FeedCity

Thursday session

Recently I was drafting a post and had to catch myself as I almost inserted a jab at someone else, a callback to something from a while ago that no longer matters. That kind of post is not me. I sometimes brainstorm reactionary posts that I wish I could write, but always think better of it, staying away from extremes.

I think I’ve been listening to the pessimists too much. It’s true that some things are bad, and I’ve blogged about many of them, but the only way out is hope. Otherwise we get stuck, caught in a spiral of outrage, never moving forward.

When I quit Twitter in 2012, I was outspoken in my worry about developer-hostile, centralized platforms. I paired the dissent with advocacy for open formats and eventually built my own social network. Complaints should lead to progress, not paralysis.

Hair. A nice beard. Savings. Debt. A house. Subscriptions to video streaming services. A piece of forest. Kids. A wife. A husband. Hands without scars. Arms without scars. Legs without scars. A face without scars. A monthly salary. Paid vacations. Happiness. Things I’m proud of. A normal dog. Social media profiles. Investments. Plans for the future. Plans for the present. Plans for the past. A camera. Concrete goals. Wisdom. Ai bots. Ai companions. Ai slaves. Fancy clothes. Colognes. Fame (although I am quite hungry). Faith. Horses in the back. 99 problems. Enlightenment. A daily routine. Willingness to write long posts.

---

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

There’s a new proposed lexicon for Markdown-based content in AT Proto. I could support this. The problem is that currently there’s no good way to have multiple formats, and I think HTML is still the richest, most complete way to represent blog posts.

Ceiling skylight.

Jo and I are trading blog post titles. The title Jo chose for me is “A perfect day.” What would my perfect day look like? Reflecting on this question, I started to think about the days that have brought me the most joy in the past. I realised that the days that stick out in ...

I am trading blog post titles with Joe. He gave me a few suggestions for what to write about. I chose the title “Scotland’s brightness levels”. Place is a recurring theme when I am writing. Where am I? What do I see? What I write about Nature is what I see here in Scotland. ...

President Obama going to the NBA All-Star game made the freaking All-Star game worth something. Perfect place for him to show up.

It's interesting to see the ATProto solution to a problem we solved in RSS-land a few years ago, how to include Markdown along with other source formats (HTML, OPML).

Happy Birthday, ArtLungBlog. Here’s the contents of my first post, which did not have a title. The integer value for the post is a rather short 2448604. It’s archived here, and it says: It occurs to me that this Blogger stuff may be dull. Still, the prospect of keeping a journal is kind of a...

Hannah Aubry writes on the Mastodon blog about community initiatives including experiments to change how new users sign up:

At first, we’re planning to recommend the closest geographic server in the correct language based on data surfaced by the app store, so it will only be available initially on the Android and iOS apps. We may also experiment with other logic for recommending a server, including random distribution.

I don’t believe this will help. In fact, it might make users more confused. My proposal remains to move away from email-like user handles.

Hearing from multiple people now (including my son!) who have gone back to buying music. Spotify burnout. I still have a huge collection of iTunes purchases and ripped CDs, just sitting there.

A thoughtful approach from Sam:

1. Use AI only for tasks you already know how to do, on occasions when the time that would be spent completing the task can be better spent on other problems.
2. When using AI, provide the chosen tool with something you’ve made as an input along with a specific prompt.
3. Always comprehensively review the output from an AI tool for quality.

adactio.com/links/22412

Think you know about styling lists with CSS? Think again!

This is just a taste of the kind of in-depth knowledge that Rich will be beaming directly into our brains at Web Day Out…

adactio.com/links/22411

When I found out Current was going to ship this week, I postponed making a video preview of my own RSS reader because it would feel like I was interfering with Current’s release. Now the tables have turned. Current is so popular that I just need to stay out of its way or I’ll get overshadowed. 🤪

Last year I was often expecting unexpected calls, from doctors and nurses, so I turned off “silence unknown callers”. I’ve now officially had enough of the spam interruptions. Enabled it again. ☎️

"The problem is, if you’re optimizing a product that fundamentally isn’t working for how people get news in 2026, all you’re really doing is riding that buggy off of a cliff with style."

“Do I want this thought to exist publicly beyond my own notebook?” If the answer is yes, publish it on your site. Everything else is distribution. #indienews #indieweb