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

The Museum showed photos of the larger artifacts, like these stone vaults, carved into natural rock. They showed site maps with pointers of what each part was intended to do. Once you have a product, and an eager market, things will work to get it supplied.

How do we carry this out? The Museum showed many Amphorae, large earthenware/ceramic vessels which were built to store and carry various products around, locally, regionally and along longer routes to Rome and Beyond.

During the Roman era, there were thriving colonies not only in Lusitania, today's Portugal, but also in the Southern region of today's Spain now called Andalucia, which came from the Moorish era name - Al Andalus.

In the Algarve, Phoenicians, Romans set up colonies. The Romans saw the abundance of fish and built an industry of processing then into a preserve, the "Garum" fish sauce which was popular in their cuisine. Garum produced in the region was high quality, and had a demand from various regions of the Empire, including the Capital, Rome itself.

Garum was created by cutting up the fish and placing them into stone vaults cut into the local bedrock. Salt was added as a condiment but primarily as a preservative agent. The salty fish mix was left on the stone vats to cure for some time, months possibly. And once finished, it provided a concentrated sauce with protein and a flavour judged exquisite by the people.

Quality brings demand, and demand attracts traders; there's money to be made and livelihoods could focus on supplying it.

The Algarve is the most Southern part of Portugal, the warmest and sunniest. Trees, fruit, grapes grow well there. Fish in the seas are plenty. It was good land for settlements.

And they came, different peoples over different eras. Phoenicians, traders at heart, created outposts to explore the land and it's products, while also supporting passing seafarers going to farther places. Some of their mariners came from the homeland in modern day Middle East, traversed the whole Mediterranean, and went past the Columns of Hercules, now Gibraltar, into the open Atlantic.

Wild ocean waters, for people with small ships, but brave they were; and the profits from trading moved them. From home, via this route, into the Bay of Biscay, always a dangerous passage, and on to Cornwall for the Tin metal so demanded by the Bronze Age technology. Tin was plentiful there, and provided profitable mining for thousands of years. Traders came from far an apart to purchase the ore and bring it home for resale.

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.

Saved the page, it's just started and not published yet. But there should be a preview available here: https://rgx.vivaldi.net/?p=13&preview=true

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

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

@rgx Tested and works as expected, the barebones first post is getting prettier. I like it, edit and saves are very fast.

Now, if I can reduce the number of TABS open here... That would greatly help. 😜

@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/

Testing 1, 2, 3...

Hello blog world.

@rgx

https://wordsmith.social/rgx/a-first-post

Write.freely is the open sourced software that is in use at Write.as.

There are other instances, offering different levels of services, number of blogs supported, free or paid levels, etc.

* A summary of instances of write.freely is here: https://writefreely.org/instances

* List of features of Write.freely: https://writefreely.org/features/

* About write.freely page: https://writefreely.org/about

Looking for a blog space, so I can collate and have a permanent home for my tests, reports, ideas, etc.

Write.as is a blog platform for Writers, part of the Fediverse and can easily connect to other instances running Mastodon or Pleroma.

This video demonstrates how well that works. Quite cool - it's sad how many times we see well written blog posts without any feedback or comments, since people don't want to register to comment.

Here, people can see your new pages, and read and comment from their own instances. Thumbs up. Well done.

https://video.writeas.org/videos/watch/cc55e615-d204-417c-9575-7b57674cc6f3

*RT* " Holiday shopping reminder…

Mozilla tracks privacy/security concerns for some tech: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/

If, like me, you already have Google Home Listening Device, just remember to unplug it before you discuss your plans to seize the means of production."

OP by Adrian, https://toot.cafe/@aardrian/103255753769984047

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