FeedCity

Spent most of the day resting, listening to the audiobook for The Grace of Kings, and trying to avoid working. My body was exhausted and Covid was the non-negotiable reminder to slow down. Feeling better. 😷

Liquid Glass has (deservedly) received plenty of criticism. But there are some areas that are clearly better, like these buttons in iOS alerts.

MSNBC → MS NOW. In fairness to the designers, any new logo is going to be worse than the peacock.

During the first Trump term, I thought MSNBC’s coverage was great. But this year they’ve seemed unmoored. I’ve mostly stopped watching. This rebrand was a chance for something new and they blew it.

I want to switch cell providers, so I used ChatGPT to figure out that Consumer Cellular is the best choice for me. I finally get around to filling in the form, and it complains about my zip code. "No service." Yes I know, there's no cell coverage where I live. I still need a freaking cell phone. Called them, the sales person says maybe it's a problem with your computer. Geez Louise. It's a problem with your computer. How many years have they had to fix this stupid bug. I could see if I was buying a landline. But this is a mobile device. That means it moves. To places with cell coverage.

"The 19th developed seven key initiatives to guide our priorities for the next three years." Doing this work in public is such a smart move.

In "Mashups", I explored the question "what is the blog equivalent of a mashup?" The post itself was a mashup of several other posts chosen to complement the ideas I was thinking about. (What better way to figure something out than to try it?) The topic of mashup pertains to ...

What if you made a social network out of RSS? Then your blogroll would be the list of people you follow. Their updates would show up in a reverse chronologic list of posts that would look like something from Bluesky or Twitter. You could view a list of the people you follow, and expand each person to see their most recent five posts, summarized, with a link to each to read the whole thing. Since there are no limits to the length of a post in RSS there would be no limit to the length of one of these posts.

I've been watching The Dropout on Hulu. It's hard to watch at times, because the main character of the show, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is such a horrible person. She lies to everyone about everything, but she's cute and the VCs like her, so they pump hundreds of million...

Did a live server migration over the weekend, switching over DNS like…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gU35Tgtlmg

The Useful Line Indicator The metal bar often with either grooves or embossed with white lines or in later century models the clear plastic Perspex card guides often with pre-printed white or red lines and/or hash marks on either side of the a typing point are called the line indicator. The “line” it suggests is … Continue reading The Uses and Subtleties of the Line Indicator on a Typewriter

There’s still plenty more to come, so please enjoy them until your body just can’t stand the fun!

I would like to get on the record.

1. The only billionaire-proof social network will be based on RSS.
2. The shortest path to being billionaire-proof for Bluesky is well thought-out inbound and outbound RSS.

We're going to have some interop based on RSS not too far down the road. A network that will only require an RSS feed for entry. It's what we should've built in 2006 and didn't.

Sitting outside at the hotel, drinking so much water and Gatorade. I always seem to get sick while traveling. 😷

The new header graphic is gift from Stan Krute at Fresh Art Daily.

If someone manages to create a content blocker for MacOS/iOS that prevents all the content that mentions either AI or vibe coding to reach my screen, I’d buy it in a heartbeat. I am so goddamn tired of reading about AI, GPT models, and people vibe-coding. I get it, it’s fun tech, but it’s exhausting. It’s the crypto/NTF craze on steroids.

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Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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We're in the doldrums of summer. It's hot and muggy, but I am where you want to be this time of year, in the Catskill Mountains, where there's lots to do outdoors, the peaches are fantastic right now, apples coming soon. I'm working a few hours a day on the integration of writing and timelines built around feeds. Instead of using Bluesky or Mastodon, with their limits, we use WordPress for storing posts. It has none of their limits, has a high performance open source server back-end, not without problems, but far ahead of where the competition is in terms are reliablity and ease of implementation. To be part of this network, all you need to do is a way of producing an RSS feed. Seems pretty openly billionaire-proof wouldn't you say.

Writing HTML on a phone is difficult. To write HTML – like all programming languages – you need to use a lot of symbols. The main symbols that you need for HTML are the open and closing angle brackets (< and >, respectively). On iOS, these are in the tertiary keyboard....

Mastodon shows an "Alt" button in the bottom right of images that have associated alt text. This button, when clicked, shows the alt text the author has written for the image. Here is an example of a post with an attached image that has alt text: The Mastodon user interface s...

Under the blanket of the late evening, having been in awe at the beauty of the sunset, I looked to the sky and saw a star – a single star. There are other stars out there, but they are not yet visible. My eyes fixate on the first star, feeling awe at the sparkle in the night ...