FeedCity

Trying out Flashes, a photos app for Bluesky. On the surface feels similar to our Micro.blog companion app Sunlit. Lots of potential.

An email arrived from the Social Security Administration entitled Help Us Slam the Scam. Explains how not to get scammed by people who want our checks. Wonder if they realized it applies equally to Elon Musk, richest man in the world, who wants to eat old people's cupcakes because, well I can't explain it.

People give Matt Mullenweg a lot of shit, but do they realize how hopeless the open web would be if he and his friends hadn’t kept it going for 20+ years. I wrote the other day that I feel like a time traveler, discovering WordPress 20 years after I left UserLand. I care that it's open source, but I care much more that it's open web esp after we've been so thoroughly dominated by feature-limited silos such as Twitter, Facebook and yes -- even Mastodon and Bluesky. Even if there's a theoretical way to do it, practically speaking we have to wait for their developers to implement the features we want. Open source doesn't help there, but open web does. Matt puts the emphasis on the open source part, that's why it wasn't until very recently that I realized that open web is more important, to me at least.

I asked ChatGPT to draw a picture of a death panel as described by Republican lawmakers as they fought the Affordable Care Act. I was surprised it was willing to do it.

According to the bot: "The concept of 'death panels' was a widely debunked political talking point used by opponents of the Affordable Care Act. It falsely suggested that government-run committees would decide whether individuals—especially the elderly or disabled—would receive life-saving care.

"I can generate an image depicting a grim, dystopian bureaucratic setting where a group of shadowy officials in suits are sitting at a long, dark table, stamping papers while an elderly patient looks on with concern. The room would have a cold, sterile look, with a looming clock symbolizing bureaucratic power over life and death."

Ich habe ein bisschen Buch geschrieben! Ein Kapitel über „IndieWeb und Fediverse“ im Fachbuch „WordPress 6 – Das umfassende Handbuch“, erschienen im @rheinwerkverlag, um genau zu sein. Im November 2023 fragten mich @florian und @simon, ob ich Zeit und Lust hätte, ein Kapitel über das IndieWeb zu ihrem Buchprojekt beizusteuern. Und da spätestens seit dem […]

Tried out ChatGPT Deep Research now that it’s on the less expensive plan. Don’t have a lot of use for it, but it’s super impressive as a tool you might take out every once in a while. I used it to dig into some background facts for a blog post.

Working on some ActivityPub tweaks today, finally added some code to handle Question objects / polls. It was confusing to not have the context for these posts from Mastodon before. They look like this in the Micro.blog timeline now:

Personally I don’t use polls. I’ll revisit doing more later.

For all kinds of marketing materials..

This is what the page looks like when published.

Scott Lynch in his newsletter:

I have decided to post every short story I’ve ever written (once rights exclusivity periods or other arrangements for them expire, for those that haven’t already) on my website, for free, in perpetuity, at the same time I make them available as e-books. Many of them are available elsewhere for free already. I just want to centralize the archive.

Feels like a very IndieWeb-y statement. And more authors when self-publishing are fine with DRM-free, which is also great.

HTTP content negotiation was a mistake. The perceived wins are always overshadowed by all the new problems. I’ve long thought a slimmed down ActivityPub without content negotiation and without JSON-LD would be so much nicer. Sorry folks! Controversial hot take but it’s true. 🤪

Rich suggests another reason why the UX of websites on mobile is so shit these days:

The path to installing a native app is well trodden. We search the App Store (or ironically follow a link from a website), hit ‘Get’ and the app is downloaded to our phone’s home screen, ready to use any time with a simple tap.

A PWA can also live on your home screen, nicely indistinguishable from a native app. But the journey to getting a PWA – or indeed any web app – onto your home screen remains convoluted to say the least. This is the lack of equivalence I’m driving at. I wonder if the mobile web experience would suck as badly if web apps could be installed just as easily as native apps?

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I’m improving something I started last year, to automatically save thumbnail versions of web pages that could be used in various places. As an example, starting this week Micro.blog now makes banners suitable for Open Graph meta tags, combining the profile photo and a render...

If you like the prospect of an old man ranting at clouds, this is for you.

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Congrats to John Siracusa on the release of his newest Mac app, Hyperspace:

There are plenty of Mac apps that will save disk space by finding duplicate files and then deleting the duplicates. Using APFS clones, my app could reclaim disk space without removing any files! As a digital pack rat, this appealed to me immensely.

It is a dangerously clever way to save disk space. I probably wouldn’t trust this app from anyone else, but I know John has tested the heck out of it. Your files are in good hands.

I posted something sad on Bluesky last night. It was short, but the thinking behind it wasn't. Here's the quote: It might be the last minute but we can still legally remove Trump, and objectively it’s the only thing that makes any sense. I got two responses from Karoli Kun...

When I was interested in getting my first standard typewriter last year, Ruben Flores immediately recommended I get a Remington 17. While I’ve picked up a handful of other standards in the meanwhile, I’ve kept my eyes peeled. I just couldn’t let this $21 beauty slip by. If my 1956 Remington Standard is any indication, … Continue reading

I wanted to see a transcript before blogging about it but this AP story probably has enough of Phil Schiller’s testimony on the App Store: “What happens if a developer doesn’t pay and what is the process for that?” Schiller recalled about his initial reservations about requ...

Last week I published my first Cybersecurity Friday post with three key steps for indieweb cybersecurity. In summary:1. Email MFA/2FA. Add multi-factor authentication (sometimes called two-factor authentication) to everywhere you store or check email. Do not use phone/cell nu...