I posted this to @news a week ago. Quoting it here as a reminder:

An early heads-up: we are planning a major server upgrade for October 1st, 10pm central time / 3pm GMT. While we hope to limit downtime, Micro.blog will be unavailable for a little while during the upgrade. Your blogs hosted on Micro.blog will remain online.

While we’ve had sporadic downtime this year, I don’t think we’ve had planned downtime in several years, and I don’t take it lightly. It’s a database upgrade and worth the time to do it right.

I think the new “finished” pane turned out well. This has been a much-needed improvement to Micro.blog. Because we fire off publishing and Hugo-ing in the background, it was irritating to keep an eye on the status and find the new blog post link.

House shopping during election season is great. There are so many political yard signs, you can tell a lot about what your future neighbors are like.

Last night’s SNL was great. Maya Rudolph, Andy Samberg, Dana Carvey, Jean Smart… That’s the way to start the 50th season. 📺

Really enjoyed seeing The Wild Robot. Beautiful. Glad I read the book first too… The movie follows the story closely but some characters, dialogue, and details were bound to change. 🍿

I ended up disabling Type to Siri. Kept accidentally triggering it with impatient double-taps on the tab bar.

Austin forever. New mural on 51st.

Molly White blogs about POSSE:

The next time a new social media site comes along, you can plug it in to your existing system. And the next time a social media site dies or becomes untenable, you just disconnect it. With this model, even when a platform goes under, you lose relatively little: your posts still remain live and under your control on your site, even if the copies of them on the disconnected website are abandoned or deleted.

Cherrywood Coffeehouse. ☕️

Thinking about what a modern AppleScript would look like powered by LLMs. The human language-like syntax of AppleScript was the right idea, but there were syntax quirks that made it frustrating. LLMs could fix that. Free idea! I’m tempted but it’s too far outside the scope of Micro.blog’s mission.

Rest in peace, Maggie Smith.

Sort of an all-Zuckerberg podcast week. Good interview with Mark on Decoder but can’t disagree more strongly with Mark’s vision of AI-generated content showing up in your feed. This is the terrible end-game of algorithmic timelines.

I’m still interested in Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, but maybe I’m not the market because I can barely tell the difference between the Wayfarer, Headliner, and Skyler styles. Also I buy new glasses about once every 10 years.

Tantek Çelik proposes a “CC-NT” license, for “no-training”: This seems like an obvious thing to me. If you can write a license that forbids “commercial use”, then you should be able to write a license that forbids use in “training models”, which respectful / well-written cr...

Pushed another TestFlight beta of Micro.blog with lots of little tweaks that had been bugging me. Still a few bugs in this version, plus the work of replacing the old text editor.

“Orion makes every other VR or AR device I have tried feel like a mistake — including the Apple Vision Pro.” — Ben Thompson, who interviews Meta’s CTO

Let’s start with this: Meta Connect was more interesting and fun than Apple’s iPhone event or WWDC keynote. Live demos are better. Even when Mark Zuckerberg was kind of goofy, or when he said “hell yes” and “live demos sometimes work”… Maybe it it wasn’t as polished, with de...

Mira Murati is leaving OpenAI. If things had gone differently after the board shakeup, she would’ve been the CEO and Sam Altman would be at Microsoft. But it didn’t appear that she had been sidelined either. She led the live OpenAI announcements for GPT-4o instead of Sam just a few months ago.

Just uploaded a new TestFlight beta with support for iOS 18 dark and tinted icons. Looks way better now for folks who’ve customized their home screen icons.

Automattic vs. WP Engine will have a chilling effect on WordPress hosting. When I decided to use Hugo in Micro.blog, I considered using WordPress under the hood instead. It would’ve brought significant benefits, but at the cost of bloat and web hosting monoculture. Glad to have avoided this drama.

Effectively no one knows how good Micro.blog is for blogging. I alternate between being bummed out by this and optimistic that there is so much room for growth. Might take a few more years for overnight success to hit.

Sarah Perez reporting on the financial backing of the new Social Web Foundation. This is an impressive start:

The Ford Foundation has also offered the organization a large grant to get the project started. In total, SWF is closing in on $1 million in financial support.

Finished watching the first season of Shōgun. Fantastic. 📺

Good post at WP Tavern highlighting the major plot points of the ongoing WordPress drama. I also listened to the Twitter X space (ugh) where Matt Mullenweg answers questions on the fallout from his WordCamp talk. I don’t envy folks trying to navigate this… Such a big community and lots of money.

During the pandemic I accidentally let my P.O. Box expire. I almost never checked it anyway, but I felt bad that there was a chance of letters being returned or lost into the void. Today I finally fixed it. Was able to go in person and restore the same number which luckily wasn’t being used yet.

Can’t shake the feeling today that I’m going to have to do this all on my own.

Molly White is doing something on her blog that I don’t think I’ve seen before. When linking some people’s names, she will include tiny links to Wikipedia or social web profiles. Here’s a screenshot with the links highlighted, in this case Wikipedia, Mastodon, and Bluesky:

Social Web Foundation:

The Social Web Foundation works to grow this new ecosystem in an open, healthy, and sustainable way—working with technologists and the public to build a new global town square that works for everyone.

This looks very interesting. I’m going to be honest, though, even though I know this is petty: I’m insulted that Micro.blog wasn’t given a heads-up about this before launch. We’ve only supported ActivityPub since 2018. 🤪

Not in a good mood this morning, so all of my blog posts are going to be tinged with a little bit of unwarranted frustration. Apologies in advance. 🙂

Going to restart the public beta for Micro.blog on iOS. Just waiting for Apple to approve the beta, because Micro.blog has only been around for 7 years with dozens of public releases, so we must be devious hackers trying to exploit the App Store. So tired of Apple as a babysitter.