I’ve been fine-tuning publishing performance again. Shaving off a second here or there. Some things including full rebuilds should be better now. More to do!
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Beautiful Public Data
A curated selection of visually interesting datasets collected by local, state and federal government agencies.
This site must’ve started as a way of showcasing really interesting collections, but now it’s turning into an archive of what’s being systematically destroyed by the current US regime.
I’m more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I’ve built since | by Mike Hall | Jul, 2025 | Medium
Vibe coding and Robocop
The short version of what I want to say is: vibe coding seems to live very squarely in the land of prototypes and toys. Promoting software that’s been built entirely using this method would be akin to sending a hacked weekend prototype to production and expecting it to be stable.
Remy is taking a very sensible approach here:
I’ve used it myself to solve really bespoke problems where the user count is one.
Would I put this out to production: absolutely not.
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
So @herebox and I rode waves and in between talked www and python and php and data before he headed back north. Delightful!
Untitled
📕 Finished reading How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell ISBN: 9781612198552
This Week in the IndieWeb
Nick Heer asking the right question about Apple suing Jon Prosser:
This multitrillion-dollar company was financially injured by a few YouTube videos showing the redesign of its operating system?
This lawsuit is clearly a threat to future leakers. Apple shouldn’t throw its weight around like this.
If you're an ambitious developer, esp in 2025, if you want to win, you have to do some leading. That means doing things that help your competitors. When everyone looks to the same big platform vendor to work with, no one wins except the platform vendor.
I want ChatGPT to behave like a computer. I've said as much to it. It resists.
A 2025 design refresh
Gleann Cholm Cille
My new look
I think it's very stylish.BTW, David Frum imho nailed it in yesterday's podcast where he said Trump was trained by every day having to appease a different set of creditors. It was a good day if he was able to hold them off for one more day. This actually came out in the trial he lost, the 34 guilty verdicts. He's always skating on the verge of bankruptcy. You gotta wonder if the creditors have been paid back yet. I bet some of them haven't.
AI researchers are still mostly on Twitter / X, unfortunately. This thread from OpenAI’s Keren Gu shows the interesting balance between biological safety and not preventing actual biologists and chemists from getting work done. Good to err on the side of not helping people make weapons.
Just discovered a wrinkle with our setting to disable fediverse posting. If you @-mention someone in a blog post, Micro.blog sends a copy to that person, so your post will leak out to fediverse servers anyway. Not sure what to do about this.
Excited for Portland fans. Not enough players get to spend their whole career with the same team, or at least retire with it. From @cheesemaker:
There are so many terrible things going on in the world but for this one moment I am mainlining the pure joy knowing that Damian Lillard is once again a Portland Trail Blazer. 🏀
Two-way vs one-way links
TBL's links are one-way. This was actually a major innovation, at the time people understood there was something called hypertext, it had been written about in Ted Nelson's almost biblical book of the pre-web, Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Previous attempts at hypertext assumed links had to be two-way. By limiting the links to one direction, the technical problem became trivial. You could do two-way links today because relational databases are mature and inexpensive to operate, perform very well on today's hardware, and the internet of 2025 is much faster than the internet of 1990. But the one-way limit was necessary for the web to achieve its simplicity, and the non-existence of a platform vendor, which may have been its most important feature. It could still be done, but it would require a lot of cooperation and backfilling.