Saturday morning is a great time to draft a couple blog posts that won’t be published until later. I usually work a little every day, but the weekend should be quiet. Sometimes I wish I had the discipline to only announce new things on Tuesdays like Apple.
Worked on some iPad fixes and pushed a new TestFlight beta, then settled in to watch the Spurs. Stephon Castle with 30+ points, really showing what he can do. 🏀
Love this photo from Stephen Hackett of his notebooks. Also very smart to have digital copies. I’ve scanned some of my old journals in but not all of them. Really want to finish that task because it makes me very nervous to lose the journals.
This is cool: a new sidebar plug-in by Leon Mika for the Bayou theme.
Spots 7-10 for the NBA play-in are shaping up to be very interesting! Spurs look good. Blazers have won their last 9 of 10 games. Warriors and Mavs will both look a little different for the rest of the season. 🏀
I’m the guest on the latest Hanselminutes podcast! It was great talking to Scott. We covered a lot in just half an hour: blogging, domain names, social networks, the fediverse, POSSE, discovery, and the Micro.one launch.
So many nails and staples.
Micro.one and Micro.blog onboarding is not very good. And yet new people join every day and start blogging. Welcome! We’ll make it better. Thanks for jumping through the hoops to get here.
Inoreader adds support for Bluesky. This uses the API, not the RSS feeds, so there’s more flexibility in how they can integrate the content:
Bluesky content is displayed in our custom microblog layout, designed for platforms like Bluesky, Facebook, and Micro.blog that don’t follow the traditional headline + content format. It’s a clean, streamlined reading experience we’re sure you’ll love!
Manu Moreale blogs about how we label people, how we define them based on large groups instead of who they are:
The moment you started using these definitions, you lost me. Not because I’m offended by them, but because it saddens me to see the complete annihilation of individuality which is what makes us uniquely interesting. The moment you decide to simply label someone as anything, you prime yourself to be incapable of recognizing that there’s a lot more beneath the surface.
People are complicated. If we oversimplify, we risk only highlighting our differences instead of what connects us.
Old trains.
Lots of talk in the AI space about moats. Does any model have such an outsized advantage that it just can’t be beat, protecting the business from competition? But the best moat is a great product. OpenAI still has a technical and UX lead across their suite of products. Might not always be that way.
You know what was great last night? Spurs vs. Hawks, first game with De’Aaron Fox in the lineup. I missed some of it and rewatched the last 5 minutes on tape delay. 🏀
I wrote a script last night that can take any missing photos on a blog and restore them from the Wayback Machine. Feels like it should be tucked away somewhere as a Micro.blog feature, but not sure where yet.
Simple goals for today:
Tonight Adam Newbold posted about receiving a cease and desist. Some people assumed it was from me, but I had never heard of it. Micro.blog has not sent anyone a cease and desist. I have been focused on making Micro.blog better and hiring Sven to help answer customer questions, not hiring lawyers.
New home internet update: Verizon 5G router arrived and it’s… alright. 100 Mbps if the wind is blowing the right direction. 🤪 Trying to be patient until fiber is ready.
Today we’re rolling out two plug-in changes to Micro.blog. The first is that for new users, the Sumo theme by Matt Langford is now the default theme. This is a great theme that I think will serve new users better than our previous default theme Marfa. Sumo is better maintained and easier to customize.
Inspired by the good work that plug-in developers are doing, we’re also starting to sprinkle in donation buttons on your plug-ins list. The buttons can say either donate, tip, or buy me a coffee. Here’s an example:
I’ve been manually wiring these up, but later we’ll automate this so that Micro.blog can discover the donation link via a plug-in’s config or readme. If you’ve created a plug-in that accepts donations, let me know and I’ll update the listing.
Federico Viticci blogging about timeline apps:
My problem with timeline apps is that I struggle to understand their pitch as alternatives to browsing Mastodon and Bluesky (supported by both Tapestry and Reeder) when they don’t support key functionalities of those services such as posting, replying, reposting, or marking items as favorites.
There’s no reason these apps can’t also support creating new posts. Sort of like how the Micro.blog iOS app can post to WordPress. I don’t think apps need to support all social features, though.
Amazon’s Kindle Vella is shutting down with only a few weeks notice. I never read any stories but I thought it was an interesting idea — serialized novels delivered in short episodes like a chapter at a time, mostly fantasy and romance. Perhaps should’ve been more integrated with Kindle Unlimited.
Tapestry from the Iconfactory is out! Of course I love that it supports Micro.blog. And it makes me happy just seeing developers experiment with new ways to mix open social platforms together.
We’re a few days in to not having internet at the house, which means no YouTube TV, Max, Netflix, Prime, Disney+, Apple TV+, FanDuel Sports, and Hulu. Our over-the-air antenna reception looks amazing, though. Sort of want to cancel everything and start over with local TV.
Jason Snell wonders if AltStore should’ve poked the bear. He covers both sides well:
Is notarization a tool Apple can use to bypass all of Europe’s regulations of Apple whenever it feels like preventing users from running MacPaint on an iPad? Or is it something out of Apple’s hands?
Apple’s iOS “notarization” is a flawed approach, clearly at odds with the DMA. It’s appropriate for them to be called out until they fix this so that it matches macOS notarization, which requires no human review.
Finished reading: Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson. Not even sure what to say. Still letting the end of the first arc sink in. 📚
This interview with Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter on Decoder is excellent. Andy seems like the kind of person who will change things. I can’t believe he wasn’t on my radar even though we’ve linked to Bookshop in Micro.blog bookshelves for a few years.
Me complaining a year ago:
No, I don’t want to rate the app, or the Skype call, or the mechanic, or the quality of a support email, or a song, or my doctor’s appointment, or whether the web page answered my question… I don’t really want to rate anything ever again! If I actually have feedback, I know how to send it.
The prompts have only gotten worse since then. By trying to improve customer service, they’ve actually destroyed it.
A small, pointless Apple Intelligence chat completion failure as I’m chatting with Verizon support… It thinks I’m talking to myself? I know it’s a cheap shot to gripe about AI, but this is really basic stuff.
Trying to get internet at the new place. AT&T will only talk on the phone and they make everything complicated. Google Fiber is in the neighborhood but not on our street. Verizon was supposed to overnight a 5G router a few days ago, it hasn’t shipped. Trying to avoid cable if fiber is imminent.