I made a change today for new users to essentially require setting the “about me” text for a Micro.blog profile. After you confirm signing up, you’ll get this page with some random profiles. I hope that it’ll help with discovery in the future and also weeding out non-humans more easily.
@manton that kind of blank page nearly always stops me short. peer examples of real people might take off the edge but it's the existential whoami?
@numericcitizen Randomly selected only from active users. I will probably tweak it a little. Kind of an experiment still.
@manton Please: don’t force this profile. It messed up the layout of my blogs. I’ve been trying to keep my blog layouts really clean, and this just messed with things. (I finally had to find a hack to work around it…)
@unattributed Thanks, I hadn’t considered it would mess up any layouts… Were you able to edit the template to remove the text? I’ll make a change so it can be set back to blank.
@manton I still haven’t figured out where it is being generated in the theme. I worked around it by putting invisible null characters in my profile for now. ;)
When I figure out where it is being inserted I will change it.
@unattributed I made a small change to at least allow setting the “about me” as a simple space, so no need for invisible characters.
@manton I found a better solution (from a theme standpoint). Any of the themes that support microhooks can just create an empty: layouts/partials/microhook-description.html
Ideally, I’d like to set the twitter:description, og:description, and description meta elements directly so they can be in the HEAD section, without having them tied to the blog template… But I doubt anyone else would want or care about that… So, I’m happy with things as they are now.
