People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Here’s what the new prompt for email newsletter subscriptions looks like for your blog. The extra step lets us generate some random values hidden from real users, inspired by this post from Jeremy Keith, to make it a tiny bit harder for bots. Could do more later now that this is in place.
Think I figured out my high bounce and complaint rate for email sending. Spammers are trying to (probably accidentally) sign up to customer’s newsletters with fake email addresses. Working on making it harder for bots to navigate this.
Angels in the architecture
Strolling around Strasbourg
We just shipped an update to Strata for iOS, our private notes app for Micro.blog, with Android to follow later in the week. This adds a QR code scanning option to get your secret key moved over from another platform. For Apple folks, it also syncs the key via iCloud, but nice to have options.
Checked in at Chez Yvonne. Choucroute garní — with Jessica
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
IT WOULD BE AMAZING IF IN THE LAST WEEKS OF THE CAMPAIGN JOURNAILSTS DECIDED THEY CARE ABOUT OUR COUNTRY AND THE REST OF THE WORLD AND START REPORTING THE TRUTH ABOUT THIS ELECTION AND HOPE FOR THE BEST IF TRUMP IS ELECTED. OTHERWISE THE ONLY HONORABLE CHOICE IS TO QUIT.
Thinking about the difference between companies who use AI to make existing features better and companies who try to rethink everything. I’ve been using the iOS 18.1 beta for a while. I don’t think Apple really believes in AI the way OpenAI, Anthropic, or Microsoft do. See Microsoft’s memo from Mustafa Suleyman:
This is a new era of technology that doesn’t just “solve problems”, it’s there to support you, teach you, help you. In this sense, Copilots really are different to that last wave of the web and mobile. This is the beginning of a fundamental shift in what’s possible for all of us.
It has been pointed out that this blog will be 30 years old on October 7, not October 10, as I had previously reported. The clock at the bottom of story pages is correct. It currently reads: 29 years, 11 months, 25 days, 19 hours, 1 minute, 34 seconds.
Trade Secrets Radio: What is podcasting? This is the exact moment, 9/24/2004, that podcasting got its name and its definition. It's pretty short. We knew what we were doing. We loved what RSS did for news. Now we were doing the same for radio. Not just talking about it, but finally -- doing it. It worked, pretty freaking well. There's a podcast episode to go with it, coming out shortly.
Kinda wild watching a person sat on the train next to me using Twitter, and then posting an emotive, implicitly pro-Elon reply. Anyway, curiosity got the better of me and I logged in for the first time in ages; the site is unrecognisable, overflowing with spammy ads and pornography, with a user base of boiled frogs digging ever deeper trenches in one man’s manufactured culture war. It’s all very sad, bizarre and dare I say it, weird.
I have a lot of podcast catching up to do today.
Reading Ariadne by Jennifer Saint.
Going to Strasbourg. brb
Just in case folks missed the other notices about this, I’m running a big server upgrade in 30 minutes. Wish I could keep Micro.blog fully up during the upgrade but it’s going to be smoother and hopefully faster to just rip the bandaid off. Seeya on the other side.
