FeedCity

On my way to the State of the Browser conference last weekend, I stumbled upon an open space in which many trees were in full blossom. Pink petals fell from the tree branches as the gentle spring wind blew. The trees were outside a church courtyard. I stopped, taking in the b...

If we don’t keep sharing the joys of the web, its fate will go in the wrong direction unnecessarily. Take a moment today to share a joy of the web with someone! Maybe you made a cool web page. Share it with a friend! Did you see something that made you smile, or think, or re...

I love to find links to accompany virtual calls – especially those that explicitly relate to or were mentioned by someone. This led to my being bestowed the title “Fastest link sharer in the world.” When I saw this pop up in the meeting chat, I knew I had to remember it for l...

I was in a Tesco Express – a convenience store”– last weekend. When I walked in, looking for a meal deal and at the stage of choosing which sweet to buy 1, I saw two young women walk toward the ice cream freezer. I then heard: “They are out of ice cream. What the fuck [laughs].” I couldn’t help but smile to myself at the randomness of this comment – the excitement for ice cream and the seeming surprise from the fact that there was none available. The joy with which the words were said resonated with me. I am still laughing about it now. 1 I opted for a Bounty, my go-to chocolate bar. The packaging has a palm tree on it! [↩]

This week’s ATP has a members-only special segment about vibe coding. One snippet from John Siracusa, encapsulating much of the conversation: As programming tools have gotten better, the demand for programmers has gone up, not down. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he ga...

How Bluesky hooks up via RSS into a powerful news system.

March 28 through April 4, 2025 Recent Events From events.indieweb.org/archive: Homebrew Website Club - Americas Wednesday, April 2 at 6:00pm Homebrew Website Club Europe/London Wednesday, April 2 at 7:00pm Upcoming Events From events.indieweb.org: Front End Study ...

John Gruber blogging about whether the tariffs will impact Apple:

It’s under-remarked upon, but Apple, to a point of almost obstinance, considers pricing part of the brand for its products. They tend not to raise or lower prices with the ebbs and flows of the world economy or even the obvious constraints of simple supply and demand.

I appreciate this about Apple. Prices send a message and consistency is part of that. (Also why Micro.blog’s standard subscription has never changed from $5.)

While I’m commenting on YouTube videos today, I love that half of Casey Neistat’s video about the Switch 2 is actually about the New York subway.

Nice 9-minute edit by The Verge of the Copilot event, including a protester interrupting the presentation. I get that AI is divisive but it does actual harm to scream at another human in this way. So much outrage now is funneled into attacks when for many topics it’s not even clear what is right.

Greg Morris has been doing great work on Micro Social, and he’s got a buy me a coffee page! ☕️ Perfect way to support an indie app and help grow the Micro.blog ecosystem.

Bluesky is not Billionaire-proof, version 2. I wasn't satisfied with the blog post I wrote in March. I felt it was poorly organized and hard to understand, so I edited it, to get it down to its essential elements, and at the end explain why it's so important to get this right. Basically, by trying to be the universe, Bluesky is cutting off easy connections that can be made with other networks, make the system work better for communication, and at least deliver some of the freedom we all want. They've been very successful, and deserve to profit from that, but recognize it plays a larger role today than just as a business, so let's spread it out so it's harder to shut it down. This is a real concern, not just a nice-to-have thing.

It’s all fun and games with the global economy until your tariffs start interrupting Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders. 🤪

ChatGPT colorized the photo of my grandfather on his tribute site.

How to people feel about web apps that take over common keyboard shortcuts like command-S? We’ve added a handful of keyboard shortcuts to Micro.blog on the web, and I really like it, so I’d like to add a couple more.

Also one could argue that in the interest of neatness, one could phase out webmaster -- but why? It's not as if it's taking up a lot of memory or makes our software run slower. The idea of a webmaster is obsolete, it was how we thought of the web in the late 90s. Also note that it hasn't been deprecated by DNS, for the same reason, if it ain't broke don't fix it. Same subject is coming up on the nets as people discuss Musk's idea of rewriting the Social Security server side from Cobol to something else. We probably don't want to do that. Anyway. Just sayin.

One thing led to another, we discussed lots of facets to the RFSM document. At some point it started rewriting what I had, and used two terms that don't belong in standards-making: dogfood and deprecate. Nothing every is deprecated. That's arrogance on the part of developers....

Just tried an experiment, I asked ChatGPT to review ActivityPub re Rules for Standards-makers. I don't know if it was blowing smoke up my you-know-what, it did know that I wrote RFSM. But as you might imagine, after reading it, I totally concurred with its conclusions. In any case, it illustrates how ChatGPT can be helpful in designing new formats and protocols, making them more supportable and more useful for interop, which according to Rule 1, is the only reason we make standards.

This is the 84th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Matt Webb and his blog, interconnected.org To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inb...