*banned 4 MarkDown love* @design_RG@qoto.org

Long Hair, Short Hair, take your pick. Both very pretty and well cared for. Thanks @Johannab

#xp #mastocats #CatsofTwitter #meow
---
RT @johannabee
A Fluffy Beastie, A Fuzzy Beastie. #mastocats
https://twitter.com/johannabee/status/1079751108812259330

Types of Cats.

OT : https://radical.town/@pwrmnstr/103037685954284304

#cats #mastocats #meow #felines

There are a number of Bot picking up posts from popular, important or not so quite from the birdsite and bridging over to the Fediverse. I do follow the awesome Cat bot, @catpostingbot of course, made my day when first found it.

There a large list of Bot put together by Commandlinekid. - commandlinekid@noagendasocial.com

The updated list is kept on this blog - newest additions are at *the bottom*.

A number of right wing pols, but also Hindu media and figures, some major international media as well.

https://mastlist.blogspot.com/

Cat Disapproves of You.

Ooops.

Selective Content. Got Gold?

#humour #gold #omg

QOTO Moderator Nomination Process - Notes

This month we have a process for nominating candidates for Moderator position here at QOTO.org. It is an important one, and I would like to post a few notes and thoughts about it.

1. First of all, it's surprising how open and transparent the process of Staff selection is here; In most cases, these discussions are hel In Camera, by existing site staff (moderators and administrators), sometimes subject to a vote between them, sometimes with Admins having the final decision, after accepting input.

Here, it's done in the public Feed, the posts are also federated with other instances. And the nomination process is open to participation by any current user in QOTO. (an election should ensue, if more than one person is nominated; otherwise, it's considered hors-concours, and the nominated person gets the job)

2. Nomination is currently done via a post in the QOTO Discourse forum (a less known and used feature of the community), you will need to register an account there as it's different software that Mastodon running here.

As an alternative, you could post a Mastodon post, and declare your support for any user here you see as a good candidate, include the person via their @ tag name, and include @freemo, our system admin so he won't miss it.

A word processor works great, has lots of formatting, etc.

But it also is more distracting. I find that sometimes the best is simple, down to Earth things and tools.

For writing, the words come first. Formatting is important, but can come later.

Long writing here in Mastodon-land, using the SMALL toot editor window, not seeing all your text, with distractions and notifications popping up all the time?

Not ideal. Get an Editor. Great free ones out there, many people have favourites.

I like, use and recommend EditPad Lite, it's Free for personal use.

https://www.editpadlite.com/download.html

Very nice article -- and a super handy feature to have.

Earlier today I wrote a sequence of posts (visit to Lisbon Museum series) in a plain Text editor (more space to write, font size control, NO distractions on sight).

When I had completed it, it was time to post here - in individual segments to keep size in control.

I did it via traditional Clipboard commands, hurrying and worried that someone would comment or reply before I had the full set posted.

Went looking for an enhanced Clipboard utility, they have been around. But -- discovered that Windows 10 now has that, Built-In, no added software needed.

The article in PC Mag linked explains it well, with illustration. It's simple and convenient to use.

Thank you PC Mag, Microsoft. 👍

https://www.pcmag.com/feature/364313/how-to-use-the-new-and-improved-windows-10-clipboard

Reminiscing of a visit to the Archeology Museum, in Lisbon, Portugal.

It started this morning, the thread. And over short posts, someone told a story. Of a Greek man, who lived in antiquity, by the Mediterranean side; in a city whose name is still preserved, and today is written "Marseille".

This series of posts was interesting, I caught one flying by the Local feed, about halfway down his sequence, liked it and went to the top to find the rest.

Enjoying his post, I remembered similar thoughts, of History, and how things worked, how small bits and pieces came to me as I visited an exposition, at the Archeological Museum, in Lisbon.

Stopping at each display, I would read and examine the artifacts. All of them had came from the same region, countryside around today's city of Loulé, in the Algarve, Southern Portugal.

The region has been inhabited for thousands of years, and the exhibit had pieces from pre-historic, Phoenician, Roman, Moorish and more modern times.

@anarchiv

#dystopian #art #xp #moa
---
RT @AheadLooms
HOOKED - VR sculpt, Darius Bartsy https://buff.ly/2RdDBRX
https://twitter.com/AheadLooms/status/1202920890394128385

Beautiful Persian & Tabby mix, Beast is gorgeous. #xp #moa
---
RT @Beast_the_Cat
The only closeups that I want feature treats 🤔😸
#whiskerswednesday #catsoftwitter
https://twitter.com/Beast_the_Cat/status/1202107491204644864

A picture, or it didn't happen.

A Quick look at a more complex Blog setup.

Along with trying out the Write.freely open source, fediverse compatible system, I went and opened up a free blog at Vivaldi.net. This is the company providing the Vivaldi browser, and they also offer a free email account and a free blog if desired.

For curiosity and comparison purposes, I went ahead and started a first post. The blogs at Vivaldi are using WordPress, and offer a lot more controls, formatting options, online image hosting, but at the price of a more complex interface to be learned.

It looks interesting, but will take some time getting used to and knowing the tools and options.

The write.freely seems aptly named - as there's very little to distract you from writing away, concentrating in the words, less distractions.

Leaving here a screen shot for the record.

For first time users, I would suggest the write.freely ones, unless you are prepared to cram for a few days to get over the learning curve quickly.

I am including two snapshots - the editor area can work in either Visual Mode, with images displayed in full size.

Or in Text Mode, where you see Raw HTML, tags and nitty gritty, but sometimes can be a nice way to work, fix glitches.

Do note there's a lot more visual clutter around. 😛

For the record, @freemo had recommended to me write.freely and I think that is a good recommendation for casual users, to get started, it will be easier.

@rgx@wordsmith.social

Experimenting is needed, not all places offering blog hosting have the same features.

write.as which has a nice video, showing easy fediverse connections, also has a lot of limitations for Free accounts.

The Fediverse instances list for write.freely can be useful -- Although a lot of them are NOT open to registrations, check the rightmost column.

https://fediverse.network/writefreely

From that page, I looked at a couple of instances, there's one in Canada: https://fediverse.network/personaljournal.ca

...and settled in another one, located in France, under better European Union privacy protection rules. https://fediverse.network/write.tedomum.net

This last one, I created a new blog, copied my test post, and did the searching for the account here in Mastodon.

It did work, the account was found. After I published the page there, it showed here as a Toot, which I can click to view (has link to web page hosting) and reply with comments to.

@rgx@write.tedomum.net is my current testing page. Click on the username and it will show a typical Mastodon user page, with stats and toots listed.

@rgx

The blog editor only allows formating via html tags. You can type in easier ones, but a time saver can be an extension for your browser that natively supports markup languages.

Found one, I have used a similar in the past for Forums, with BBcode tag formatting.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bbcodewebex/

The Economist's last issue's cover deserves its own post. Great art and satyre.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/12/05/britains-nightmare-before-christmas

And thanks to the magic of the Firefox (or Chrome) Birdsite browser extension, we can bridge the Divide and tease the bird users with our own Toots here.

Screenshot from post above , as cross-posted and in my TW account.

** See details, where to get it, step by step guide on my own post: https://qoto.org/@design_RG/103244781718208800

Panettone is delicious, and even better if #homemade.

#christmas #comfortfood #food #Italian #omg

BBC Good Food programme's recipe: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/panettone

Christmas will soon be here

#christmas #santa #fediverse

OP: Dave Sutton, https://pluspora.com/posts/d234dab0ee8f01377d64005056264835