FeedCity

I've heard some reports of people having trouble using WordLand. I was just able to do a test post, and I can see from the logs that other people are successfully posting. It would be helpful if people with accounts could do a short test post. And if you have something to report, here's a good place to do it.

A bunch of new people are trying out FeedLand news products. I haven't looked at them in a long time. I'm glad they're looking, but most of my demo news products were broken. Oy. It was hard to untangle. It should be a lot easier, and next time I can dig in and do it over I think it will be. Anyway as I convert my demos, I'll list them here: mblriver.com, politics.newsriver.org, bloggers.scripting.com, dave.podcatch.com.

I will mourn those who I feel grief over. You can’t demand I mourn. You may request basic respect for the dead. You can’t demand I respect a legacy I find invidious. You can’t demand I ignore the words of the dead. If you can demand my feelings and thoughts be “correct,” you are authoritarian.

Love this story and illustrations on animator James Baker’s blog, from a trip to China in the late 1980s.

I was going to save this announcement for later, but I’m just too excited: Harry Roberts will be speaking at Web Day Out! Goddamn, that’s one fine line-up, and it isn’t even complete yet! Get your ticket if you haven’t already. There’s a bit of a story behind the talk that...

In a piece I wrote yesterday on my WordPress blog, I offered to do a virtual handshake with the people who worked at Netscape when it disappeared just as RSS 0.9.1 was being adopted by the blogosphere in 1999. I never considered their point of view, but in fairness, they never would talk to us except to dictate and dominate. In the piece I try to explain how it all looked from my point of view, that of a developer who had adopted RSS in favor of my own earlier format. Most of the stories miss the real innovator here, and when you find out who it is you will be surprised. (It's not me, most of my job re RSS has been fairly thankless and not creative. I wish other people would share the load. And definitely not profitable, but still worth doing because the web is the only place independent developers can work without the interference of big tech companies.)

I’m on my first United flight with Starlink, and wow! I ran a fast.com test and got 110 mbps down and 38 mbps up, which is insane. 28ms ping times. While flying! When you think of all of the engineering and technology coming together to let me blog this it’s really incredible.

Says something about Vimeo’s decline that I heard about them being acquired not from the tech news websites that I read all the time, but from Cartoon Brew in my RSS reader:

Vimeo, once the internet’s most prestigious stage for independent filmmakers and animators, is being acquired by Milan-based app developer Bending Spoons in a $1.38 billion all-cash deal.

There is a narrow space for an indie-focused, YouTube alternative. Hosting video is difficult.

Last weekend, I joined forces with my buddy Hunter to make a game for PlayJam 8, a game jam for the adorable yellow Playdate game console. Introducing: Stellar Scrapm'n! Descend into debt as you ascend to the stars in a clunky little hauling ship. Crank to steer through rock...

It's really simpler than really simple.

It’s funny to me that Apple made the new battery pack exclusive to the iPhone Air. If I really wanted the thinnest possible phone, no way I’m putting a case or extra battery on it. Even the bumper seems like too much.

As you probably know by now, thanks to the infinite supply of news on the subject, today new OS versions came out for Apple gadgets. Yes, it’s the one with that idiot Liquid Glass. Yes, I hate it. No, I don’t hate it because it’s different from what I was used to before. And...

From the latest Fediverse Report, about Mastodon quote posts:

Mastodon’s concern regarding the potential for harm with dunking does need some context however, researcher Hilda Bastian has a highly detailed overview of over 30 studies on quote posts on Twitter and their impact. Bastian notes: “There’s conflicting evidence on whether QTs increase or decrease incivility, and whatever effect there is, it doesn’t seem to be major.”

I think this dunking is real, but there are many other problems with social media that Mastodon does not attempt to address. Not sure quote posts are make or break.

Here's an idea. Why doesn't Apple make a laptop with a light shining out to highlight the user's face so they look better when they're on a Zoom call. I bet someone makes a device like this to clip on a laptop. Right??

When Really Simple isn't simple enough. 😄

OpenAI published a pair of blog posts today about their next steps for teen safety, acknowledging the trade-off on privacy. Sam Altman: First, we have to separate users who are under 18 from those who aren’t (ChatGPT is intended for people 13 and up). We’re building an age-...

Added a help page for upcoming Open Graph improvements in Micro.blog, including a template system to override the default styles. This is rolling out over the next few days. Very flexible, so hopefully plug-ins can be created for various styles.

Thinking of Robert Redford, what a career. Sneakers is one of my favorite films, and arguably the best film about computers ever made. All the President’s Men is so good. Watched both of these countless times. (Also just learned his mother was born in Austin.) 🍿

Until we start working together and for each other it’s going to keep getting worse.