FeedCity

I found out why it was harder to get a hotel this weekend in San Diego. Apparently, the American Society of Hematologists is having their annual conference and exhibition. I spent over an hour trying to get a ride out of the airport, surrounded by people with conference swag. Not sure how many attendees, but 32,000 people attended last year according to their site.

For IndieWebCamp San Diego’s Create Day, I worked on cleaning up some code for indiewebify.me and pushed it to a branch on my GitHub. The readme there has more details, but this is basically an in-progress update to use the SlimPHP framework. It is probably only about 30% complete, but some parts of it are functional. Pushing this to Github will make it easier for the community to collaborate on and decide how to move forward.

I’ve been very reluctant to set defaults for syndication, making options be selected each time instead. This is a bit problematic because I like to reduce friction.

The issue is that I don’t want them to be global. I want them to be a bit more granular.

For example, a hallmark of a note for me is that is doesn’t have an explicit title. Maybe I want all notes to go to all services that support them unless I say otherwise….

I am worried about a mistake I made years ago involving importing old posts… so the code needs to check the published date and not post anything old automatically.

Responses to URLs on a syndication site should automatically go out to that site…but not necessarily to other sites.

I had a discussion about this with my Indieweb associates at IndieWebCamp San Diego and I’m still not sure what I’ll end up doing.

I caved after a month and re-upgraded to ChatGPT Plus. The feature to use text in another app’s window (like Xcode) is really nice.

[The Oxford Clarion] I grew up in Oxford, and the Eagle and Child is one of my favorite pubs from back home. I'm also a longtime critic of certain big companies, Larry Ellison's Oracle among them. So imagine my dismay when I heard this: "The masterplan is “a...

[Lindsey Lionheart O'Brien at Mozilla Distilled] This is a rebrand and reorientation for Mozilla: "Mozilla isn’t just another tech company — we’re a global crew of activists, technologists and builders, all working to keep the internet free, open and accessi...

Also of interest for Glass users:

Updated importer RSS feeds to also download photos to your blog. For example, add a Glass profile feed and Micro.blog will copy the photos to your own domain name. This is set in Sources by adding a new feed with “import posts to blog” selected.

Testing with Glass RSS feeds today and they’ve got problems. I’ve filed a feedback item here for the Glass folks. I considered working around this in Micro.blog but I really don’t want any more hard-coded hacks for other platforms.

I have so many micro domain names that I actually have a list to remember all of them. This is a fun one that I will launch later in December: micro.christmas

Mozilla has repositioned itself as "a global crew of activists, technologists and builders, all working to keep the internet free, open and accessible." These are all worthy goals, but in my experience Mozilla has been an obstacle to these things. I wrote in a comment on Mas...

This is a nice surprise from Jamie Thingelstad:

I love to see new blogs being created. In the spirit of Christmas, I’m gifting five 1-year subscriptions to micro.blog for readers of the Weekly Thing (announced in WT304). These folks can then get their blogs going and in January I’m going to share links and introduce each of them. Fun! 🤩🎁🎄

There’s a lot to do today. Started the day with something very simple: updated the profile icon for Micro.blog news. Now in color and centered so it looks nice with rounded profile icons. We post here throughout the week with platform updates.

Reading Europe at Dawn by Dave Hutchinson.

I’ve updated our Mastodon and Bluesky cross-posting to have new options to control whether to backfeed replies to Micro.blog. It also now better respects the visibility of posts to avoid leaking semi-private posts outside of Mastodon. Screenshot of the setting:

19 Jahre gibt es jetzt dieses kleine Fleckchen Internet! Irgendwie ist ja schon ein bisschen affig, das zu feiern… ich hab den „Geburtstag“ sogar im Kalender gespeichert 🤓 Naja… es gibt affigeres… seinem Blog ein Geburtstagslied zu machen z.B.!?! 🥸 (…ich schiebs einfach aufs LLM!)

It looks like the Dealbook Summit had a number of great interviews this year, major props to Andrew Ross Sorkin, but this one with Jeff Bezos was particularly good.

So cold this morning, instead of walking I grabbed a Lime scooter up to the coffee shop. First time I’ve ridden a scooter since San Jose a few years ago. Working on making Micro.blog better, of course, because it’s Saturday morning.

With the success of Bluesky starter packs — which Micro.blog can browse natively! — every other social web platform is trying to invent their own similar format. But we already have blogrolls and OPML. I’d love to see some standardization around this so that there’s a shared format across platforms.

Good blog post on the ramifications of Micro.blog’s new backfeed replies from Mastodon and Bluesky:

While you could argue that publishing something on the internet means it’s fair game to use elsewhere (in a Google search result, for example) I would argue that our social media interactions at least feel limited to the context in which they take place.

This is an evolving balance between the open web and semi-private communities. More we can do here.

Screen shot of my blogroll on Scripting News. It's dynamic. Shown are the latest posts on the emptywheel blog. When a blog updates it moves to the top of the list. A 2024 adaptation of a concept from early blogging days. It should be part of the social web. You can try it out realtime at scripting.com.