Little helpers for your Micro.blog site: fischr.org

@fischr Oh, those are great additions. Thanks for creating them! I’m going to try out your Youtube helper on roel.io.

@roelio That’s great. Glad you like it. If something is not working, feel free to reach out. Looks already nice on your blog :)

@fischr It does look nice already. :) And I especially appreciate the more privacy preserving embeds. No need to allow YouTube to track everyone that visits my site without choosing to watch a video.

@roelio Yeah, was also the main driver for me to add a few things to the already existing plugin :)

@fischr Nice YouTube plugin, René! I could use a little help with posting playlists, however. It works just fine with standard single video IDs, but seems to have problems with parsing the longer IDs. I often post what I’m listening to and albums come mostly in playlist format. Thanks!

@fischr Sure! I posted two. I fixed the first one and it works, and this one does not. I left it unchanged for now so you could see them both in action, if that helps :) Here’s a link to the broken one. Thanks!

tylerknowsnothing.com/2025/10/1…

@tylerknowsnothing Tried to find a solution. Can you give the recent version a try? I saw that you manually add playlist pictures next to the YT embed. I added an option to add a custom thumbnail. Let me know if it works. More details here github.com/flschr/mb…

@fischr Thanks! Checking now. BRB.

@fischr Excellent! Works now with no mods to the post. Nice addition of the custom thumbnail, too. I’ll give that a go on the next post. Thanks so much :)

@tylerknowsnothing Glad to hear it works! 👍

@tylerknowsnothing For me its working? The only problem I see is, that it interferes with some gallery plugin you seem to have, which shows the thumbnail as overlay .. but the video starts playing behind the overlay?

@fischr Ah. I was going to ask about that. I have to run out to get some old man lab tests done, but will check when I get back. I don’t recall having a gallery plugin explicitly, but I think I have some image-related ones. BRB! Thanks!

@fischr Ok. So I uninstalled the plugin and there’s no change. I pulled up the alpha layer and opened the DOM inspector and it’s under @media screen as #microblog_lightbox, so I think it’s just an in-built function of the Hugo system? I only know enough of this stuff to be dangerous, so I hope this is helpful :) The other issue seems to be that the thumbnail isn’t being pulled for the playlist, so it just shows two white bars. I’ll test the custom thumbnail function soon to see how that appears and let you know.

Thanks so much for all your help!

@tylerknowsnothing The image zoom-out is definitely not from the Youtube plugin. Depending on the theme you use, it could be a theme default you might find a switch in the settings to disable for testing purposes if uninstalling image related plugins didn’t help to fix this behavior.

@tylerknowsnothing Sometimes you need to rebuild your site to get “old stuff” out. Check Account > Logs > Rebuild after you uninstalled the image plugin. It might help, if its not another plugin or theme default :)

@fischr I’m using Bayou. I’ll check to see what options might be available. Haven’t looked in a while :)

@fischr Ah yes! Thanks for the reminder. I’ll rebuild it now. Thanks!

@tylerknowsnothing Checked the theme quickly. I don’t believe this behavior is coming from the theme (by default)

@fischr I’m going to try another theme to see what happens. I hope the theme preview works. It should be the same as the published version… I hope, at least 🤣

@tylerknowsnothing Themes are always a bit tricky in Micro.blog. Wasted already hours in getting a new theme up and running. But likely just a problem on my site. Otherwise @manton would be aware and fixed something :)

@tylerknowsnothing I just had a look in your code and I’m pretty sure this is caused by a plugin called “lightbox”.

@fischr I just checked the code in the Photo Collections plugin and #microblog_lightbox is a selector. So, I’ll remove it and rebuild again. I think that should do it. BRB…

@fischr After the rebuild and refresh it’s still doing it. @manton might you be able to take a look at tylerknowsnothing.com, click on the video in my most recent video post and tell where the lightbox is coming from and how I might block it for YouTube video posts? We’re having trouble figuring out where it’s coming from. Previous conversation has all the details. Thanks!

@fischr So, I have Manton’s Photo Collections plugin installed, v 1.0.4, which I recall I added for my album art uploads. I forgot to send this earlier. The composer window got stuck behind other stuff :D