FeedCity

I’ve never thought custom emoji were a good idea. People say they love them, but how often are they used? Micro.blog spends a silly amount of time just downloading all the custom emoji from Mastodon instances so they can be displayed correctly. Currently 1 million custom emoji from 4000 servers. 🤪

WordLand is the easy editor that writers using WordPress always deserved. I updated the docs this morning to include very basic getting started stuff, and it now includes a link to a form where you can apply to be a tester. At this time it's limited to people who know how to write a bug report, how to find and read the JavaScript console in a web browser, and take a screen shot that shows clearly what went wrong. This the hardest part of getting a product fit for general use, and I'm too old to try to wrangle workable bug reports from well-intentioned users who basically aren't scientists. This time I'm determined to do this the right way without excess wear and tear on me. 😄

Put the kettle on; it’s another epic data-driven screed from Alex. The footnotes on this would be a regular post on any other blog (and yes, even the footnotes have footnotes). This is a spot-on description of the difference between back-end development and front-end develo...

~3 weeks ago I posted some thoughts¹ about the US #election. Upon more reflection, more thoughts and some updates.~50 days until many #changes that will harm many, disrupt many more. Some changes and impacts will be immediate, some in days to weeks, mostly predictable, and so...

Sunday session

It’s December, somehow; the tail end of a stressful year, but also the precursor to another one that (and I’m sorry this isn’t the cheeriest prediction) somehow promises to be worse. Good times. How do we propose to survive it? Although I’m not a big resolutions guy, t...

For a while (years!) we’ve had both ActivityPub support in Micro.blog and cross-posting to Mastodon. ActivityPub is best if you want people on the fediverse to follow your Micro.blog account directly. No need to maintain a Mastodon account. Cross-posting is good if you want ...

I'm using the term "RSS-based podcasts" in place of "podcasts" to make sure whoever reads it knows to ask the question of other "podcasts," are you RSS-based? The best answer is to encourage YouTube et al to just connect their "podcasts" to RSS and everyone's happy. Like "organic cheeseburgers." :-)

Mum Foods. The best BBQ I’ve had in a long while.

One way to help RSS-based podcasts is to promote individual episodes from the past. Sometimes shows are done, but the archive contains good stuff. Not everything is based on current events. Music, art, history for example.

The Big Interview with Dan Rather podcast is a gold mine, esp when political blogs basically have nothing to say at least for a while. Just listened to his interview with Steven Van Zandt of the E Street Band and the Sopranos. There are nine seasons of this podcast between 2013 and 2021. Going to keep me busy for a while.

Substack’s RSS feeds are a disaster. It’s like the programmers never once looked at the XML output. You could say it doesn’t matter, but feeds and HTML that are cleaner and more readable are also usually faster to process and do something useful with.

Good post by Allen Pike about Apple Intelligence. On-device AI is great for notification summaries, but falls short for much of the rest:

While an underpowered-but-automatic notification summary can be better than nothing, there isn’t a lot of purpose to an underpowered image generation app. You can tell from the name that Apple knows “Image Playground” is, at best, a toy.

Apple is a little bit trapped with their AI strategy. For some things they can’t be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic. If I was Apple, I would focus only on what smaller models are great at — notifications and writing tools — and then open up Siri to be extensible with frontier models.

For the record, Bluesky has completely taken over from Threads. Threads is basically at zero, needs something to shake it up. Obviously this could be different for everyone. And engagement on Twitter is pretty close to zero. I still check in there periodically because despite what people say a lot of people I follow still post there. And I do too, since cross-posting costs me nothing. And it has been pointed out that deleting your Twitter account comes with a fairly huge risk. And if you do it, I wouldn't announce it, because anyone apparently can claim your account once it is completely deactivated. And that could create some problems for you. Probably better to hold the account indefinitely.

I've exported the data from Bingeworthy 2 in JSON and uploaded to a new public repo. It can be used to seed the ratings table for the updated instance.

And welcome to the time of year you can't remember what the day of the week is. For what it's worth today is Sunday. Feels like Monday?

And here, for the record, is the archive for November. A relatively lite month, only 87K worth of text. The norm is about 120K.

Welcome to the last month of Scripting News in the year 2024. Each year goes by faster and faster. And as we move forward in time, there's less room in front of us on the runway of life, and more behind us. At some point in the next decade my plane will probably take off. I feel a sense of urgency about getting it done. Still a fair amount on my todo list, but I'm making progress. As someone once said many times: Still diggin!

[Joel Gascoigne] I always appreciate Joel's updates. "Early on, my dream was just to create a tool that made it easy to Tweet consistently, build it for myself and others, and make enough money to cover my living expenses and go full-time on it. The number f...