FeedCity

I keep beating the drum about Bluesky. Their story says they know they need to be replaceable. But until they deliver on replaceability, it's a 5-alarm fire because of what happened with Twitter. It should not have been possible to acquire Twitter's user base. In hindsight we know it could have been avoided. And it can be avoided by Bluesky, but my guess is the last thing they want is to be replaced. If they really meant it, we could make it happen in a few weeks, and then we could build some really incredible systems, starting in late May, early June. I really believe that. Next journalist that interviews them should ask about this. Thanks for listening.

We can own the platforms that support us

As I write this, I’m flying home from the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. Now in its 19th year, it’s an annual meeting of newsrooms, journalists, and news professionals from all over the world. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was blown away by ...

Developers: This is the WordPress API. Compare it to AT Proto and ActivityPub. It's got a lot of advantages. It does the basics of social media. It scales, is mature, stable, and well-managed. A stronger, stable, more broad and better foundation imho to build on than the others.

For the past couple of years, myself and Jessica have been going to the Belfast Tradfest in the Summer. It’s an excellent event with great workshops, sessions, and concerts. And it helps that Belfast is such a lovely city to spend a week in. What struck me the first time we...

Fun!

But also …never forget, never forgive.

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[Zoë Schiffer at WIRED] The Social Security Administration is changing its communications strategy in a surprising way: ““We are no longer planning to issue press releases or those dear colleague letters to inform the media and public about programmatic and ...

Sunny skies, bikes, a whole lot of fun, and only a little rain! 🚲🚲🚲 The Ladds 500 took over Ladd's Circle park today, with hundreds joining in to ride around and around and around! Relay, race, parade, or party - call it whatever you want, just remember to have fun! #Ladds500 #PDX #PDXbikes #BikeSummer

Updated my NBA arenas web page for the game last night in Phoenix. A few good moments in the game but Spurs lost badly, missing too many players even beyond Wemby.

When I visit coffee shops, I like to take notes of things that I appreciate about their design, as well as wishes for what would improve my experience in the coffee shop. Most of these notes are scattered throughout the forest that is my digital notebook, so I thought I would...

Manuel who runs the wonderful People and Blogs interview series has taken over Blogroll.org from Ray. I have visited Blogroll.org many times when in search for new links to explore. I am grateful to both Ray for starting and maintaining the project, and for Manuel continuing ...

When I am designing URLs, I consider whether a URL is something that would be easy to understand if heard aloud. This does not need to apply to all URLs – for example, I wouldn’t mention a post URL verbally – but it does apply to many pages, like a contact page or an about pa...

MJ, my blog mascot, has the unique ability of being able to balance coffee cups on his head while upside down. This is reflected in a design concept I made last year for my blog. In experimenting with new article layouts, I thought about what it would be like to have MJ stick to the side of the screen as the user scrolled. Then I thought what if MJ rotated! Here is MJ at the point that proves his magic coffee cup doesn’t spill: The MJ cat mascot upside down with an arrow pointing at it that has the message “a magic coffee cup that doesn’t spill”. This is the only feature in the sidebar. The sidebar is next to the main article text. I, on the other hand, regularly spill coffee. You can view the web page and its source code if you want to take a peek to see how the scroll-based animation works!

After pressing Send on an email to a friend this evening, my email client opened a window which read You wrote “I have attached”, but no attachment has been added. Do you want to send your message anyway?. Without this feature, I would have sent the email and likely forgotten...

I thought I’d try something different and write not about a snippet of my day but the day in full – almost like a journal. I started the day with reading. I’m reading Goodnight Tokyo, a fiction book about a Tokyo taxi driver and the stories of the people he drives around the...

For the IndieWeb Movie Club I watched 1997’s The Castle IWC April 2025: hosted by Zachary Kai Usually I will read and research before seeing a film. I don’t mind spoilers. So a trailer and a wikipedia synopsis would be a first step. For this, I took it on faith that it’d be worthwhile. The...

Parker Ortolani blogging about the new ChatGPT feature to look at past conversations:

…it makes the tool dramatically more intelligent — and personal. By being able to reference things you have talked about before without hoping that the model would catch it or by manually teaching it, it feels more like talking with a person than ever before.

In all the talk of AI models and the technical bits, many people miss that ChatGPT is a success because it’s an actual product now. A competitor can’t “catch up” to ChatGPT unless they also build everything that OpenAI has added around the model.