. But it has interesting points !

I used a couple of other ones for short test periods, but none was striking and clearly a solution for me, until I found MarkText, which is wonderful.

My fist testing with it quickly evolved from a Fediverse instance post, to a full blown Blog page as I used and got comfortable with it. I wrote the page showing my impressions and findings.

And the tools I use for Blog production

I started an year ago exactly, in early December, with the first real blog page dating around mid December, 2019.

Being new to the platform, I tried a couple of different instances and still have accounts at Write.as, and a few others. The first place I could see one of my test pages federating (showing up in my own Fediverse account, where announcements of new posts arrive), the first instance which successfully federated my early test posts was the one I chose for my new Tech blog – TeDomum.net, which is maintained by a French cooperative organization offering many other services.

At first I worked in the instance's Blog editor. Soon I found out it was possible to install and run a small, personal, private instance of Write.Freely, and that was intriguing...

This is by all means a geeky thing, for those of us who like tinkering and figuring out things. Almost everyone will be happy using the normal editor at a public, free Write.Freely instance. Getting started this way would be ideal for anyone new to the platform.

Entering into a personal instance adventure

Write.Freely is produced with versions for Linux, Mac OS and Windows. I use and enjoy Windows 10, which I am familiar with having been with it since the Beta testing days, so the fact that WF could be had in my own chosen platform was nice.

The WF package itself is about 60 MB or so, and not complex to install. The hard part was to get the needed Database where the posts are stored.

MySQL Server 5.6 is the recommended solution, and the WF site has more detailed installation instructions for it under the various Linux flavours. Very scant info on doing the same on a Windows system, so I was on my own here.

You can get the MySQL installer for Windows here. There are 32 and 64 bit versions, to suit your machine's architecture (most recent machines would use the 64 bits version)

A whole morning struggling with the MySQL syntax, and searching for how to do needed simple things like creating a database, adding a user, etc. I did not keep notes, and someday I might try this process in another machine – this time to document it, with notes and screenshots.

A good guide on how to do this would be priceless, as there isn't one as far as I know (certainly none is present or linked at the Write Freely documentation pages.

While searching for links for this page, I just found an interesting and very detailed tutorial – about how to install MySQL Server 5.6 under Windows 10 – bookmarking it for reference and for the page readers. Recommended!

Why run a personal Instance of Write.Freely?

The main motivation was the fact that I could run it on my normal working laptop, natively. And the fact all this could be done without needing a live internet connection.

Plus, a big factor, the fact that I can do edits and previews at lightning speed – the page loads are instant. A good thing when I am doing a final pass and polishing text, fixing and enhancing wording and formatting, etc.

When finished, the page is exactly the same as it will be when copied and pasted at the live internet host – since we are using exactly the same platform.

Being created locally, these pages also remain as a backup of all the work I produce in this machine, which is basically all of the blog posts (besides many other things).

So – speed, convenience, quick editing, full backup and identical page rendering.

Where are we at?

Presently writing this in MarkText, which will soon have a full fledged page.

When complete, I will switch to 'Source Mode', and copy the raw markdown text, for pasting into the local WF blog editor.

A quick check and any little fixes if needed, and soon another copy paste into the live internet hosts for the pages (I have two blogs with different themes and hosted in different WriteFreely instances).

Recently I updated my local install to the most current WF version, 0.12, and was really glad that contrary to my fears, there was no angst dealing with MySQL server – no issues, I did not touch it or the database, yey!

Famous Last Words

I wanted to thank my friend João Pinheiro for his interest in my previous post about MarkText, and for trying it and posting a nice blog review of his whole experience.

Big thank yous to the creators of our various software packages, which I use all the time for my writing and publishing work:

• Write.as, the creators of the wonderful Write.Freely blog platform.
• MarkText, which is also turning quickly into an essential tool for me.
• IrfanView, my simple and powerful image editor.
• MySQL Server free Community edition, which powers and stores all my local writing here.

@rgx@write.tedomum.net

This page created entirely in MarkDown language. Thank you for reading, feel free to comment about this post – reach me at my Writer's Lounge.

R.G. @rgx@muensterland.social ^—top of page

That is a Good Question. Here's why.

A collage of recent posts on important issues we face in the Fediverse. And which we hopefully can move forward on.

Originally In response to a post by Snow

Why you chose Glitch social? It still can be affected by Eugen.

Indeed — Glitch-Social is a Much Better mastodon, but still has the heavy load of all the mastocode under the hood.

I would prefer to use Pleroma, BUT...

... There are some UGLY markdown rendering issues, and I cannot live with that.

From my Pleroma GitHub Issue post, a partial quote:

I have noticed that posts with H2 heading titles, created and displayed perfectly on a Glitch-Social instance, display without the Larger text expected for the title in Pleroma FE.

While it's possible that this is intentional, a fellow user suggested an issue be raised here, for discussion and in case this is not intended behaviour.

Example post : Marilyn. Always remembered.

Which display so in Pinafore client (logged at the source, a Glitch-Social instance, here using the Dark Greyscale theme) :

Made a big post yesterday about it and included Lain on it – hoping he would push the Pleroma FE people to fix that.

They also would need to improve the MastoFE

...under Pleroma a bit – it's the GlitchSocial web client, and very decent for me, as I am more used to this side of fedi.

PleromaFE is intriguing, but a SINGLE column to display info is so Wrong, for me — Wide Screen displays in PCs and Laptops deserve better.

And here's what I mean, better

The screenshot above is from Todon.nl — and that is running plain Vanilla Mastodon. (click image for full size version)

They just happened to have a better awi Wide Screen Theme, and without any extra software, I could get and use the work environment you see here, above.

And it can still get improved

As shown here, in another screenshot. From Todon.nl as well.

But now using a Firefox browser add-on, called 'Collapsed Mastodon'. (click image for full size version)

For me, this was the Dream Team, the best work environment for someone who likes to read and writes long form — which I do.

Sadly, changes in the Mastodon code since version 3.1.4 have disabled the styling which Collapsed Mastodon did.

It could be possible to do the same in the project's own Web Client code itself. If there's interest by the developers, which is the main obstacle to get anything done. (the user add-on, sadly no longer working. )

An ongoing battle for improvement

That's another one of my pet peeves – and one I am also working on. Hard to get changes made, I have reported things and offered suggestions.

Eugen R. doesn't even respond to me anymore. 🙄

(he thinks the skinny, narrow and ADHD inducing 4 panels awi is the shits, apparently.)

And he's not the only one...

My Suggestion for AWI enhancements on the Glitch-Social GitHub was posted 6 months ago. NO replies or comments. 🤨

My bug report at the PleromaFE Git hub was also posted a few months ago.

Issue 878 – MarkDown – Heading formatted text not displaying properly

No comments there at all. 🤔😐

Detailed explanation of the Wide Screen improvement

I have a fully explained and detailed Forum post about the proposal also. Please visit and check it out. It's publicly readable, and if you want to comment, a free registration only takes a minute.

Pleroma is the Future, but we need to fix some issues. Thank you!

#MastoFE #PleromaFE #PleromaDev #Pleroma #UI #ux

#FediReporter in action. We can do better, Fediverse.

@rgx@write.tedomum.net

This page created entirely in MarkDown language. Thank you for reading, feel free to comment about this post – reach me at my Writer's Lounge.

R.G. @rgx@muensterland.social ^—top of page

New find, a lovely MarkDown text editor

This morning I stumbled across an interesting blog, and in it, a reference to a good markdown text editor.

Have tried others before, and not for long; I am familiar with the MD tags, and work well with the EditPad Lite text editor, or from inside the nice Dark Themed Write.freely blog editor, if I am composing a new blog page.

The review is really well done, got my attention – and I made a post on Twitter about it soon after. Painful, with Twitter's crippling small limit for posts, broken up in many parts, which makes it more difficult to create a coherent presentation.

However – writing it was the push to download and install MarkText – and to collate some of the thoughts in the Tweets into a longer, Fediverse intended post. This one, being written inside MarkText itself, my first trial. And it looks and feels wonderful already.

What's to like in MarkText?

Much, I think – it's open sourced, no cost to try and to keep using for the future (unlike some similar alternatives, either trialware or outright commercial software).

• Very clean interface, pleasant to me, used to the Write.freely equally simple and stark but comfy editor.
• Lots of configuration options, if you want to chose settings. 6 different Themes, including three Dark Mode ones – the one in my screen is a Charcoal gray, very pretty.
• Saving and exporting: MarkText can export your files to HTML source versions, for use in other applications.
• or to PDF, with control over Fonts used, page dimensions for printing, margins, etc.
• Spell checking in different languages, additional dictionaries offered.
• Word Count at the top of the screen; useful for many types of writing.

And much more

I am starting using it, and just the very first impression was very good – it feels light, fast, easy to work with. An improved version of the WF editor I enjoy a lot.

• There are more features here, more themes in the rich Settings panel.

• And by digging in, you find options to allow it to auto-upload image files, which you intend to use in any given page, to an online image host.

• Used it to upload to a GitHub account. This is the first time I had an app write to it – saved the file with the original name, all worked well. Ready to post in Blog or anywhere else as desired.

But this is a more advanced feature, there if you want to try and use it (and to be loved by many, I am sure)

Back to the basics

Some nice and simple things that quickly shine:

• A Word Counter, at the top left corner.

Handy, and this enables MarkText to be useful for many other writing tasks, even if there's no MD formatting intended. I can see it becoming my editor of choice for letter writing, for example... 🖍📝🙂

(where I usually go for the long form, and could overwhelm a recipient if they are reading my text on a mobile device screen)

• File Exporting Formats.

Which include HTML and PDF. The html option allows some more controls. You can set a Page Title, and if desired, use a configured Theme.

For users wanting to export MarkDown formatted text into a Zonelets blog, these are not important, as we have the css controls for text appearance already.

Select export HTML, and paste the text into a normal text editor with the Zonelets post template. Later as we get more familiar with this tool, we could open the Zonelets Template page and edit, save a new ZL blog post directly from MarkText — complete and ready for uploading. 🙂✔

Conclusion – Recommended tool!

This is very quickly becoming a comfortable place to write in. I like and recommend it.

Give it a try and share your comments – thank you.

@rgx@write.tedomum.net

This page created entirely in MarkDown language. Thank you for reading, feel free to comment about this post – reach me at my Writer's Lounge.

R.G. @rgx@muensterland.social ^—top of page

An idea for improvement

This is in regards to the cool new 'Zonelets Blogs', created and maintained by Marina Kittaka.

Marina create this new project last month, November 2020, and it's got some really interesting aspects – a very simple approach, pure html source code, allowing people to learn and get familiar with the inner workings of the Web.

It is a minimalist approach, intentionally – as opposed to the heavy and too complex situation we see with WordPress and other large publishing platforms.

Based on simple fundamentals

Like having a free host (like NeoCities.org), which gives everyone a home, 1 GigaByte of storage space for their files, full access to them via a web tool, allows java-scripting and other good points.

I have been blogging for a year now with the very nice Write.freely platform, and am very happy. It is simple, polished and fast – a comparison with WordPress really did not impress me (bloated, slow to load a page upon an edit, preview).

Zonelets is based on pure html source editing, by hand (or with some other tools we find convenient). It's great for learning, amazing how puzzling things can be when you misplace a semicolon or forget to close a tag. 😜

Zonelets is javascript driven

All of the work needed to show a list of all recent posts, the one previous or newer to one you are currently reading, some assorted headers for the blog as desired — all of this is done via Marina's nice work in the 'scripts.js' file.

(In stark comparison to that, my loved Write.freely platform does not allow any javascript at all to be used; for security, which is understandable.)

Zonelets works well, it's light and fast.

But I was worried about messing up the magical 'scripts.js' file with the frequent editing needed to add new posts to the blog (hopefully a frequent occurrence, no?)

The idea was suggested

The banner image on this post is a screen capture of my tweet – which included a question to the author about that.

“Thanks, Marina! A suggestion, if possible to have 'posts array list' on a separate file from script.js, it could make maintenance easier, add new pages.”

A reply came :

Thanks for the suggestion! I'm curious: for you personally, what specifically would make it more convenient to have that in a separate file? Is it mostly not wanting to regularly mess with the file containing the core stuff?

And I reasoned so :

“I think it's mostly more peace of mind of not messing the big javascript file, with some editing error.

With a smaller, posts only file, we could leave the main js file alone, once the basic user config is saved to it (author, blog name, etc).”

Fast forward a day, and we have it.

Thanks to the assistance of a fellow programmer, much more versed in web dev than myself, I have made some modifications that allow this to happen.

New features – proposed for addition to main project branch :

• All posts info (their dates and titles) to be moved from the main script.
• These are easier to access and maintain.

Modifications required :

• very small editing on the main 'scripts.js' file.
• creation of a new 'my-posts.js' file, where post titles, dates are added.
• adding an extra line calling this extra script in the bottom of all blog posts.

Edits needed – in main 'script.js' file :

Here we are removing the existing post Array entries (the detailed list of post dates and titles.)

All of that is cut off and pasted into the new 'my-posts.js' file.

We introduce a new line, which will import the Post Array data :

import {postsArray} from "./my-posts.js";

And the new 'my-posts.js' list file :

We could use any name for the new file to store the posts. I chose 'my-posts.js' for simplicity, and to differentiate it easily on the Neocities file manager window from the similar 'posts' folder we use for most blog pages.

The screenshot above shows my current file. There's a key statement at the bottom which allows the data to be exported for use with other scripts :

export { postsArray };

In every other respect, it's identical to the 'post array', section 2 of Marina's original script.js file. (we moved any posts from there to our new separate file)

And near the bottom of the Blog posts :

From the main level, the root folder of the blog – where we have the index, archive, about and not_found html pages — use this at bottom :

The two key lines being these :

<script type="module" src="./my-posts.js"></script> <script type="module" src="./script.js"></script>

For Existing and New Blog posts :

These files are placed in a sub-folder, so they require a very minor change in these two lines — the '. ' (representing the current directory) is replaced with a '..' , which points to one directory level above, to the location of both javascript files.

The two key lines being these :

<script type="module" src="../my-posts.js"></script> <script type="module" src="../script.js"></script>

And that is it.

The editing will be needed just to switch to this new scheme. You should edit the '2020-11-10-Post-Template.html' (default, included in Marina's package), and save it.

From this point on, use it – open the file and save to a new filename as you start a new Blog page. It will have all the needed, current scripting included.

When you finish creating the new Blog page, don't forget to add it to the new 'my-posts.js' file, and upload both to NeoCities.org. Done!

Tested and working on my personal Zonelets blog.

I hope this can be useful and thank Aduros for the assistance with the coding, and to Marina for the whole project initiative.

@rgx@write.tedomum.net

This page created entirely in MarkDown language. Thank you for reading, feel free to comment about this post – reach me at my Writer's Lounge.

R.G. @rgx@muensterland.social ^—top of page

Verdana Pro — why use 'Arial'

...when something much nicer is freely available?

Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation. This typeface was originally release with Windows 98 as part of our vision to significantly improve on screen reading time. Verdana Pro adds light, semibold and black styles with italics, as well as condensed styles with italics across all weights.

-source: Microsoft

Why is Verdana better for screen reading?

Bearing similarities to humanist sans-serif typefaces such as Frutiger, Verdana was designed to be readable at small sizes on the low-resolution computer screens of the period.

• Like many designs of this type, Verdana has a large x-height (tall lower-case characters), with wider proportions and looser letter-spacing than on print-orientated designs like Helvetica.
• The counters and apertures are wide, to keep strokes clearly separate from one another, and similarly-shaped letters are designed to appear clearly different to increase legibility for body text.
• The bold weight is thicker than would be normal with fonts for print use, suiting the limitations of onscreen display.

-source: Wikipedia

20 different styles on the Windows Store download pack, Free. Verdana and Georgia were specially developed for on-screen reading.

Verdana typeface info, Wikipedia

And it's a FREE Download from :

• Microsoft directly
• or Online Web Fonts

Georgia is also a better on-screen font

...designed to replace a serif font like Times New Roman.

Georgia is a serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation in the mid-1990s. This typeface was designed as a serif companion to the Verdana font family with a goal to appear elegant but legible on low-resolution screens as well as when printed at small sizes.

-source: Microsoft

Georgia was intended as a serif typeface that would appear elegant but legible when printed small or on low-resolution screens. The typeface is inspired by Scotch Roman designs of the 19th century.

As a transitional serif design, Georgia shows a number of traditional features of “rational” serif typefaces from around the early 19th century, such as alternating thick and thin strokes, ball terminals and a vertical axis.

Closer inspection shows how Georgia was designed for clarity on a computer monitor even at small sizes. It features:

• a large x-height (tall lower-case letters);
• its thin strokes are thicker than would be common on a typeface designed for display use or the greater sharpness possible in print.
• Its reduced contrast and thickened serifs make it somewhat resemble Clarendon designs from the 19th century.

-source: Wikipedia

Also a FREE Download from :

• Microsoft directly
• or Online Web Fonts

Improve your on-screen Browser reading

...by selecting custom fonts which were developed for this exact task. Professional work, skilled designers. All for no cost and a minimal effort.

Install the better fonts (if not in your system yet) and :

• Go into your web browser's 'Settings' (or 'Options') panel.
• Locate the 'Fonts' control. Screenshot shows Firefox's :

• Select the 'Advanced' button to access all the font options.
• For Serif – replace 'Times New Roman' with much smoother 'Georgia'. ✔
• For Sans – replace 'Arial' or 'Sans' with 'Verdana Pro'. ✔

Press the 'Ok' button to save our selections. And voilá. Enjoy. Repeat this customization for other systems you use regularly as well. 😉👍

#FediReporter tips for better web reading experience #rgxJournal #Typefaces #Design are important

@rgx@write.tedomum.net

This page created entirely in MarkDown language. Thank you for reading, feel free to comment about this post – reach me at my Writer's Lounge.

R.G. @rgx@muensterland.social ^—top of page