Eisenhower State Park near my campsite this morning. I had so much fun last night for the Honda Element meetup! Lots of cool cars, all different.

Posted a new Core Intuition. This week we talk about trademarks… with Micro.blog, not WordPress. When to call a lawyer and other decisions of running a small business.

Traveling today, but carved out a nice morning in Dallas to fix and deploy several bugs. Loving this weather too.

Great post from Cory Doctorow on using RSS:

Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.

It’s weird that we still have to tell people about RSS in 2024, but that’s just how it is.

I ported another Hugo theme over to Micro.blog. It’s called Soho, based on the Hyde theme. Just needed a little adapting for microblog posts. Available for previewing in the plug-in directory.

I’m less than a week into using Arc on the Mac, and already I’m so used to it that when I hop into Safari, everything is a little off.

The new color Kindle looks really nice. I don’t read comics on the Kindle or make highlights much, so the only advantage for color would be book covers… Almost worth it. I bet those look great.

I missed the beginning of the Texas debate but from what I saw in the second half, Colin Allred did really well. Ted Cruz is so obnoxious. Always a tough race here, though. 🇺🇸

I recorded a quick video demo of the new theme preview in Micro.blog. This is such an obvious feature but it was sort of tricky to do before because of how Micro.blog is architected with static-site generation. Working pretty well so far!

Good glass-half-full analysis from Jason Snell about the new iPad mini with A17 Pro:

…this model feels more like a holding action that gets the iPad mini onto Apple Intelligence… while also using up some amount of chip excess. If I had to predict when we’ll see a next-next-generation iPad mini, I think I’d guess that it will probably be sooner than three years from now.

Things have accelerated since my post about Automattic and WP Engine a couple weeks ago. I’m writing this follow-up post not to pick sides, but because it feels right to blog about something this significant happening in the website hosting world. Banning WP Engine from Word...

A few more notes about the new theme preview feature at the help site.

New iPad Mini with the A17 Pro and AI looks good. At first I was surprised by the $500 price, thought for sure the previous model was less expensive, but no. I’m still enjoying the iPhone Pro Max as a mini mini iPad, but I’m already used to the iPhone size, so it no longer feels very big.

New way to preview themes, from the news blog:

Added new Preview button for themes in the plug-in directory. This will create a special preview version of your blog to try out the theme. Also improved the tab bar and navigation around plug-ins.

Micro.blog News https://news.micro.blog/2024/10/15/added-new-preview.html

I’m going to try to record a video demo of this later. It’s a big change.

Working with the Stripe API this morning, trying to make things a little better. It hurts to look at the dashboard and see all the failed payments. MRR is so much higher than actual revenue. 💔

Jeremy Keith built a static archive of his site The Session:

I wanted to reduce the dependencies on each page to as close to zero as I could. All the CSS is embedded in the the page. Likewise with most of the JavaScript (you’ll still need an internet connection to get audio playback and dynamic maps). This keeps the individual pages nice and self-contained. That means they can be shared around (as an email attachment, for example).

Not everyone can code something like this, so more web platforms should have this as a built-in feature. Micro.blog has multiple exports with just plain HTML.

Om Malik:

Pure blogging is “blogging” because you have something to say. To me, that is a pure blogger. Any other explanation of blogging “is just the traditional idea of media,” meant for an audience and for reach.

Jamie Zawinski on the 30-year anniversary of the Netscape 0.9 release:

According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the “What’s Cool” button in the toolbar.

Tuned in to the SpaceX livestream in time to see the Starship splashdown. Watched the recap of catching the booster too. Incredible. Looks like something that might be an AI-generated video, but it’s real. 🚀

Bennu Coffee might be too serious about their wi-fi passwords. ☕️

It’s time for another update in my Honda Element blog post series. After my last road trip, I decided to scrap the rooftop box. Even though the extra storage was great, I was suspicious it was dragging too much on the highway and killing my gas milage. In its place I’ve moun...

The Internet Archive is still down after an attack. A backup of the web is too important to only have one copy of. This is why we do so much archiving inside Micro.blog (for Premium). Everything you link to in a blog post is archived, with images and CSS. Helps distribute the work just a little.

Considering a radical redesign of the Micro.blog home page. The current design by @vincent has served us well for nearly two years now. Maybe time to shake things up.

Now that we’ve got Threads cross-posting for everyone, it was time to clean up a few related things. Today I added some better styling for showing categories and cross-post services. Plus, you can finally edit the cross-posting for a draft!

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has written a long essay about powerful AI. I haven’t even finished reading it and it has already blown my mind a few times over: To summarize the above, my basic prediction is that AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the pro...

When we recorded the latest Core Int, I hadn’t yet watched Money Electric on HBO. Just watched it tonight and it was excellent. I still have mixed feelings about digging up Satoshi’s identity, but it was very convincing.

We were late with the last episode of Core Int, so it’s basically two episodes this week. On the new show today, we talk about Daniel’s latest updates to Black Ink, version numbers, doing things the right way, tracking down Bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto, and AI energy use.

I’ve decided to give Arc for Mac a real shot, going all-in as my default browser. I usually use Safari and have no complaints with it. Nice to see Arc trying some new things, though. Also liked Chris Messina’s post about where Arc 2.0 might be going.

As soon as Threads released their early documentation for the Threads API months ago, we dropped everything we were doing and prototyped it in Micro.blog. We had a slow road to getting approved by Meta, but I’m happy to announce that automatic cross-posting from your blog to...

NPR has reviewed internal documents from TikTok:

For the first time, internal TikTok communications have been made public that show a company unconcerned with the harms the app poses for American teenagers. This is despite its own research validating many child safety concerns.

We’ve known for a long time that the addictive nature of the infinite timeline pioneered by TikTok was causing problems for teenagers. But this is a whole new thing:

One internal report that analyzed TikTok’s main video feed saw “a high volume of … not attractive subjects” were filling everyone’s app. In response, Kentucky investigators found that TikTok retooled its algorithm to amplify users the company viewed as beautiful.

Shut it down. ByteDance has until January to divest the app and I have no sympathy for a delay. It needs new leadership.