Happy holidays everyone. Here's a nice fire to keep you warm. ❤️
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
ProPublica’s Most-Read Stories of 2024
[ProPublica]
While the website I work for is not the cheeriest place on the internet, its deeply-reported stories are some of the most vital and impactful.
These are the most-read ProPublica stories of 2024, including:
The Year After a Denied Abortion:
"Ten...
We got a new game for the holidays: Everdell. Still figuring it out but it’s great so far. Looking forward to checking out the expansions too.
One week until the Micro.one launch.
I created a new demo site demo-photos.micro.blog to showcase some photo blog features in Micro.blog. It doesn’t use any custom code… Just the home page photos plug-in and Micro.blog collections. For photos, I imported my old Instagram archive.
It has been a very nice Christmas Day. Happy Holidays, everyone. 🎄 Also saw two movies this week that I enjoyed: An Almost Christmas Story, a short stop-motion film on Netflix; and A Complete Unknown, which was excellent. Listening to Bob Dylan ever since. 🍿
I am ready to start programming ChatGPT, the same way I have built my own code writing and deploying software on Macintosh. I want to create rules in some kind of macro language that it will never violate. I find it has huge problems with memory, it says it's remembering so...
Nollaig shona daoibh go léir a chairde!
Nollaig shona daoibh go léir a chairde!
Been watching Interior: Chinatown on Hulu. Didn’t read the book, but interesting story.
I have a fairly large and old C application that was written to run on the Mac and Windows. I still use it today on a relatively modern Macintosh. I wonder if it will soon be possible to turn this project over to an AI like ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity or some other, to convert it to run on Linux, where it should be able to run in perpetuity, or at least a lot longer than on the Macintosh. I would be willing to pay a few thousand dollars to do this work.
Playing Elizabeth Kelly’s Delight (slip jig) and Patsy Geary’s (jig) on mandolin with Jessica on fiddle: https://thesession.org/tunes/953 https://thesession.org/tunes/9076 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rgCRPPTo40
Playing Elizabeth Kelly’s Delight (slip jig) and Patsy Geary’s (jig) on mandolin with Jessica on fiddle:
https://thesession.org/tunes/953
Having a proper Cork Christmas with spiced beef, like! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiced_beef#Ireland
Having a proper Cork Christmas with spiced beef, like!
For your Christmas Eve podcast listening queue, we just posted Core Intuition 623. Daniel and I talk about shipping new features like Micro.blog’s photo collections, preparing the next MarsEdit release, and the Micro.one teaser. 🎄
How this stuff fits in? 1. RSS blew a big open hole in the distribution of news and ideas. 2. Now we want to blow the equivalent hole in the writer's web.
Another idea that we continued to push in 2024 is textcasting. It was what I needed to build WordLand, it defines its objective, to form an open social web with all the basic features writers need. Titles, links, simple styling, ability to edit, no character limit, these are basic features we will drive the adoption of. Defining a new network where if you want to play you'll need to start thinking about writers, their power, and interop. You can't be on the open web and be a silo. And some of the most insidious silo-like features seem innocuous, like character limits. Whatever forces you into copying and pasting into tiny little text boxes, that's how you know you're in a silo. If you can use any writing tool to post to a network, then it is on the web. Pretty simple. Right now -- none of the popular ones qualify. None.
Talking with a friend about the listening lists idea and realized if it takes off it will turn podcasting into its own loosely-coupled social network. Really low tech, like the web. And not possible for one company to control. All it will take is one popular podcast client to get the pump primed. The second and third apps should be much easier to convince. This is how it worked with podcasting. Steady mission broadcasting, keep beating the drum, and if it's the right idea and when it's the right time, eventually, it happens. It will be that way too for this layer of the network, but at this time I don't own a podcast client, and that's the most basic ingredient in this bootstrap, so we wait, and keep beating the drum.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference between “blog” and “blog post” (as well as “podcast” and “podcast episode”).
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference between “blog” and “blog post” (as well as “podcast” and “podcast episode”).
lab.artlung.com and a return to a World Wide Web
artlung.com/blog/2024/12/23/lab-artlung-com-and-a-return-to-a-world-wide-web/
Don’t Fuck With Scroll
- Violates User Expectations
- Causes Motion Sickness
- Reduces Accessibility for Disabled Users
- Inconsistent Performance Across Devices
- Impairs Usability for Power Users
- Increases Page Load Times
- Breaks Native Browser Features
- Makes Scroll Position Unclear
- Adds Maintenance Overhead
- Disrespects the User’s Control
Feedback on my post about Matt Mullenweg over the weekend has been fairly positive. One topic that I wish I had covered: will our opinion change depending on whether the court rules in favor of Automattic or WP Engine? I think it could, but that outcome is a long way off.