I’ve been in a full-on wrestling match with my Micro.blog theme lately. Had this specific vision: truncated posts on the homepage with a “Continue Reading” link, a nice drop cap at the start of long-form posts, and images that didn’t feel like they were yelling over the text. Simple, right?

Started with trying to add the “Continue Reading” link myself but it didn’t work. Was about to send a support ticket, then thought “nah, I want to figure this out.” Asked Perplexity for help instead, and honestly? Huge help figuring out what I’d done wrong.

While I was at it, I asked Perplexity to help with other stuff too. Spotted a drop cap line in the CSS and thought “oh, I want that.” That turned into a whole thing. Spent HOURS trying to figure out what we kept doing wrong. Drop caps are a pain in the ass. Got them working on the homepage eventually, then tried adding them to the long-form summaries and everything broke. Finally just gave up on homepage drop caps.

Now I’m focusing on single post pages — getting that first letter styled with a drop cap in my theme color, sitting under the title and hero image. Also resizing images on the homepage so they don’t swallow the text.

Somewhere in all this, I realized how much I’ve missed this kind of tinkering. Used to mess with HTML and CSS all the time years ago, got rusty without noticing. Digging into Micro.blog’s custom themes, poking at selectors, breaking things and fixing them — it lit that old spark back up. Even figured out how to add anchor links within posts.

Now I’m venturing into shortcodes with some plug-ins I installed. The annoying part? Not every shortcode works nicely across every theme, which sucks when you’re excited to experiment. I mentioned this to the Micro.blog Help team and they agreed and are working on it — which is pretty cool.

It’s been equal parts frustrating and fun. One moment I’m grumbling because a div won’t behave, the next I’m genuinely excited because I got a drop cap to sit exactly where I want it, in exactly the right color. Can’t wait to keep learning more tricks to customize my little corner of the web.