FeedCity

Going to Saint Augustine. brb

This is the 106th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Louie Mantia and his blog, lmnt.me To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox ever...

All the big boys, all the Berties, all the envelopes, yeah, they hurt me. I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me.

https://www.rte.ie/news/presidential-election/2025/0905/1531932-bertie-ahern-presidency

There have been a lot of improvements to Micro.blog lately. If you don’t follow the @news account closely, you can also subscribe to the weekly email of posts from news.micro.blog, delivered every Monday.

Simon Willison has vibe-coded 124 useful tools.

Our shop does not have a public restroom for customers, so we ask for your understanding! Yes, yes!

Dusting off a little of the queued up work for JSON Feed. Thanks to Daniel Pietzsch, the JSON Feed Validator now has a JSON API, if any apps need to hook into validating JSON Feeds using it. There’s a new format=json URL parameter.

Seeing this sign after parking my car… Not so much worried as I am curious how bad it must be to order a custom sign for this.

Probably the last post-work rays of sunlight for 2025.

Thursday session

Ever since first adding book reading to Micro.blog, I’ve tried to avoid recreating my own book database. So we lean on Google Books, Open Library, Goodreads, and even (for a while) paying for metadata. I think that approach has run its course. Going to add our own book curation and cover tools.

AI is as good at writing software as it is in creating competent visual art. It's only amazing in terms of how much more a novice can do. It doesn't mean what they create is interesting in more than a gee-wiz way, and the novelty fades pretty quickly I've found.

ChatGPT might not give you the best answer. Yesterday I hit a problem with the MySQL hosting service, and as we worked it out, ChatGPT and me, I ended up contacting the ISP's support asking them to restart the server, something I cannot do through the control panel. They don'...

I know I go on and on too much about AI sometimes, but… OpenAI’s Codex continues to amaze me. You can have it just watch a GitHub repo for pull requests, then automatically check the new code and add a comment if anything looks wrong. 🤯 Great for a tiny team with not enough eyeballs on things.

Another thing I should have mentioned, about the title of the podcast, is that I think this is the last chance for the open web. It may already be too late. Look at what's happening politically in the US now and ask how tolerant the government is going to be for an open web. We always had to deal with the possibility that they would shut down free speech here. It has been tried, and didn't work in the 90s. But the guardrails that existed then possibly don't exist now. The same things that are forcing CBS for example to become a controlled press, will affect the web too, but you won't read about it in the NYT or hear about it on Maddow because they have very low regard for the amateur writing on the web. They only respect commercial writing.

BTW, one of the things I should have mentioned in yesterday's podcast is that the product isn't just WordLand, it's also FeedLand. The two are connected by a well-developed WebSocket interface, which I will provide code for, as well as docs for what goes over the wire. I think a lot of feed aficionados will find this really interesting (and also really simple).

As a VC-backed company, perhaps The Browser Company was always going to need to sell. My initial reaction is Atlassian seems a weird fit. But maybe not? From The Verge:

Miller is clear, even forceful, that Dia is not about to become just a wrapper for Atlassian apps, or shift to thinking primarily about IT managers and enterprise features. Dia is still for individual users. It’s just that now, it’s primarily for individual users at work.

I’m really enjoying Dia. I’ll probably keep using it unless or until it gets worse.

Half of the line-up of speakers for Web Day Out is already on the site. One more is already confirmed. I’m ridiculously excited about the way the line-up is taking shape, and judging by the zippiness of ticket sales, so are lots of my peers. Seriously, don’t wait to get you...

Kind of odd if someone has a link to schedule a meeting on their website, but they don’t share an email address or any other contact info. Is email a lost art? It still works. Simple, everywhere.

I’m seeing more and more companies referring to their tech stack as using “traditional machine learning” …presumably to distance themselves from the slopaganda of “AI” grifters before the bubble pops.