I don’t usually work so much during the holidays. I don’t recommend it for others. But sometimes I get a sense that there is an opportunity now and I can’t let it slip away. January is going to be full of distractions I haven’t blogged about yet: moving to a new house, if everything goes well. 🎄

Rolling out a few improvements today, including some tweaks to categories. One small change that I like is showing recent blog posts for a category underneath it when editing. Just shows the truncated preview of each post.

Part of a large abandoned lot on 51st that rumor has it will eventually be a new Whole Foods.

Great stop by the Longhorns. I’m enjoying this game. It’s had everything and there’s still some time left. 🏈

Micro.blog folks, I’m planning to move the Categories link out of the web sidebar and put it in the header that’s used when managing posts. Cleans up the sidebar a little and I don’t think it’s clicked on that often. If this messes up anyone’s workflow, let me know. Screenshot preview:

This “154 versions” link is hilarious to me. I wrote my last post in Micro.blog for Mac and whenever you hit ⌘S it saves another version to the server just in case you need to revert. Other obsessive ⌘S people may be able to relate.

I’ve been thinking about the WP Engine drama and whether I should take a side. Users move between Micro.blog and WordPress regularly. We’ve long had WordPress import and export, and even native posting directly to WordPress from the mobile app, plus connecting external WordP...

Previewing a tiny part of an upcoming blog post… When choosing a blog hosting platform, consider whether the company’s CEO even uses it themselves. Why would I use a product that the leadership doesn’t believe in? It would be like Steve Jobs introducing the iPod but he never listened to music.

Love what I’m seeing from the upcoming Mimi Uploader with support for Micro.blog photo collections. Nice work, Sam!

The rebuild of I-35 continues. This rubble is where Star Seeds Cafe used to be.

Started working on a blog post today and had to actually go do some research to make sure I was right. This is a benefit of occasional long-form writing. It’s a way to refine how you feel about something, learning a bunch in the process.

Everyone thinks they can build their own blogging engine. And they’re right! It’s easy! But there’s a reason why there are only a few very successful platforms and tools. Micro.blog is built on top of Hugo so we have a portable format and the performance of static servers. It’s robust and proven.

This morning I got three green lights in a row that are never all green, then I parallel parked perfectly in a tight space, so pretty sure everything today is going to be amazing.

Skimming Steve Troughton-Smith’s thread and commentary on the EU’s requirements for Apple. Even though I’ve been frustrated by the App Store and calling for sideloading longer than most developers, I’m feeling burned out on the drama. Huge computing platforms need to be more open. We’ll get there.

Added the snow falling plug-in to micro.christmas. ❄️

New plug-in! Snow fall adds falling snow to your blog. Check it out on manton.org. Looks best in dark mode or with a darker default blog background. One-click install for Micro.blog folks. ❄️

Right before bed last night, I had an insight for how to optimize the Micro.blog timeline for a certain segment of follower sizes. I wrote it down and then crashed. Would’ve been lost otherwise, probably for days until I hit the same part of the codebase again.

We just posted episode 622 of Core Intuition. We talk about my work on the recent photo collections in Micro.blog (before I shipped it), Daniel using Swift concurrency, and our general optimism about AI for programming.

The grass is always greener on the other side. Pretty often I see Micro.blog people explore other blogging platforms, or just post more to Mastodon, but it almost always leads to blogging less often. This is both discouraging and also sort of a testament that the Micro.blog way works.

I may have Osborne effect-ed myself a little with the blog post teasing Micro.one. Current customers: do not worry. The first phase of the plan for Micro.one is limited. If you’re already subscribed to Micro.blog, you’re in the right place.

Don’t miss the sneak peek screenshot link in Sam Grover’s update post about Mimi Uploader. I think photo collections could be a really good fit for the app.

I’ve been rolling this idea around in my head for a couple years, in various forms, and think I’m finally ready to do something with it. Updated placeholder website: micro.one

Mike McCue from Flipboard announcing Surf:

Built from the ground up on ActivityPub, AT Proto and RSS, you can create and surf amazing custom feeds that organize people, videos, articles, images and podcasts around the things you care about.

I don’t have access to the beta yet, so not entirely sure what it is, but sounds promising! Maybe a little like Flipboard merged with Tapestry.

The weather’s changing. Rain and wind, leaves falling down at Cherrywood. ☕️

Didn’t expect how much I’d like the new full-screen photos view that is built into the Micro.blog photo collections plug-in. To see it in action, scroll through my blog home page and click on a photo.

We had tickets to the Peter Pan musical last week and somehow with work and looking for a house we forgot to go. Calendars are hard. Very disappointed, both to miss the musical and also because I’m still not at the point in my life where I can just throw away money for no reason.

I sort of want to increase the border radius of every button by 1px every few days until they are perfectly rounded and see if anyone notices.

Very interested that Delta is trying Apple’s external link entitlement. There are so many gotchas, but hopefully it works for them. From MacStories:

After tapping through a full-screen warning from Apple that you’re about to embark on a dangerous adventure to the World Wide Web…

🙂

This sounds great! A New Social: “We believe in an open social web centered around people, not platforms. We build bridges, not walls.” The non-profit organization will be the new home for Bridgy Fed.

I like Apple Intelligence notification summaries enough to keep them enabled. They’re not perfect. I think the summaries get into trouble when they attempt to distill several notifications into a list of just a few words each.