FeedCity

Facebook has had 3 billion users for a while, but I wasn’t expecting Instagram to already have 3 billion monthly active users. Insane scale.

The web has been asleep for 19 years, which is almost as long as Rip Van Winkle was.

In the future you will be able to chain social networks together. It's up to you to figure out what that means. Because each social network will specialize in certain things. How will that work? Left as an exercise for the reader. We'll build new kinds of brains built out of whatever you can dream up.

An invaluable resource. The Internet Archive is getting close to 1 trillion pages archived:

Since 1996, the Wayback Machine has been capturing the web—saving the voices, creativity, and communities that make up our shared digital history. Nearly one trillion pages later, we’re still archiving, so that future generations can look back and understand the world as we lived it online.

If you work at a clever company, then you should let them know about sponsoring Web Day Out.

All the details are in this PDF sponsorship pack. Basically there are three (and only three) spots available, at three different levels of sponsorship.

One of the best things about the venue for Web Day Out is that always having an excellent auditorium, the Studio Theatre has a really nice space for the breaks. It would be the perfect spot to set up a stand and chat with all the smart attendees.

All the attendees will, by definition, be smart because they got tickets for Web Day Out—a steal at just £225+VAT.

Here's a place to comment on yesterday's podcast with Mattias.

There are a lot of developers who think they understand WordPress but they don't. It has a REST api that you can build on. Everything WordPress does. It's the API the browser client is built on. I didn't know it was there until I added WordPress login to FeedLand a couple of years ago. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. What can I do with it? It snuck up on me because it is an API to the web, and it's also the easiest API to for ActivityPub. If you think you understand the programming model for the fediverse, you should take a look. This is as exciting as any web product I did before, because now, after being asleep for 19 years, the web can now wake up. It really feels that way.

So far the WordPress API hasn't been promoted much, I only found out about it by accident. . Judge my success by how many other editors show up for WordPress and how they are all automatically plugged into networks defined by ActivityPub and RSS. People will be totally surprised by what you can do with tools that can be plugged into each other in all the ways you can think of.

Had cocido for lunch in Madrid yesterday and I’m still full today.

Casey Newton's annual updates are always great. This year, perhaps predictably, the biggest highlight for me is his ambitions around community. We need stronger community platforms to support newsrooms.

There is some riveting drama in the Ruby community around company sponsorships, and directory nudging similar to what happened with Advanced Custom Fields and Secure Custom Fields. This post does the best summary: Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover. I will only add that Automattic attempted to sponsor RailsConf and … Continue reading Ruby Drama →

Posted a quick 1-minute video on YouTube (boo!) to demo a new feature to install Open Graph preview cards for Micro.blog themes, even if you don’t use the full design from the theme.

“The need is absolute.” I’m quoting Peter O’Toole playing T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. Two incredibly interesting and problematic twentieth century people one filling in for the other to tell a story. That line, which O’Toole says in reaction to the question of the need of phones in a recently liberated town taken from...

Unfortunately picked today with an expected high of 100° as the day I should start taking long walks again.

Trump’s Gleichschaltung: The “Synchronization” of American society with its increasingly omnipresent government The intended conditioning is clear: before you do anything, check with the Dear Leader first because you can never be quite sure whether or not it passes or fails in his omnipotent judgment. And, yeah, that includes your sense of humor. This forced...

I’ve had a couple side conversations recently about centralized video. John Gruber makes a strong case today that this needs to be solved soon:

With YouTube, Google has a centralized chokehold on video. We need a way that’s as easy and scalable to host video content, independently, as it is for written content. I don’t know what the answer to that is, technically, but we ought to start working on it with urgency.

Oh jeez, just spend too many minutes wondering why this code wasn’t working until I realized I had typed “theme.opml” instead of “theme.toml”. 🤪

It happened so slowly that we didn't notice but Twitter wiped out the idea of the web developer. The platforms we were trying to make work together were programmed so they couldn't work together. As well-intentioned we may have been, it wasn't the web we were developing for. I know the term web developer has come to mean more than it means to me. But it's like saying someone is a Mac developer. A web developer creates apps for the web. Not for a specific service. For any service that supports the open formats that everyone else uses.