FeedCity

Cross-posted from my daveverse site. I hadn’t considered the point of view of people who worked at Netscape when it disappeared just as RSS 0.9.1 was being adopted by the blogosphere in 1999. We did try to get in touch with them, even when they didn’t work there, but no one...

Bluesky is spinning out the PLC directory:

After considering several jurisdictions, legal structures, and potential parent organizations, the new entity will form as a Swiss Association. In a period of international uncertainty around Internet governance, Switzerland provides a credibly neutral and stable global home.

I like this. They’ve always acknowledged that PLC wasn’t intended to be permanent. Now there’s progress that’s better without waiting for it to be perfect.

Smart move by Mastodon to get into the hosting business:

This could be a fully operated server under the organisation’s own domain run by our team (with moderation included, on request); or, we can work with an organisation’s in-house operations team, via a support contract.

I’ve noticed whenever I catch Mastodon’s financial reports that individual donations have dropped. It’s hard to make donations work unless you have frequent NPR-style fundraising. Hosting will be mostly for larger institutions, not trying to compete with all the many smaller indie servers.

The penalty for ABC and Disney should be we stop watching their stuff.

The challenge we face in the open social web is seducing people off the silos with fun toys to play with that from the start don't rely on a bigco to run it, the back-end is a server you could run for $20 a month on digital ocean for example. But the logical network isn't tied to the physical server, we use urls or dns to find other nodes. They can be hosted anywhere. The reason to run lots of servers is to demonstrate that it's only as centralized as the web itself, from day 1.

This is the 108th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Robert Birming and his blog, birming.com To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbo...

For fans of the Juwel 3 typewriter that appears in the Netflix series Wednesday, there’s a tiny little simulacra in LEGO set 76781 Wednesday & Enid’s Dorm Room.  With the recent drop of the second season and Halloween around the corner, I was surprised to see the set on clearance at Target for about $30. 

Recorded a short screencast of the new Open Graph image preview interface in Micro.blog, especially for folks who want to tinker with their own design for a theme or plug-in.

Starting to doubt my low-tech video workflow of “just use QuickTime Player” for simple edits. I keep uploading video to YouTube where the audio becomes out of sync after upload. This is probably a reminder to make Micro.blog suitable for longer videos.

Before I reveal the story foreshadowed in my post about machine knitting some first hats, a digression. One of my main goals with machine knitting is to be comfortable enough with the machine and techniques required to make custom two-color patterns with AYAB. To that end, I...

Disney stock down 1.1% at 11:30AM Eastern, indicating that in the opinion of shareholders, the first amendment isn't that big a deal for a media company.

I've been getting ChatGPT to draw me product shots of all kinds of "really simple" things like ketchup, cola, cheese, baked beans (see below). Then I thought it might work pretty well as a line of books? I'll have my Python simple. Really simple. Who would want complicated baked beans?

Updated the new help page for Open Graph card templates, which are rolling out in Micro.blog today. Plug-in developers can essentially design cards with HTML and CSS. Micro.blog then renderers them as static images.

Test post test post test post test post test post test post, my kingdom for a test post!

I got a few good error reports and that led to an easy fix. So if you had a problem creating a new post on WordLand could you please try again and report any problems, or success. Thanks!

David Smith blogging on the 5 year anniversary of Widgetsmith, telling the story of how a seemingly niche app ended up huge:

I then open my helpdesk page and I am shocked by what I see. There are new emails coming in at a rate of multiple per second. A literal waterfall of customer outreach.

Drove through my old neighborhood in south Austin for the first time in a while. In some ways, the decades haven’t changed it. But things are still different. A few larger new houses. Waymo cars driving themselves down streets as if that is perfectly normal and not science fiction.