Today I’m going to test this blog on mobile by documenting my walk through Salem looking for flint…

I’m going to start near the North River, cut across to Collins Cove, and maybe make it up to Winter Island.

I’m interested in flint because of the central role it played in human development. From what I understand, the main sources in this region are further north, in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

There were these crumbly rocks, very brittle.

We found a little bit of a stair tread, seems like marble or granite.

There are a few of these really vein-y granite blocks.

This rock had a sort of glossy surface, but when I bonked it with the hammer it just turned out to be grainy inside.

There was a lot of this (natural concrete? I forget what it’s called when they’re all smushed together). It has black mica and maybe quartz.

I found my way back to this boulder with a dark band between two lighter bands.

So in terms of the flint treasure hunt, not a lot of success. In terms of writing a blog post with my phone, I noticed some things I want to fix:

1. Adding pictures—the dialog is too small, and has the wrong button style. My UI for uploading images should probably be more of a modal that waits for upload, rather than putting a placeholder in the post while the upload is going.

2. I need to extend the token lifetime. I think it’s around a half hour; it’s probably safe to make it 12 hours for an application like this.

3. There’s no easy way to embed a youtube video. I quite liked this one for background info on the local geology, and I should have a way to embed it.

4. Typing on my phone is a drag. I don’t think there’s much to be done about that. I uploaded the images on my phone, saved the post, then added the text on my computer at home.

5. The images sometimes try to be on the same line as the text, which looks bad in the rendered post.