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Anthropic experiments in using a Chrome extension instead of building their own web browser. Also some good notes about safety. I’m still enjoying Dia, but it does seem like a lot for everyone to create a new browser.

See, I have a bit of a problem with letting other people define me. I’ve really gotta work on that…

An update on offering Micro.blog for free to teachers and nurses, now that it has been a few weeks. It’s going well! We had some previous users take us up on the offer, and some brand new users. Thinking about other ways to get the word out.

Got excited for a minute when I misread this headline: Libby’s library app adds an AI… Thought it was “API”. We sort of reverse-engineered how Libby works, but it’s not reliable.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about using AI for polish. The idea was to let AI help with taking care of lots of little details that can be tempting to skip in the rush to get a new feature out. Lately I’ve been thinking about another good use for AI. Not to finish a...

Big update today for Micro.blog folks who have multiple accounts. The iOS, Android, and Mac apps have long supported multiple accounts, but on the web you could only switch between separate blogs on the same account. Managing multiple accounts on the web was frustrating.

Now you’ll find a popover menu in the sidebar to add a new account and select between your accounts. Here’s a screenshot showing me signed into a couple of our official accounts in addition to my personal account:

And for all users, even if you only have a single Micro.blog account, we now have passkeys! This is the password-less standard for quickly signing in. No more waiting for a confirmation email from Micro.blog.

I think perhaps I should have one day every week where I never link to anything. Just to provide a demo of what the web would be like without linking. Which is most of the sites that say they are part of the web. I think that's a lie we should stop tolerating.

I'm working my way through Mr Robot, for the third time I think. If you want to know what I do, it's like what Elliot does, for about four hours pretty much every day. I used to work longer hours but I've found this amount of work is optimal. I make more mistakes after about 1PM. Anyway Mr Robot is a very good thing to watch for the times we live in. The technology is already a little outdated, but they thought of that, there are some settings where they use old PCs from the 80s, with total respect. I like that. And the utilities he uses are pretty much the same ones I use these days. And the context of a world in technological meltdown, I think that's a very realistic scenario. I don't see how our networks can't avoid breaking down. And our health care system, which these days is pretty much the same thing.

Tragic story in The New York Times of suicide and ChatGPT. This probably lines up with the “sycophantic” edition of 4o. As more people use chatbots as therapists, there are so many new potential problems. For minors perhaps there should be escalation to humans, even less privacy.

Guess I won’t be deploying this bug fix right away. 🙁 When deploying to the app servers, I roll each server out of the load balancer to avoid downtime. Can’t do that when Linode’s management interface and API are down.

Congrats to the Iconfactory on the Tot 2.0 release. Looks like a good update.

In July my cousin had an accident that landed her in an ICU. Her parents and husband have coordinated family to be present for her 24/7. We are a large enough family that we can do this. I have been present for her for several sessions now. At the beginning, she did not recognize me....

Ethan tagged me in a post. I didn’t feel a thing. “I’d love to invite a few other folks to share their favorite newsletters”, he wrote. My immediate thought was that I don’t actually subscribe to many newsletters. But then I remembered that most newsletters are available a...

I haven’t forgotten about holding a small Micro.camp this year. The summer has been full of distractions. I think it’s important that we do an event each year, even if it has to be scaled down a little. It’s a time to mark the progress and hear from people.

I like the idea of adding this to personal websites:

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.

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The consensus among the people who responded to my what does "on the web" mean query is this. Something is on the web if it has a URL you can use to view it in a web browser. That means, in 2025, that the URL begins with HTTP or HTTPS. Every "page" on a site must have a URL so they can be pointed to independently, otherwise known as deep linking. It's not enough to just have a home page that's on the web. So for example, an iPhone app isn't on the web just because it has an information page that is.

ChatGPT is the Lotus 1-2-3 of search. Google is Visicalc.

The presentations for WordCamp US are just a few days away! We have some really exciting keynotes including Danny Sullivan from Google, John Maeda from Microsoft AI, and Adam Gazzaley (one of the top neuroscientists in the world) from UCSF. I think being in the room and able to meet the speakers and ask questions … Continue reading The Future of WordPress and AI at WCUS →