I care a lot about personal domain names and blogging, of course, and that bleeds into how we approach URLs in Micro.blog. Trying to keep the simplicity of short, readable CDN URLs as we expand to support longer videos, which are more complicated to host.

Typepad is shutting down today. That deadline came up quickly. It’s the last day to export any content. Micro.blog and WordPress both support importing Typepad archives.

From the “this would be a good blog post” department, Kevin Rose has thoughts about ChatGPT Pulse that he posted on Twitter / X:

It’s an agent that continuously researches on your behalf, building on topics from your recent conversations. I’m really having a hard time wrapping my head around this paradigm, because it’s truly unlike anything we’ve seen before.

It’s like having a knowledge partner that follows you around, deepening your understanding of whatever you’re curious about.

I blogged over the weekend about Pulse. I’m a few more days in now and it’s still good.

Reading through this great 3-part blog post series from Stephanie Booth about rebooting the blogosphere:

from my “reading interface” (ie, the RSS reader), make it super easy to comment, share, react or link to a publication and start writing something new

A key point in Micro.blog from the beginning was to unify reading, blogging, and replying. A little-understood feature in Micro.blog is you can follow any blog, for example search “climbtothestars.org” to follow Stephanie’s blog. Need to keep improving that.

The New Yorker has a long profile of Tim Berners-Lee:

Somehow, the man responsible for all of this is a mild-mannered British Unitarian who loves model trains and folk music, and recently celebrated his seventieth birthday with a picnic on a Welsh mountain.

Wait, how did I not know that he loves model trains? 🚂 Looking forward to his memoir: This Is For Everyone. 📚

New book: Adventures in Animation. We were at Alamo recently and before the movie there were the usual shorts and old commercials. One struck me immediately and I thought: that looks like Richard Williams. It was.

Doing some more work with FFmpeg. It’s amazing how far video and audio tools have come. Ages ago when I was working on my app Wii Transfer, I had to jump through all sorts of hoops. Although that was in the Flash days before HTML 5 video.

Enjoying the WNBA playoffs. Today is Aces / Fever game 4. And the NBA preseason starts on Thursday! 🏀

I temporarily upgraded to ChatGPT Pro so I could try out Pulse. I know, Pro is expensive. While it’s a “business expense”, I don’t plan to keep the subscription. I’m trying to cut expenses and raise revenue, not the opposite! ChatGPT Pulse takes your AI chat history, optiona...

Asked Codex for a simple fix to something, and it went way off in the weeds and wrote its own Ruby and Python shell scripts to test its theory about the bug. Too thorough! Sometimes I really do just want the quick, possibly wrong answer that I can then tweak myself. 🤪

A contrast in two announcements today. This is why OpenAI is a different kind of company than Meta and should not be distracted with an ad-based business.

ChatGPT Pulse from OpenAI. Fidji Simo:

Pulse has already helped me discover new emerging treatments for my health condition, recommended new painting techniques for my art practice, surfaced great weekend events for my family, and more.

Vibes from Meta. Mark Zuckerberg:

Introducing Vibes – a feed of expressive AI-generated videos from artists and creators in the Meta AI app.

Started listening to the latest WP Tavern podcast earlier, with Dave Winer. Great so far. Dave’s fired up! I like it. As he blogged today about not waiting for the silos:

I’m not intimidated any more, I’m fed up and going ahead without them.

We can build a better web. Open, connected, portable.

A few days ago there was a discussion on the Social Web Incubator Community Group mailing list about fediverse handles. I sent an email to the list that I want to capture on my blog here. There is also a relevant issue in Mastodon’s repo, with comments going back to 2022. Wh...

Alex Heath writing on his new blog / newsletter site Sources that Fidji Simo is planning for ads in ChatGPT. I’m disappointed in this. It is going to be very difficult to do ads without compromising something.

Sources say that Simo has recently been meeting with potential candidates, including some of her former Facebook colleagues, to lead a new team that will be tasked with bringing ads to ChatGPT.

Matt Birchler has been in App Store review limbo, waiting for a week while his customers can’t upgrade to pay for his own app. So frustrating. Quick Subtitles looks like a cool app.

Over the summer we started including little book cover previews on the Micro.blog timeline when a book is mentioned. People loved this, and of course wanted it on their own blog too. That is starting to roll out now.

As an example, here’s what the books category page looks like on my own blog. If there is already a photo included in the post, it skips including the cover:

To accomplish this, Micro.blog inserts a bit of HTML into the published post, without modifying the source Markdown. The cover image can be further styled using the CSS class microblog_book. Because we also add some inline styles, you may need to add !important in your CSS to adjust margin and padding.

Happy reading! 📚

Final trailer for Wicked: For Good. After the first movie, I have complete faith in them to finish strong. Can’t wait to see what they do with No Good Deed and For Good. 🍿

I own about a dozen domain names in the form micro.tld. Most for things not announced yet, some that won’t ever happen. For better or worse, it’s the brand. Too many fun domains out there. 🤪

I’m always juggling a lot of different tasks at the same time, from small bug fixes to major new features. When I keep hearing about the same thing over and over, I’ll jot down notes for how it might work in Micro.blog, or I’ll run experiments, but sometimes it stays in the ...

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.

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.

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.

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

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”. 🤪

The next FediForum is coming up in a couple weeks. I just registered.

Join us for two half-days of discussions, demos, presentations, teaching, learning and plotting next steps in moving the open social web, the Fediverse and social media based on open protocols forward!

FediForum https://mastodon.social/@fediforum/115254204842427492

Starting to get tempted by the iPhone Air, but still committed to keeping my old phone for a while. I listened to two shows this week that were really good: MKBHD’s review and today’s Dithering.

I’m cracking up at this essay in The New Yorker:

A two-bedroom house with a front yard and a back yard? Psh. What do you need all that space for? Yoga? I’m from New York. I once paid two thousand dollars a month to live in the freight elevator of the former Filene’s Basement, in Union Square.

Om Malik really likes the iPhone Air:

I don’t tend to get smitten by something so quickly, but the “Air” is really up there. It’s so thin you think a strong gust of air could really blow it away from your hands. (These puns keep coming on their own. I swear I’m not trying.)

As a consumer, I never ask to reverse a credit card charge because I know how difficult it is for small businesses. If someone forgets they signed up for Micro.blog, misses the emails, a chargeback costs us $15. It makes it feel pointless for us to offer inexpensive $1 subscriptions. Frustrating.