FeedCity

Sometimes you just need a little color. Stairwell at Central Market.

There is a place for the WordPress block editor, or Medium, or Squarespace, or any number of very nice editors. But if you want to write natively for the web, those will never be quite right.

As I improve my own web text editor, I’m reflecting on what it felt like when the first WYSIWYG editors hit the market. PageMill launched and we said, “Amazing, this is what web editing should be.” But it turns out rich text just gets in the way. Markdown + limited HTML when needed is the way to go.

I often only finally get into a book at the end of a loan in Libby, hopelessly nowhere near finished with it. Wish there was a “just give me one extra day” button. For Kindle, turning off wifi works, but no good option for audiobooks.

Drove by a couple fire trucks protecting the shoulder for a car and a Cybertruck stopped on the side of the road. Probably a fender bender, didn’t look serious. But… two fire trucks? Maybe drama follows all Cybertrucks.

There’s a good analysis in Last Week in Fediverse about Twitter X, Bluesky, and Mastodon. Just a small part:

…if the goal is to build ActivityPub into the default protocol for the social web, it is worth paying attention to what is happening right now in the Brazilian ATmosphere.

Manuel Moreale blogs about a more intentional, personal web:

I’m talking about liberating yourself from all sorts of algorithmic grouping and filtering and getting back to experiencing and using the web in a much more deliberate and mindful way.

I think it’s okay that “social web” or IndieWeb mean slightly different things to different people. All of those definitions still share in common a goal of openness and standards, not silos.

Just sad hearing about the news of 6 more hostages dead in Gaza. The closer we get to 1 year since the attack by Hamas, the more heartbreaking that there’s no deal.

Bluesky has added 1 million users in the past few days, largely from the Twitter X in Brazil fallout. Congrats to the team. Really impressive to keep servers humming along.

Ollie inspecting a new package, the SolarSaga 100 Prime. This is going to go on my car.

Just posted a new episode of Core Int: Reinventing the 90s. We use two new software releases (the Overcast rewrite and my own new Micro.blog text editor) to talk about how customers react to software changes and bugs. Also, is SwiftUI now the best way to start Mac apps? Spoiler: not sure.

Ghost in their weekly update, joking about likes:

Descartes famously said “I think, therefore I am” — but it wasn’t until several years later when we started getting likes on Instagram that we collectively came to the realization that the meaning of life, in fact, revolves around a consistent stream of dopamine hits from the internet.

Micro.blog doesn’t have likes and for better or worse, I’m standing by that decision.

Ramping up the search for our next home. For old neighborhoods, love doing a little background research on who developed the neighborhood. Doesn’t actually matter, but it’s fun to discover where it came from… Sometimes land originally granted by the Republic of Texas to veterans and settlers.

This story and art from Christine Mi for The Washington Post makes me want to book a train trip again. I’ve done Austin to Los Angeles, Austin to Chicago… So much more to see.

Still a few months away, but the Wind and Truth cover reveal makes the book feel like it’s even closer. Michael Whelan has had an incredible career. Love this “semi-retired” bit about the artist:

Fifteen years ago, Whelan was semi-retired and considering a return to science fiction when he received the manuscript for The Way of Kings.

An update on Strata for Android. Getting closer to a release. We had a rejection, resubmitted. Pretty confident it’ll be approved and out today or early next week.

Tantek Çelik blogged about IndieWebCamp Portland:

We wrapped up with our usual Create Day Demos session, live streamed for remote attendees to see as well. Lots of great demos of things people built, designed, removed, cleaned-up, documented, and blogged! Everyone still at the camp showed something on their personal site!

I miss IndieWebCamp. Don’t think I’ve attended one since we hosted in Austin a couple weeks before COVID hit.

Setting up some more customer support email filters. It’s gotten to where I have so much spam waiting for me, I hate to check support email, which is really bad for everyone. 🙁

I have a few upcoming camping reservations, part of my quest to visit all 88 state parks in Texas. Got this email the other day about one of the reservations:

Select sites at Abilene State Park are closed due to hazardous trees.

Hazardous trees! Luckily the park changed their mind and will allow camping anyway. I’m more amused by the notice than worried, but still gonna try to avoid camping underneath any branches that look ready to fall.

From The Wall Street Journal: Apple, Nvidia Are in Talks to Invest in OpenAI. This makes sense to me. Apple is obviously developing their own AI models, but I don’t think they care about AI as much as OpenAI, Anthropic, and others who live and breathe it. See more commentary from M.G. Siegler.

There are some interesting things going on with the new Patreon-like Sub Club for the fediverse. Presumably it can send members-only posts via ActivityPub because it knows which followers are paid subscribers. I’m puzzled by the payment inside third-party apps, though… I wonder how that works.

I like this post from Marty McGuire about the IndieWeb and how the indieweb.org wiki can sometimes be overwhelming for new users:

That’s because indieweb.org is not a presciption or a cookbook or an exercise plan. It doesn’t tell you how to “be IndieWeb”. It’s a collective memory of experiments, some successful and some not, from a group of experimenters that has changed greatly over time.

Also some nice words for Micro.blog in there. The wiki is an incredible resource, but just start with your own web site and don’t worry about the rest unless you want to dig deeper.

I joked yesterday that enabling the AI features in Micro.blog for everyone might bankrupt me. I didn’t seriously think that it would be out of control, but API usage is sometimes hard to predict, and bills usually only trend in one direction: up. Now with 24 hours usage, seems totally fine.

Fountain at Cosmic on 4th. I should go here more often. ☕️

You get an AI! You get an AI! Starting to enable automatic photo keywords and search for all paid customers, no longer requiring Micro.blog Premium. Check out the video on YouTube here, recorded a few months ago. Now available to everyone. (I reserve the right to tweak this if it bankrupts me.)

Tumblr’s getting started on porting the backend to WordPress:

We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction. We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside.

I hope they blog about the process… Should be interesting.

Years ago, mostly by accident, I started using green for block quotes in Markdown. Screenshot below. It’s weird because I never use green in actual published blog themes or Micro.blog on the web. I did a quick survey of other Markdown apps for inspiration and can’t really find a better style.

I was hoping the new iPhone Pro would have 12 GB of RAM. Sticking with 8 GB is enough for small AI models, but doesn’t seem as future-proof as the new Google Pixel at 16 GB. Apples to oranges? Dunno, that’s a really big difference.

Wow, has it really been a full year since the last Epilogue release for Android? Today I’ve gathered up all the recent changes and shipped them on Android, available at Google Play here. Screenshots still out of date, but it’s got the new icon and mostly the same features as iOS.

Nice write-up from Chris Enns on using Micro.blog for hosting short podcasts and adding stats with OP3.