FeedCity

Waterloo Park. 🌳

Just watched B. J. Novak’s directorial debut, Vengeance (2022) and oh boy, it’s a hoot. A hearty recommendation from me.

Matt Haughey blogs about the uncertainty for small businesses and how bad things might get if the world loses trust in the US dollar:

Not only were the tariffs announced and rolled out haphazardly and far too quickly, but within a few days the tariff against China doubled again. This is no way to let US-based small businesses plan for anything, and what we have today is total chaos in the aftermath.

Matt Mullenweg blogs about the new AI-powered WordPress design builder:

The long-anticipated “Big Sky” AI site builder on WordPress.com went live today. It combines several models and can create logos, site designs, typography, color schemes, and content. It’s an entirely new way to interact with and edit a brand-new or existing WordPress site.

I went through their interface to get a sense of what they’re doing. The AI will create a basic design, then you can tweak the layout, colors, and fonts by clicking around. To actually make the blog live, you have to upgrade to a paid plan.

The long-anticipated “Big Sky” AI site builder on WordPress.com went live today. It combines several models and can create logos, site designs, typography, color schemes, and content. It’s an entirely new way to interact with and edit a brand-new or existing WordPress site. This AI agent will make WordPress accessible to an entirely new generation … Continue reading AI Site Builder →

Jeremy Keith has a good collection of links and quotes about AI crawling. On this specific part of the commentary I continue to disagree, though: If you’re using the products powered by these attacks, you’re part of the problem. Don’t pretend it’s cute to ask ChatGPT for so...

As I hinted at the other day, I’m rolling out command-S in more places in Micro.blog. From the news blog today:

Updated new posts, editing, and notes to support command-S for saving. The convention in Micro.blog on the web will be command-return to save something and close the thing, and command-S to stay where you are if you don’t want to leave the page.

Micro.blog News https://news.micro.blog/2025/04/09/updated-new-posts-editing-and.html

Vincent’s also been working on some shortcut-related stuff that I can’t wait to share. It’s really nice.

Sigh. Amtrak really needs its own tracks:

Train 21 and Train 421 are currently stopped west of Longview (LVW) due to a rail partner’s disabled trainset blocking the tracks in the area. Due to an expected lengthy delay, Train 21 and Train 421 will reverse back to Longview (LVW) to await further updates.

🚂

All Trump is doing is making the US the cootie zone. We won't make anything here and we won't buy anything. We'll have nice 2025 computers, phones, cars, medicine, lumber, energy, but all the shit we import will break and be used up and we won't be able to replace it. The re...

Greg Storey blogging about how much we’ve divided ourselves and what we’ve lost:

When we don’t talk to each other, we stop trusting each other. When we stop trusting each other, we stop trusting anything —ballots, elections, basic facts. And when we lose trust, democracy doesn’t just wobble. It collapses.

I believe that eventually WordPress will be the hub for writers the way the web itself became the the hub for apps. Initially, the web wasn’t the best place to host apps, the Mac had a much more developed set of meaningful features for app devs, and we already knew the Mac A...

Tuesday session

The foundation of a flexible, good IndieWeb website is markup (the "M" in HTML!") that doesn't drive you batty to debug and CSS that works with it to have it look, sound, and interact how you want, whatever device or format the website is displayed on.

Nice write-up over at TechCrunch of the new Tapestry 1.1:

…one of the larger challenges of multi-feed aggregation apps like Tapestry is that you’re often confronted with duplicates as other users cross-post their updates to multiple services like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Micro.blog. […] The latest Tapestry update is now able to automatically filter out these duplicates, even when the posts are not written exactly the same.

Today's song: Come on Eileen.

[Jeremy Keith] Jeremy Keith highlights the hammering that the public service internet is getting from LLM vendors: "When we talk about the unfair practices and harm done by training large language models, we usually talk about it in the past tense: how they...

Seth Godin on his 10,000th blog post:

I’d write this blog even if no one read it, but that the fact that you do, that you subscribe to it and share it, that’s my fuel.

Grim reading from the games industry, especially if you work at Shopify where the CEbrO has just mandated that you have to use this shite.

adactio.com/links/21837

Oh man, this tune by Adrian is so good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsJihAhX5P4