Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
I may have to visit this massive solar farm next time I’m in the area, about an hour outside Austin. 1.3 million solar panels. Made in America so there’s a tax credit too under the Inflation Reduction Act. (Thanks Biden!)
Really good point from Tim Walz in this clip today:
Donald Trump has already promised that he’d put Elon in charge of government regulations that oversee the businesses that Elon runs. […] Donald Trump, in front of the eyes of the American public, is promising corruption.
Because Strata notes are end-to-end encrypted, I’ve gotta rethink how I might build features that are usually server-based. Even simple things like search have to be on the client. If we ship any features that temporarily store data in plaintext, going to make this opt-in and as clear as possible.
Everyone is confused by OpenAI’s product names — GPT 4o and o1 — but I’m also amused that Anthropic’s upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet is still called 3.5, not 3.6. Why even have version numbers? 🤪 Also very interesting Rabbit-esque “computer use” feature.
What about Ghost?
Bob Sassone writes via email:
- You said on your blog that you can't imagine moving from WordPress because "there isn't anything else out there that's offering something new for the writers." What about Ghost?
My response:
- Sorry it wasn't clear -- but as far as I know, Ghost isn't built on WordPress. It's a completely different product.
- My writing tool runs on WordPress. So you can use it with your existing wordpress.com sites.
- And the codebase I've built will support lots of editors built using WordPress as the backend.
A place to ask questions.
Bob's site is bobsassone.com.
The million-plus Americans Trump killed
Thanks Aaron Ross Powell for the blog post about Micro.blog! On cross-posting:
But the magic, and the reason Micro.blog and services like it are the way the social web ought to work, comes in what it calls “Sources.” These are other platforms, including many social media platforms, Micro.blog can automatically syndicate everything you write to. And for many of them, it can pull back in replies so you can have a conversation without leaving the Micro.blog interface.
Help us choose the final syntax for Masonry in CSS | WebKit
I really like the way that the thinking here is tied back to Bert Bos’s original design principles for CSS.
This is a deep dive into the future of CSS layout—make a cup of tea and settle in for some good nerdiness!
Announcing UX London 2025
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
How elderly dementia patients are unwittingly fueling political campaigns
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Twelve Million Deportations
Something very significant is happening in Texas with reviewing death row inmate Robert Roberson’s trial. He was supposed to be executed last week. Abbot and Paxton are of course useless, but the legislature is trying to make it right. This article in the Texas Tribune is a good place to start.
Early voting started today! We went to our location but the line was insanely long. Gonna try again tomorrow. Hopefully a good sign for turnout. 🇺🇸
I’m using iOS App Intents for the first time as a developer. My gut feeling when this was all introduced was that it was way too limited to create an extensible, universal Siri that works in lots of contexts. I still believe that. Some cool things are possible, though.
I'm sticking with WordPress
When I get a questionable notification summary in the iOS 18.1 beta, I run the original text through OpenAI to compare. It’s usually better. Certainly not a deal-breaker, but the thing about AI is it needs to actually be good or you lose the illusion.
Don’t depend on Threads to validate the Fediverse. That’s not what they’re doing. Some of the people working there have good hearts and mean well, but Meta is a huge company, competing with other huge companies, and the goals of the Fediverse do not show up in their roadmap.
I got a notice that Threads had deleted one of my posts because they said it violated their rules. They thought I was claiming to have written something I had not written. I didn't keep the notice (it popped up when I signed on). I shrugged it off when I got it, but then realized that we are very far away from the web. It has been turned into Disneyland where the cops are algorithms and they err on the side of stopping innocent things. I was just passing on a link to someone else's blog, something I thought an informed person would want to know about (that's the idea behind every link I share). We really do need to dig our way out of this hole, again. This is of course no better than Twitter or Facebook. Not a place to get work done.