IndieWeb
Nick Heer blogging about the Ghost 6.0 release:
If Ghost added MarsEdit support, I would be awful tempted to switch from WordPress.
Probably not going to happen. People have asked for it. Ghost has oddly never cared about open APIs until recently, with ActivityPub, and even that was years after everyone else added support for it.
If you want the most support for lots of APIs and publishing from different apps, there are only two suitable platforms: WordPress and Micro.blog.
This is a helpful table from Molly White, breaking down the costs for hosting a newsletter with Ghost, Substack, and other popular platforms. I had missed in the initial Ghost 6.0 announcement that in addition to the price increase, paid newsletters required at a minimum the $29/month plan.
Shipped a couple new things this morning: Micro.blog for iOS bug fixes, and a slight redesign to how the automatic accessibility description works when adding a photo on the web. Much smoother workflow.
Learned on Hard Fork’s interview with Matthew Prince that Cloudflare may take a 20-30% cut when creating their marketplace between websites and AI crawlers. This supports the concerns I raised in a blog post last month.
Dave Rupert blogs about the difference between Alamo Drafthouse and all other movie theaters:
The best place to see movies in Austin is at the Alamo Drafthouse. If you’ve never been to an Alamo, I’m sorry. It’s a movie theater for people who love movies by people who love movies.
I think the last time we went to a non-Alamo was for Oppenheimer in IMAX. Great screen, great movie. Not a good theater experience.
Neat story about Patrick Schlott, an engineer who repurposed old pay phones for people to make calls where cell coverage is poor:
Schlott has taken old pay phones, modified them to make free calls, and set them up in three different towns across the county. He buys the phones secondhand from sites like eBay and Craigslist and restores them in his home workshop.
I’d love to hear more about the technical bits behind this.
Parker Ortolani blogs about the new Ollama app that provides a chat window for the first time, making local models easy to use:
Anyone that has used the official ChatGPT Mac app will feel right at home, but they will quickly notice that the model names are quite different. The app makes it easy to install various versions of Gemma 3, Deepseek R1, and Qwen 3. Instead of having to use a command line for installation, you can simply type a prompt, select a model, and it will download it for you.
Rumors point to OpenAI shipping something this week. I’m going to guess the open weights model, with GPT-5 a little further off, but who knows. Say what you want about their leadership, but that company knows how to ship.
Ghost 6.0 has been released, adding ActivityPub. Big update. It’s interesting how Ghost now talks about Bluesky compatibility, which works via Bridgy Fed, but they don’t mention Bridgy Fed. This feels slightly wrong to me since I’ve spent so much time working on AT Protocol.
Finished reading: Empire of Storms by Sarah J. Maas. Apparently the thing to do is read this and the next book at the same time, but I have other things to read so just took this one straight through. Easily the best in the series so far, seemed much better structured. 📚
Really happy with the response to our new discount to make Micro.blog free for teachers and nurses. We’ve had some people take us up on the offer already.
Mark Gurman reports on a new team inside Apple developing a search engine and world knowledge model:
While still in early stages, the team is building what it calls an “answer engine” — a system capable of crawling the web to respond to general-knowledge questions. A standalone app is currently under exploration, alongside new back-end infrastructure meant to power search capabilities in future versions of Siri, Spotlight and Safari.
Catching up on some posts from FediCon, which was held over the last couple of days in Vancouver. @bmann.ca has his talk slides and notes online.
Reminder that we are improving things with Micro.blog all the time. You can see recent changes on news.micro.blog. If there’s a bug that needs attention, send us an email. The best way for us to prioritize what to work on is what we hear about.
Created a new plug-in “Photos with months” that adds some date grouping to the default Photos page. May need additional changes, because it will conflict with some other photos page plug-ins. You can see it on my photos page.
Seems like we got some breaking news out of Bloomberg’s reporting on the Apple internal meeting. Apple had tried to update Siri with both the existing commands plus LLM-based functionality as a hybrid system, but it didn’t work well. The new Siri will be unified under a single new architecture.
The new Naked Gun is hilarious. So many gags. Very much in the same spirit as the originals. 🍿
Released a new version of the Mac app this morning, fixing several problems with the accessibility description window. I like updating the ridiculously long help page because I think the release notes show a commitment to steady improvements going back 8 years. Maybe at year 10 it’ll be really good.
That Epic vs. Google decision yesterday seems big. Google Play may become more open even than the EU’s App Store. Meanwhile, Apple continues to print money with a record quarter.
Laptop stickers.
OpenAI announcing a new data center in Norway:
The facility will run entirely on renewable power and is expected to incorporate closed-loop, direct-to-chip liquid cooling to ensure maximum cooling efficiency. Additionally, excess heat from the GPU systems will be made available to support low-carbon enterprises in the region.
I’d still like to know how much of Abilene’s data center will run on solar and wind. I assume a percentage, but not “entirely” like in Norway or they would’ve said so.
Looks like the time I spent integrating with ID.me’s API was wasted. Micro.blog is too small to get approved for production access. The open web is so ingrained in me that I see an OAuth API and assume I’ll be able to use it in some form.
Nick Heer: “The Cook era is now as long as the Jobs renaissance era.”
Now that my laptop is completely full of stickers, moving on to pins on my bag. Starting with just Mickey.
Just read my credit card number, expiration, and 3-digit code to someone over the telephone in a crowded coffee shop. YOLO! 🤪
