FeedCity

Without public media funding, local stations will close, creating news deserts and allowing political corruption to thrive.

Over the past couple of months, I read several posts in my RSS reader from people who, in previous lives, were Apple users but now, for a variety of reasons, are switching away from the company run by its homonymous CEO Tim Apple. From what I gathered, the switch was often m...

I found another thing that's possible in the age of ChatGPT. A few years ago I wondered if a product existed. I wanted a small footprint audio amplifier, with that could control a pair of high-end tower speakers I've had for a long time. I was tired of huge receiver boxes wi...

The next book for the Dan Allosso Book Club is Roland Allen‘s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (United Kingdom: Profile Books, 2023). For those interested in intellectual history, here’s a chance to join a long standing book club full of inveterate note takers/zettelkasten-ers, educators, and lifelong learners. Those interested in the topic are … Continue reading

Wednesday session

This is what I want to do next to solidify the position of Mastodon as a blogging platform.

I want a REST version of what the MetaWeblog API has been doing since 2002, to hook into the ActivityPub interface supported by Mastodon.

Then we'll put together a simple demo app, a Markdown app in a browser window that writes and updates posts to a Mastodon site.

When that's running, I'll pitch Rich Siegel at BBEdit to make it work with Masto.

With that, and the WordPress connection, we'll be well on the way to restoring the web we had before Twitter rewrote the rules. ;-)

I ran something through ChatGPT earlier and one if its bits of feedback was:

One small grammatical suggestion is to connect the final two sentences to improve flow…

The solution? Add an em dash, of course! 🙂 ChatGPT is nuts for em dashes. It uses them when a semicolon or period or anything else might be better. See also my post just last week.

At my mom’s house she has an old framed print of the poem Children Learn What They Live by Dorothy Nolte. There are variations of it, but the first line is essentially: If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn. I was staring at that and thinking of social med...

I want to make the most of the sunshine, I thought to myself as I contemplated going on a second walk. I went for a walk earlier today to get groceries. All walks bring my mind space, but meandering on a favourite path feels more conducive to letting my mind wander. I venture...

Big update to Micro.blog for Mac today if you use the notes feature. Everything is faster and more robust. I personally have probably a thousand notes, and it was a little flaky with so many notes before.

I’ve also added a “Versions…” option to the context menu. Micro.blog keeps a record of each edit to a note, so if you make a mistake you can go back to an older version. Now there’s an interface for browsing and restoring a previous copy of the note. (This interface will come to the web later. The third-party web client Lillihub already has something similar!)

Here’s a screenshot of the main interface. This is a test “Journal” notebook (you can have multiple notebooks) that also shows the new sharing URL pane.

Dave Winer:

We’re turning the clock back to move forward. Trying to undo the damage Twitter did to the web.

This is a theme I’ve tried to blog about too. We have to bring all the good ideas from the open web and the blogosphere forward, combined with the user experience lessons from social media.

In a difficult week with extended family health issues, I’m laughing to myself a little this morning because I ran into two extremely minor problems that are bugging me: forgot to get salsa for this breakfast taco, and left my headphones at home. Ah, to have insignificant gripes for one day is nice.

I wish ChatGPT would listen when I say "Just answer the question." I've tried, but when it can't figure it out it ignores the request and dumps a lot of bullshit at you. Maybe Trump can address that in his keynote to the AI conference in DC. Just kidding.

We should all wear masks like the ICE cops wear. They deserve recognition for blazing new fashion trails.

Someday Manton and I will make a very nice Markdown editor for Mastodon, and it'll work very nicely, and then I'll pitch Rich Siegel to do the same for BBEdit. That will nail it once and for all that Mastodon is a blogging platform. He's the right guy to do it, he has all the protocols implemented on micro.blog. All I want is a REST version of what the MetaWeblog API has been doing since 1998 or so. We're turning the clock back to move forward. Trying to undo the damage Twitter did to the web.

This comment makes my day. Some features you develop and never use. I poured a month or so into the blogroll software last year, and it turned out to be a total win. All the new stuff floats to the top. I can quickly find out what they posted. It's a portable version of my fe...

I have had the question “what is the blog equivalent of a mashup?” in the back of my head for a while. Joe’s most recent blog post, “Return to Mashups”, further has me thinking about this question. What does it mean for a blog post – or an entire blog – to be a mashup? My thi...

If there’s one phenomenon I can’t wrap my head around is the proliferation of people who are tech-savvy and nerdy enough to know what RSS is but are also unable to discover my RSS feeds. A non-trivial percentage of the people subscribed to both my blog-to-email newsletter a...

In related client API news, Dave Winer has also been hammering on this recently from his perspective working on WordLand and the long history of the MetaWeblog API:

But the web is what matters, not my product or yours. Even if your product is huge, it’s only part of the web. This is how we build, how we get back on track. Somehow we need to get a simple bridge that lets all blog content flow to Mastodon.

Lear year, I really wanted to see Mastodon adopt an open posting API. I even wrote a FEP to fix some limitations in how APIs were too hard-coded to Mastodon’s capabilities. It went nowhere.