This post on the news blog might seem minor, but it’s already making a huge difference. My brain had not come to terms with how bogged down the background timeline updating could get. I’m not even sure how larger platforms with millions of followers handle fan-out quickly.

Good recap at WP Tavern of State of the Word from Tokyo. Matt Mullenweg:

Some people might see 2024 as a year of distractions or attacks from bad actors in the community. But it was really a year of growth and focus where we were able to accelerate so many things that we’re doing.

Cosmic sticker. ☕️

We went to see War of the Rohirrim a few days ago. It has the feel of the battle scenes of Return of the King, but stretched to the entire 2-hour film. Worth seeing for LotR and anime fans. There is no chance to catch your breath, though. The quiet scenes are taken up with voice-over narration.

Acorn 8 is a really big update. Congrats Gus Mueller!

I usually post one photo at a time, so my last post was mostly an excuse to test the new layout for photo collections in the Micro.blog mobile app. Here’s a screenshot. Photos scroll horizontally, tap to go full-screen. This currently only works for collections, not any set of photos… yet.

A couple photos today as I was walking along Riverside.

It’s amazing how many things we worry about that don’t actually matter.

I recorded a new demo of Micro.blog photo collections on YouTube here. This video shows the Mac app’s interface for photo search and collections.

Worked on a few things over the weekend, including Mastodon posts and photos import. Micro.blog and Mastodon have had moving followers for a while, but you couldn’t actually move your Mastodon posts. Now you can import a Mastodon archive and Micro.blog will copy the posts and photos to your blog.

On the highway, passing small towns, I sometimes question why we pay so much to be in the city when there is nearly unlimited affordable property everywhere else. Of course the more central, the closer to things, the less time getting anywhere. We aren’t really buying a location. We are buying time.

While driving to Dallas yesterday, I had what I thought was a good idea. I almost pulled over to the side of the road to register a domain name. By the time I got there a few hours later, I had talked myself out of it. Realized it was the equivalent of Trader Joe’s buying 7-11 so they could run it.

I’ve been more curious about Claude lately because it has been getting so much new attention. Tried it for an HTML thing and it was great, love being able to iterate with Artifacts. But tried it again for something similar and it just error-ed out, over and over. ChatGPT still seems the most solid.

Scoot Inn. Nope.

For folks using the Sumo theme (and probably some other themes) who tried the new Micro.blog photo collections, click on Plug-ins and update to version 1.0.1 of the “Photo collections” plug-in. It’ll fix the layout issue.

Overheard: “I am not kidding about Zillow the musical!”

Downtown buildings disappearing into the mist.

Got derailed into posting something too negative to my blog. Nothing wrong with constructive complaining, but today was supposed to be about new software. Good, positive stuff. Just a note to myself to not lose the big picture next time.

NPR has a convenient list of tech executives who I will hate forever. I still can’t watch the news, saw this mostly by accident. 🇺🇸

Major new Micro.blog feature: photo collections! Check out the help page for screenshots and videos, or visit one of my own blog pages where I’m testing the feature to collect photos from parks. Micro.blog for Mac app has also been updated to version 3.4.

The Verge: “Apple and Google must prepare to stop distributing TikTok by January 19th, lawmakers warn.” Not a problem for Apple. They’ve been preparing their whole life to ban apps from the store for reasons not everyone agrees with. 🤪

Someone ran a red light in front of me today, probably a good second after the light changed. I was in no great hurry to get anywhere and waited, otherwise I would’ve been sideswiped. You never know when you’ll get a second lease on life.

Mammoth is shutting down:

Sadly, we’re no longer able to reliably update Mammoth or operate moth.social at the level we want. Therefore we will be removing Mammoth from sale on the App Store. By the end of the January, we will also shut down Moth.social along with our other project, sub.club.

When it launched a couple years ago, I thought they were on to a good idea: pairing a new Mastodon client with its own server to make signing up easy. They had some funding from Mozilla, and they pivoted to try Sub.club for monetization, but subscriber revenue is tough when most servers are free.

The social web is more async than we’re used to. This leads to conversations feeling a little broken or delayed as posts are copied between servers. My reply isn’t showing up… Is it because Micro.blog’s servers are overloaded, or is it Mastodon? Thinking about how better to report this status.

I was a little skeptical when I first saw Mozi pop up this week, but reading more about it today, I feel a lot better. Thoughtful design, some nice details. We do need more private-ish social spaces.

The day is already winding down, punting the release until tomorrow morning. Still have a couple housekeeping things to do. Writing release notes, blog posts, and maybe a new companion M.b plug-in. I’ve also extended the Micropub API and want to make sure that everything is properly documented.

Whenever I ship a new feature, I get the inevitable “why didn’t you add that other thing instead / fix that old problem first” question. It’s fair, but the truth is I’m constantly making minor improvements. Every day. A good product needs both bug fixes and new things to live.

Trying Sora. It’s extraordinary that this works at all, and it’s even faster than I was expecting. OpenAI seems to have built a whole UI system around this app too.

Cosmic’s building was originally the Texaco Depot, built around 1911. It’s the only surviving building from the old rail yard in Austin. 🚂

Wheee, just DoS-ed my own servers while working on client changes. Optimizing.