FeedCity

A thought for everyone struggling to see a good future in all the michegas. My advice -- please -- do your protesting, resisting, DEIing, organizing, learning, look for silver linings (they are there) and most important keep doing things that feed your soul. Treat yourself with love even if the world isn't. So in that spirit for those of us who have cats they love -- a story.

What a world we live in.

I hit the beach late. When I was walking into the water a stray surfboard was tumbling toward the shore. Sure enough, there was a surfer working his way in, chasing his stray board. I stopped it. That’s me, handing it off to the surfer. “I guess the session is over!” the young man quipped,...

Got my copy of Dragonsteel Prime in the mail from the last crowdfunding. 📚

I was just thinking about themes for WordPress, and thought to look up Manila themes, and found we have a whole website that's still running (thanks Jake!) where you can see the catalog of themes we had for Manila and Radio (thanks Bryan Bell!). I want something like this for WordPress themes that work beautifully with WordLand-authored blogs.

Federico Viticci on mobile app development becoming more accessible to many more people, just as blogging opened up web publishing:

Those who wanted to have an online writing space 30 years ago had to know some of the basics of hosting and HTML if they wanted to publish something for other people to read. Then Blogger came along and allowed anyone – regardless of their skill level – to be read. What if the same happened to mobile software?

Great historical data for WWDC dates from David Smith. Should be announced soon!

Generative AI can be both good and bad, just like us. We’re capable of kindness and cruelty. Society, government, and even companies should amplify the best in what we create and do.

Not sure why I didn’t think of this earlier, but there is now a simple weekly email newsletter for all the posts on news.micro.blog. You can subscribe here. We post small and big changes throughout the week that are easy to miss.

Nice profile of the Internet Archive on NPR:

The Internet Archive is among the few efforts that exist to catch the stuff that falls through the digital cracks, while also making that information accessible to the public. Six weeks into the new administration, Wayback Machine director Graham said, the Internet Archive had cataloged some 73,000 web pages that had existed on U.S. government websites that were expunged after Trump’s inauguration.

I didn’t realize that the Internet Archive did public tours. I’d love to visit the office someday. Amazing building.

The ruling class in America is more out in the open now. Pretty much the same people who brought us the Lehman Brothers too-big-to-fail meltdown in 2008 and the Brooks Brothers Riot in Y2K. Not sure if oligarch is the right word. Peter O'Toole starred in The Ruling Class, a favorite when I was younger. The last song in the movie is pretty freaking great.

What would be great -- the ability to define text macros in ChatGPT. I would write a macro that turned random text I wrote online into a properly formatted blog post. for example when i write fast i almost never stop to capitalize things that should be capitalized. or i might abbreviate the name of a product so i expect it to fill it in, as a professional copy editor would. I hope we're heading there. And if they have this, put it behind a simple api so i can wire it into my favorite writing tool. We could even work on a set of standards, a higher level Markdown if you will, that goes deeper than formatting. That would be something for an experienced copy editor to do imho.

We're getting into WordPress in a new way, the need for a featured image came from users. I didn't know they had this feature in WordPress. If you asked me if it did, I would have said yes, I'm sure it does, but where and what is it called? i could've gotten that too via chatgpt, but i would have had to think of it. that's where having sharp users makes a world of difference. When people thank me for my generosity, they don't get it. I want something out of it, your experience and your mind. It's one of my main raw materials.

Ich bin morgen, den 25. März um 14 Uhr zu Gast bei Blogtastisch!, einem Meetup für die Bloggosphäre. Vor ein paar Wochen hat Thomas Riedel mich gefragt, ob ich nicht Lust hätte bei seiner virtuellen Blogger-Konferenz mit zu machen und etwas über „Blogs im Fediverse“ zu erzählen bzw. Rede und Antwort zu stehen. In diesem […]

With all the good stuff happening with WordLand I haven't found time to wind down feedland.com and feedland.org. The servers are still working, though not performing as I'd like them to, but it doesn't seem I'm going to get the time to do a graceful transition before my self-imposed March 31 deadline. So I'll come up for a new plan, and if you're using either of these services, enjoy! And keep backing up your subscription list.

I keep adding ride videos as I get them. None I’m really very pleased with but I can see progress occurring. Maybe more importantly, I can feel progress occurring. I am seeing INTO THE BARREL of waves periodically. Before they collapse and leave me in whitewater. And I know my limits. I was north of...

Sounds like ATmosphereConf went really well in Seattle this weekend. So cool to see community events spring up around the social web.

Finished reading: Queen of Shadows by Sarah J. Maas. Slowly working my way through the series with breaks to read other books in between. 📚

Since Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth was announced a few days ago I’ve been trying to figure out how I feel about it. Blocking misbehaving bots is good, but creating fake pages and hidden links reminds me of other hacks to trick crawlers that I think could be detrimental to the web. Just not sure yet.