Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
Monday session
Monday session
Just heard an ad on WNYC-FM saying we should share news with them. That's a milestone. First time I've ever heard NPR say our purpose was anything other than giving them money. They could go even further -- support blogs and podcasts that cover the NYC area.
Great post today by Ben Thompson on the changes coming in the future, even as AI replaces some jobs:
All of that could very well be replaced by AI, but the point is that the history of humans is the continual creation of new jobs to be done — jobs that couldn’t have been conceived of before they were obvious, and which pay dramatically more than whatever baseline existed before technological change.
There will always be something to do. And humans will always seek out art and writing and anything crafted by humans, because we feel a connection with it.
John Voorhees revived his old Objective-C app with Claude Code and came away floored:
What I see is the foundation of a fundamental shift in the economics of building and maintaining apps. […] Will new opportunities emerge for indie developers to serve even narrower user segments as the time and effort to build new utility apps drops?
Yes. Small developers (especially generalists) have a new competitive advantage because they have all the capability of larger teams and none of the bureaucracy.
Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed
• Manuel Moreale
Yearly reminder to use RSS
The year is 2026, and RSS is still, by far, the best way to keep up with sites on the web.
If you already know what RSS is but you’re not currently using it, consider this a reminder for you to dust off that RSS reader of yours and put it back to use. And don’t listen to the...
Blogger of the Year
As with the previous podcast I asked Claude.ai to write the show notes. It chose to write it in the third person, which is great with me. It even filled in the first name of Jack Smith, when I couldn't remember it in the podcast, so in some ways the show notes are more infor...
Indie Microblogging epigraphs
My book has about 65 short chapters. Each chapter has a quote at the beginning. I thought it would be fun to gather all of these together in a blog post, so here they are. (They aren’t in book order.)
It’s not all the quotes in the book. There are hundreds of block quotes an...
Podcast: Blogger of the Year.
Philly Homebrew Website Club 5 Recap
Last week I started making one final editing pass on my book, trimming some sections and adding new text for Bluesky and other recent social web developments. I’ll publish all the changes soon. This will really be the last time I touch the text.
Turn a list into a web feed
I never was very good with PhotoShop and other bitmap image apps. Now I use ChatGPT, I just tell it what I want, like remove this bit and that bit, and it just freaking does it. This is how computers were meant to work. That's how I did the Peet's logo in the image in the previous post.
I've tried a lot of different kinds of Keurig pods, but the best -- with the richest taste is Peet's. Just ordered a whole bunch more to try out. And btw, when I looked up Peet's on Google I found that it had been bought by Dr Pepper for (sit down please) $18 billion. I hope you didn't pass out. I always thought of Peet's as a hometown favorite, the underdog, but my lord so much money. No wonder the coffee is so good.
I did a long video demo yesterday with a narrative about where WordLand is going. The audio quality sucks. And at the beginning I said I wasn't going to narrate, but I couldn't help myself. Turn the volume way up. WordLand has become a new kind of feed reader, it's totally building off FeedLand, I love the idea of apps building on other apps. It's exactly the kind of software we predicted, long before MCP's, with Frontier back in the 80s, 90s and 00s.
Software maintenance
In my last blog post, I noted:
With regard to sustainability [of Artemis], there are several considerations: infrastructure and its associated costs, the time required to maintain the software, responding to user requests and inquiries, and more.
This had me thinking about ho...
Why Artemis is invite-only
When someone goes to the Artemis sign up page, a message is presented asking users to ask me for an invite code. While Artemis has been public for almost a year now, the software is still invite-only. I occasionally share the invite code in blog posts, but, despite that, I st...
Designing an A-Z navigation web component
Artemis, the calm web reader I maintain, has an Authors page that lists all of the websites to which you are subscribed. The list is presented in alphabetical order, with a heading for each letter in the alphabet to aid in navigation. There is a search feature, too.
I follow...
Morning moonlight
When I first looked out the window this morning, I first noticed the faint pink colour on the horizon. The sun rises later in winter, so I can see more of the morning colours. Then, for a moment I had no words as I saw the moon – bright, full – in the sky, contrasting in grea...