FeedCity

Some days nothing shows up on the blog. Still diggin! 😄

Wednesday session

Stephen Colbert in last night’s Late Show monologue:

Do you want to know how messed up things are? The lightest story in the news is a plane crash.

Humor helps. See also: MapQuest’s brilliant rename the Gulf of Mexico website.

Nice update to the Bayou theme:

Included in this version is the option to define how many microposts and longform posts are shown on the homepage, change the categories for microposts and longform posts, set the site language (en, de, es, fi, fr, it, pt, ru), and change the date format.

The TikTok-ification of other platforms (Reels, Shorts) is optimizing for user engagement instead of usability. Good luck pausing, rewinding, or sharing one of these clips. At times it’s actually user-hostile.

A fun new font from Jason:

Citywide is a sans serif family inspired by mid-1900s bus and train destination roll signs.

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Ah, this is wonderful! Matt takes us on the quarter-decade journey of his brilliant blog (which chimes a lot with my own experience—my journal turns 25 next year)… Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s al...

Maybe I’ve been conditioned by seeing the GPT-4o name everywhere, but I don’t hate the iPhone 16e name. Weird lineup to still include the iPhone 15 without Apple Intelligence.

Some good—if overlong—writing advice.

• Focus on what matters to readers
• Be welcoming to everyone
• Swap formal words for normal ones
• When we have to say sorry, say it sincerely
• Watch out for jargon
• Avoid ambiguity: write in the active voice
• Use vivid words & delightful wordplay
• Make references most people would understand
• Avoid empty adjectives & marketing cliches
• Make people feel they’re in on the joke – don’t punch down
• Add a pinch of humour, not a dollop
• Smart asides, not cheap puns and cliches
• Be self-assured, but never arrogant

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Here’s a post outlining all the great things you can do in mobile web browsers today: Your App Should Have Been A Website (And Probably Your Game Too): Today’s browsers are powerhouses. Notifications? Check. Offline mode? Check. Secure payments? Yep, they’ve got that too...

Matt Webb reflecting on 25 years of blogging. On the very early days of blogging:

So I would post 4 or 6 times a day, like most people. Just a line with a shower thought, or a link and a comment, or a response to someone else

I’ve also found that before Twitter, blogs were often microblogs.

This life in weeks page by Gina Trapani is amazing.

[Matt Webb] I love this: "Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you ...

[Alissa Quart in Columbia Journalism Review] This article cuts right to the core of why media is failing to connect with mass audiences in America. It doesn't report from a perspective that they can identify with - largely because it doesn't hire people like...

A handy one-pager for front-end web developers:

Here are ways to keep track of what you can use, of what’s new in web browsers, and ways you can influence the development of the platform by making your voice heard.

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About halfway through this talk transcript, Aaron starts dropping a barrage of truth bombs: I understand the web, whose distinguishing characteristic is asynchronous recall on a global scale, as the technology which makes revisiting possible in a way that has genuinely n...

I started out doing a week to strip blue.threadcenter down to its bones, for a fresh start, but then I started getting ideas, and decided to go for it. I have the time, and Bluesky is having moment after moment and these days I'm using it to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, though I do check Twitter, Threads and Mastodon a few times a day, but usually there's nothing for me in those places. Anyway I'll be pointing to this post from some of my experiments, so maybe nothing more interesting than this will appear here.

Today we updated another part of Micro.blog to support blog post summaries. When automatically cross-posting to Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and LinkedIn, the summary will now be included for long-form posts with a title. It will look something like this after being copied to...

I just thought of a good example of a question you could bring to ChatGPT. Here's the prompt. I'm thinking of driving from NYC to Jacksonville, FL. I want to do it in four days with stopovers in three places that have good places to ride a bike and a Citibike-style bike ren...

[Allison Hantschel in DAME] Hand-wringing over people leaving overtly unsafe spaces like X to find communities that are actually enjoyable to hang out in (like Mastodon and BlueSky) is absolute nonsense. "With that user growth, mostly from liberals disguste...