FeedCity

Politics is bleeding into everything. Tech headlines, podcasts that aren’t usually political. For 2025, I like to box my politics into narrow parts of the day, not everywhere all the time. Soon we’ll need mute filters in all apps, from RSS readers to Overcast.

Tá mo chuid arán déanta…

Nice new logo, board members, and others news for the founding of A New Social.

This video of LiDAR vs. Tesla self-driving is great. Ever since seeing all the sensors on a Waymo, I was convinced that the Tesla approach wasn’t going to cut it. Also love the Space Mountain and Haunted Mansion scans!

Palfrey's alarm yesterday was about the Americans who were whisked off to El Salvador. Who they are and what they're accused of is unknown, as if there's any substance to the accusation. No indictment, trial, verdict, appeals, etc. El Salvador wants to be the US dumping ground for undesirables. This is where we have, as Timothy Snyder says, regime change. I thought the elmination of Social Security would have been the moment the light went on for most Americans, but this should be it. Citizens like you and me being disappeared. It's a pretty quick way to get most of the people to behave according to the rules of the government, or off you go.

I added a new feature to Micro.blog Premium today called domain name aliases. Often when people host their blog on Micro.blog, they later change their mind about the primary domain name for their blog. Now you can more easily redirect multiple domain names to the same blog so no previous links break.

For example, maybe you start with the subdomain micro.yourdomain.com but later want it to just be the root domain yourdomain.com. Micro.blog handles HTTPS and redirecting any path in the URL between domain names.

Here’s a screenshot with a couple test examples for my blog. You can find this feature under Account → New Domain Alias:

This option is available for Micro.blog Premium subscribers. Micro.blog Premium also includes support for up to 5 separate hosted blogs and any number of single-page websites.

Poking around on old servers I found this cute little app that jsonifies an RSS feed. Not sure why I did it.

Depressing anecdote from Gabe Kangas about going off into the weeds with Reddit’s algorithm:

Now I understand how men online can get indoctrinated so easily. You can go from reading about turntable slip mats to hating women in less than an hour.

Algorithmic timelines are designed to increase engagement for ads, not user happiness, not truth.

[Benedict Collins at TechRadar] This was always inevitable, but in the current environment it makes sense that it's accelerating: "Several major European tech companies are pushing for greater action from the European Union to reduce the bloc’s reliance on ...

Good update from Ben Thompson today linking the lack of Vision Pro content to the miss on AI:

…Apple is finding itself paralyzed by its need for control. The company can’t just stick a camera at a game and stream the video without any production or play-by-play commentary: what if people are bored? The company can’t just film a concert: what if people are underwhelmed?

I put out a call for Old School Bloggers, and got back a bunch of notes on Mastodon. Gettin' the band back together! :-)

Pradeep is using WordLand for some of his WordPress blog posts, and has given them a special category. Very smart, good use of categories.

Lá Fhéile Pádraig atá ann agus mar sin déanfaidh mé stobhach Gaelach inniu agus seinnfidh mé ceol traidisiúnta na hÉireann anocht!

Sunday. Day of rest, in theory. Started the day finishing up work on my new Mixtapes page. Here’s what that looks like right now. Mixtapes have been important for me for a long time. I intend to do more with it. I am thinking I’ll be adding mixtapes back as far as 1982 which I’ve...

Below is a summary of new features added to Artemis, the calm web reader I maintain. Search your subscriptions You can now search all of the posts published in the feeds of websites to which you are subscribed. To search your feeds, go to your Account page and click “Search ...

Artemis Link Graph is a web extension that lists the web pages authored by people you follow that link to the page you are viewing. Here’s an example of the extension in action, showing the links to the Bear Blog home page from blogs I follow: The Bear Blog homepage with th...

rel= links describe the relationship between the web page a link is on and the resource the page is linking to. For example, rel=alternate is used to say that there is an alternate representation of a web page available at another URL. This may be an RSS or JSON feed, or some...

Now that the Webmention plugin is finally Craft 5 compatible after last week's update, I jumped at the chance and updated another plugin I had once written for my personal site. The Internet Archive plugin automates the archiving of your posts to the Wayback Machine. Each ti...

A lot has changed since the last time we took a serious look at blogging. A few items, as examples.

1. When RSS came along Markdown didn't exist. The two technologies belong together, imho.
2. Websockets have replaced long polling.
3. Servers got cheap! (and easy to deploy).
4. SQL is fast and the tools are much better.
5. The user interfaces of all the Web 2.0+ products didn't exist last time we created new blogging communities. We can borrow ideas from twitter-like systems, even huge products like Facebook and Spotify have innovations that come long after the initial wave of blogging.

But one thing stays the same -- all the components are replaceable. Absolutely zero lock-in. We use simple standard APIs where they exist, and create new minimal formats and protocols where they don't.

Blogging has a simple philosophy that remains constant.