Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
With Pocket shutting down, I’ve updated Micro.blog’s bookmarks import for Pocket’s latest export format. Also supports Instapaper, Raindrop, and Pinboard. Happy bookmarking! 🔖
Where AI fits in
The Beatles
Personal computers
The web
Napster
AI
The first Homebrew Website Club Düsseldorf Schepp and I co-organised turned out well. We...
The first Homebrew Website Club Düsseldorf Schepp and I co-organised turned out well. We gathered at Düsseldorf’s central library inside its “Xafé” café. We had 7 participating adults and 2 children. ;) The meetup was more exchange and discussions than actual work on one’s websites. Discussed topics included: “I want to build my own website” Opinions on tooling RelMeAuth Podcast metric aggregation WebSub Personal publishing workflows and tools Image hosting ...
Stephen F. Austin State Park. Short hike on a trail near the Brazos River.
Write.as creator Matt Baer wants to focus more on writing for 2025. I can relate to a lot of this:
Our apps have always been built to help you get your words down with nothing in the way. That’s why Write.as always opens to our editor — so you can start writing immediately, and not get distracted by notifications, comments, and superfluous things like how many “likes” you received.
Oh no! Oh no. 😿 https://blog.glitch.com/post/changes-are-coming-to-glitch/
Oh no! Oh no. 😿
Making things happen
Reminder: standard ticket pricing for UX London ends at midnight tomorrow (Friday), so if you haven’t got your ticket yet, get in there now! https://ti.to/clearleft/ux-london-2025
Reminder: standard ticket pricing for UX London ends at midnight tomorrow (Friday), so if you haven’t got your ticket yet, get in there now!
Stephen Hackett throwing some cold water on the io products hype:
To be clear, the failure of the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin does not mean that there’s no room in the market for an AI-powered device with no screen. However, people really like their phones, and creating a product that will compete with the smartphone is a hill no one has successfully climbed to date.
I don’t agree that the Rabbit R1 was a failure. It fell short of expectations, but that team is still churning away. A new kind of AI-first device is still more likely to come from someone new, without the smartphone baggage.
The landing zone
You might’ve noticed there’s a new status line in Micro.blog’s publishing progress, providing a little more context for what the platform is doing. I’ll continue to tweak this so the progress is more useful.
Almost lost in all the OpenAI hype this week was that MCP is now supported in OpenAI’s responses API. MCP was a big part of Microsoft’s keynote and at Google I/O.
Who’s Afraid of a Hard Page Load?
Why single-page apps are just not worth it:
Here’s the problem: your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.
Meanwhile, the browser marches on, improving the UX of every website that uses basic HTML semantics. For instance: browsers often don’t repaint full pages anymore.
DevTools features I like: Computed CSS
I’m not convinced that the designer of a $10,000 gold watch (now obsolete), who gets driven around in the back of a Bentley, and who spends his spare time in coffee shops ‘inventing the future’ with the likes of Sam Altman, is capable of designing products for the rest of us.
Can Directories Rise Again? - The History of the Web
Search has bent in quality towards its earliest days, difficult to navigate and often unhelpful. And the remedy may be the same as it was a quarter century ago.
Om Malik blogging about today’s video of Jony Ive and Sam Altman:
The slick video harkens back to Ive’s glory days at Apple when he would talk about the chips, designs, and aluminum on videos extolling the iPhone, the watch, and the laptops. In a way, what he and Altman are indicating, through words, and subliminal marketing, is that we are building the next Apple.
What stood out to me in the announcement about io is that there will be a “family” of devices. Maybe one without a screen, a couple with small screens? I assume voice will be a big part of this, but also perhaps not. It could truly surprise us.
