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FeedCity

People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.

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Manton Reece Valid

Really happy with this change we rolled out today for the Micro.blog Family subscription plan:

Micro.blog Family now allows you to transfer “ownership” of a blog to someone else in your family (or small team). So you can manage payment for up to 5 blogs, but another member can post to their own blog and control the blog’s settings.

Micro.blog News https://news.micro.blog/2025/08/12/microblog-family-now-allows-you.html

Under the “People” section, there’s a new “Make Owner” button for each member of the blog. This makes the Family plan more flexible for a variety of setups.

Scripting News Valid

I had an hour to spare this morning so I decided for a third time to try to coax ChatGPT to play a role in a little drama I have in mind. I still want to use AI to power an RSS feed of news, customized to the interests of one person (me). My query is this: "Create a summary of the news, top 20 stories with an emphasis on these topics: how people are using AI, especially in education, blogging, US politics, science news, the NBA and MLB, with a slight emphasis on the Knicks and Mets. The results should be in JSON format, with each item including: A brief one sentence summary, publication date and a link to a source where the reader can get more info. My software will then create an RSS feed with this information.." The response was basically: "I'm sorry Dave." Groan. Here are the details.

James' Coffee Blog
James' Coffee Blog

A foggy morning

When I woke up, the hills outside were mostly invisible through the fog. A thick haze – an autumn fog – enveloped the landscape. In these moments, my mind turns to what is immediately in front of me – the trees. The trees are starting to change colour, I thought to myself. Wi...

Manton Reece Valid

Installed the iOS 26 beta. Liquid Glass is much weirder and more bubbly on iOS than on macOS. Don’t feel too strongly about it except that old and new apps now feel like they are from different operating systems.

James' Coffee Blog
James' Coffee Blog

Digital, physical

When the Internet Phone Book was released, it came up in several calls I was in. I had a copy of the book on the table next to me so that I could bring it out. Knowing that some people may not have seen the book – or heard of the project – showing the physical copy had signif...

James' Coffee Blog
James' Coffee Blog

Collaborative web weaving

At last week’s Homebrew Website Club, we had a discussion about making websites collaboratively. The discussion made me think back to the time when several participants all edited the same web page at the same time. The setup was an Etherpad – a web-based collaborative text d...

James' Coffee Blog
James' Coffee Blog

What is the web equivalent?

Interface design is intertwined with real-world metaphors. Computers save information to files. Files are stored in folders. We can open one or more windows to view different applications. We put files we no longer want into the rubbish bin (trash can). While looking for more...

Manton Reece Valid

Maurice Parker blogs that his outliner Zavala will always be free. I also think there’s a good parallel in here to what people might do if they didn’t have to work as much. They would still do something! Creating or helping people will always be rewarding.

Manton Reece Valid

Reddit blocking the Internet Archive is another step back for the open web, but maybe not too surprising after they shut down API access last year.

…we’re limiting some of their access to Reddit data to protect redditors.

Protect users, or protect Reddit monetizing user data by selling it to AI companies?

Manton Reece Valid

Thanks @jim for the quick update to the mnml theme for Micro.blog, adding support for the category intro text feature. I’ve updated a couple more plug-ins (like Marfa and Alpine) and others will be updated later.

Manton Reece Valid

GitHub CEO resigns to go back to doing his own thing:

…my startup roots have begun tugging on me and I’ve decided to leave GitHub to become a founder again. GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon. I’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we’ve built as a remote-first organization spread around the world.

GitHub is a unique product that deserves to be run independently. But also, I’m not too worried about this change.

Manton Reece Valid

Category improvements

Today we rolled out two improvements to category management in Micro.blog on the web. The first is a new selection interface so you can more easily delete lots of categories at once. This was particularly a problem when importing from other blog systems, which could create l...

Adactio Valid

Session talk

I was in Nor’n Irelan’ at the end of July for my annual week of Belfast Tradfest. It was the best one yet. Classes in the morning, sessions all day, and concerts in the evening. There were also some excellent events at Ulster University during the afternoons—talks, film sc...