FeedCity

Git scraping is a clever technique from Simon Willison to track changes to web pages by adding them to a repository. He’s using this to crawl the DOGE site.

Fiddling with improved Open Graph support for hosted blogs. I’ve never liked how most social platforms use Open Graph previews. Sometimes they’re great, sometimes they’re redundant, and sometimes they’re plastered over a timeline like ads. But bloggers need more control over this.

Almost whenever I run an alter table in MySQL, I think back to a conversation with Marco Arment at SXSW 15 years ago, about how Tumblr’s database was so big it was faster to add new tables instead of changing existing columns or indexes. MySQL has improved a lot since then.

Patrick Rhone:

We are not on the verge of a constitutional crisis, we are in the aftermath of one.

Things are indeed dire. I’m focusing on the only thing I know how to contribute: helping people post on the web and discouraging the spread of misinformation, which I think is largely to blame for getting us here. To those on the front lines for democracy, please remember to be better than the other side. Everything we do must be grounded in truth and compassion.

Federico Viticci on the products after the Vision Pro: I may be stating the obvious here, but I fundamentally believe that headsets are a dead end and glasses are the ultimate form factor we should be striving for. […] There’s a real possibility we may have Apple glasses (a...

This is a variation on something I’ve mentioned in passing before. I like running draft blog posts through AI. Even for very short posts, sometimes I’ll paste the text into ChatGPT and ask it to tell me what the post means. If AI can “understand” it, humans probably can too....

Letting go of Advanced Data Protection in the UK seems a reasonable compromise from Apple. If I’m going to nitpick anything in their statement:

Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end encryption is more urgent than ever before.

Urgent? Important, yes, but urgent is something that needs immediate attention, and I hardly think encrypted cloud backups qualify. Apple’s statement doesn’t actually matter but the word choice stood out to me.

Submitted another Micro.blog iOS bug fix update off to Apple for review. I’ve gotten much more consistent about keeping TestFlight betas up to date too. I think it’s making a difference.

Ben Werdmuller on the latest People & Blogs:

My site is my online identity; I write about things that I find interesting. That’s all I want it to be. It’s just me.

Ben’s blog has become one of my favorites. Lately a mix of tech, politics, fediverse, and the IndieWeb.

Our TV screen going out that I blogged about? It’s fixed, replaced some board or another for $200 + $40 diagnostic fee. I’m not sure the TV was worth much more than that, but when we bought another TV to replace it… it just wasn’t as good. Returned the new one. Happy, and less junk in the landfill.

This is perhaps a slightly contrarian take on the failure of Humane’s pin. Eventually I believe there will be a successful product like it. It will need to be simpler, though. No laser. Cheaper. Faster. I won’t judge the team too harshly for being so ambitious. They probably...

Stephen Colbert in last night’s Late Show monologue:

Do you want to know how messed up things are? The lightest story in the news is a plane crash.

Humor helps. See also: MapQuest’s brilliant rename the Gulf of Mexico website.

Nice update to the Bayou theme:

Included in this version is the option to define how many microposts and longform posts are shown on the homepage, change the categories for microposts and longform posts, set the site language (en, de, es, fi, fr, it, pt, ru), and change the date format.

The TikTok-ification of other platforms (Reels, Shorts) is optimizing for user engagement instead of usability. Good luck pausing, rewinding, or sharing one of these clips. At times it’s actually user-hostile.

Maybe I’ve been conditioned by seeing the GPT-4o name everywhere, but I don’t hate the iPhone 16e name. Weird lineup to still include the iPhone 15 without Apple Intelligence.

Matt Webb reflecting on 25 years of blogging. On the very early days of blogging:

So I would post 4 or 6 times a day, like most people. Just a line with a shower thought, or a link and a comment, or a response to someone else

I’ve also found that before Twitter, blogs were often microblogs.

This life in weeks page by Gina Trapani is amazing.

Today we updated another part of Micro.blog to support blog post summaries. When automatically cross-posting to Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and LinkedIn, the summary will now be included for long-form posts with a title. It will look something like this after being copied to...

Mastodon has shared their plan for quote posts. It is well-researched and thoughtful. Yet I have conflicting thoughts on it. I admire that the team is trying to think through the safety ramifications. I’ve long said we should not blindly copy features from the big silo platf...

Got some great feedback on Micro.blog’s new blog post summary (or excerpts) feature. Today the first round of improvements rolled out based on that feedback, including setting a summary when starting a new post on the web. Still to come later this week: support in cross-posting.

Micro Social 1.5 looks like a big update. Can’t wait to check this out when it hits the App Store:

A customisable Instagram-style photo timeline, making browsing and replying to photos more intuitive than ever. Plus, introduce a new way to engage with images using customisable photo reactions—tap the heart and leave a personal response.

Also books features and more. There will be a “Plus” one-time purchase to unlock new features.

Michael Tsai has collected some posts remembering Martin Pilkington. It is hard for me to even wrap my head around losing a member of the Mac developer community like this, far too soon. I spent a little time today reading through some of his old blog posts. Rest in peace.

Finished reading: The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods. Not all of it worked for me but I’ll read almost any book about books. Also some nice historical fiction-y bits weaved in. 📚

We also went to see the Oscar-nominated animated shorts at Alamo today. This year includes some really strange films. But all good in their own way. I’d vote for In the Shadow of the Cypress. 🍿

Flow was extraordinary. It’s like nothing else. 🍿

People who shoot on film (or who used to) will probably enjoy this video from Adrian about when he brought 100 rolls of film on a road trip.

NSHipster is back again with a bunch of tips for running AI models on a Mac with Ollama. Also this:

If you wait for Apple to deliver on its promises, you’re going to miss out on the most important technological shift in a generation.

There are so many new (sponsored) rules in the celebrity all-star game that I stepped away for a minute and there was a mascot playing on the court. Which honestly makes me just want to see a full game of only team mascots. 🏀

Nice single-page site from Pixelfed about social web technologies. Think about if more platforms supported everything on that page.

Wrote up some documentation for the first phase of our blog post “summary” feature rollout. Like a lot of things in Micro.blog, this is a foundation. Other things can be built on top of it.