FeedCity

The snow looks like drops of moonlight I thought to myself as the cool light from the street lamps illuminated the falling snow. It’s beautiful. I have never seen anything like it. Earlier this week I saw light rain fall that looked almost like it was snow – the light reflec...

A comprehensive look at Mastodon, Bluesky, and the growing ecosystem of open, interoperable social networks.

Highly recommend this week's conversation between Nicolle Wallace and Heather Cox Richardson. The contrast of their points of view is dramatic, the election wasn't a win for the Dems, it was a victory for the people.

Never mind Cloudflare; the electricity has gone out in our street.

It’s actually kinda nice, playing mandolin by candlelight.

Important #indieweb lesson in #modular website setup this morning:Keep your DNS provider separate from your CDN separate from your webhost, so you can swap out any one of them as necessary, whether for economic or as it were today, reliability reasons. And make sure those ser...

New trailer for Project Hail Mary! This is going to be great. I’m going to try to re-read the book before the movie comes out.

Love this blog post from Ton Zijlstra about discovering a train ticket in an old book:

While the book is in excellent condition, not at all ‘well traveled’, it does make me wonder about its path through the world. From that 1991 train trip up the valley towards the St. Gotthard massif, to a bookshop in Galway, Ireland. And now to my bookshelves.

In 1999 when my wife and I were traveling in Europe, I left a book in a hostel in Italy. I wrote a note in it for the next reader. I still wonder where that book ended up.

Good episode of Dithering today, talking about the impending Gemini 3 release and why OpenAI will probably be fine even if their models fall behind the state of the art. It’s increasingly about products, not models, because all the models are quite good now.

A feed that Aaron Swartz put up early in RSS times was a feed of Paul Graham essays. The feed items have no guid or pubDate. The way FeedLand is coded right now for detecting changes, it sees all these items as updating every time we read the feed. Okay we have to make it a little bit smarter.

What I'm doing now is preparing FeedLand to reliably do things we haven't had it do yet, at least not at scale. It has one important feature most other feed management systems don't have, dynamic OPML lists that I keep touting here. I have a product that can both generate them and use them on behalf of users. But it's a lot more fun if there are other products that can do the same. It means we can build networks of feed sharing apps, no kidding -- it's going to do new things for us the same way RSS did new things for us 22 years ago. Now it can be fun when there are more FeedLand instances out there. It'd be more fun if they were products like Overcast or Pocket Casts. Sometimes companies like Apple or Microsoft show up in these little projects, it has happened (Apple supported XML-RPC, for example. Microsoft supported Frontier in MSIE on the Mac.).

Last week when I announced Micro.blog Studio — our new subscription plan with improved video hosting including up to 20-minute videos — I also mentioned we would be adding more features for podcasting. Today we have the first of those new features. Exclusively for Micro...

This has been one of my favorite events for the past two years, and after a rough 2025, this is a great way to cap off the year.  Even better, Tantek has already suggested a session on card catalogs that’s right up my alley: https://indieweb.org/2025/SD#Session_ideas. 

BTW, one of the areas of breakage is in our handling of source:markdown. What changed? There are now feeds I didn't create (ie "in the wild") that have source:markdown elements. This bug is 100% my doing. The feeds are fine. These are the kinds of bugs you like to find, and fix.

📕 Finished reading Art & Fear by David Bayles, Ted Orland ISBN: 9780961454739

I'm looking into the problem in feedlanddatabase I mentioned yesterday. I bet it'll turn out there are a bunch of issues that have been there for a long time, but don't show up in the user interface of the product. I'm still developing good techniques for debugging Node.js server apps. Recently, I've developed new tools that make these bugs show themselves, like socketdemo. I added some new capabilities to it in the JavaScript console that make the updates visible. If you open the console in the debugger while it's running you'll see what I'm talking about, screen shot. Sometimes to debug a problem that doesn't have a UI you have to give it a UI.

Wow, Eugen Rochko stepping down as Mastodon CEO. Congrats to him on all the success in helping the open web move forward! This part also resonated with me:

You are to be compared with tech billionaires, with their immense wealth and layered support systems, but with none of the money or resources.

I find Brian Eno to be a fascinating chap. His music isn’t my cup of tea, but I really enjoy hearing his thoughts on art, creativity, and culture. I’ve always loved this short piece he wrote about singing with other people. I’ve passed that link onto multiple people who hav...

Front page of the BBC right now.

The first section is on the rules of alphabetization and indexing to standardize the space of ordering cards for both people’s names and company names. The second section covers some history on basic filing techniques and then goes into alphabetic, geographic, numeric, and subject indexing methods. The final sections cover the L.B Automatic (Library Bureau), … Continue reading

Watched: Frankenstein. I liked this more than I was expecting. Some visually great scenes… Wish I had seen it in the theater instead of Netflix. 🍿