Rail lights from Manor. 🚂

To know what a product is means knowing what it is not.

I’ve suggested a couple times this year that I want to rethink the Micro.blog trial period. It feels like the time for a change. Next week I’m going to remove the 10-day trial. You can pay, or not! And new users can start with a Micro.one subscription and then upgrade to Micro.blog if they want to.

Some interesting stats in Mastodon’s 2023 report. Patron donors have dropped over the last couple of years, but total donations are up because of larger, single donations. Makes me wonder if the future of financing Mastodon might be more commercial offerings, like paid hosting or subscriptions.

Christmas tree with green books at Half Price Books. 📚

By popular demand, added a sign-up form to the Micro.one teaser home page. I’ll send an email to everyone at launch on January 2nd. Then I’ll sell the mailing list to the highest bidder and you’ll get spam for life. (Just kidding. It’ll be a one-time email.)

We got a new game for the holidays: Everdell. Still figuring it out but it’s great so far. Looking forward to checking out the expansions too.

One week until the Micro.one launch.

I created a new demo site demo-photos.micro.blog to showcase some photo blog features in Micro.blog. It doesn’t use any custom code… Just the home page photos plug-in and Micro.blog collections. For photos, I imported my old Instagram archive.

It has been a very nice Christmas Day. Happy Holidays, everyone. 🎄 Also saw two movies this week that I enjoyed: An Almost Christmas Story, a short stop-motion film on Netflix; and A Complete Unknown, which was excellent. Listening to Bob Dylan ever since. 🍿

For your Christmas Eve podcast listening queue, we just posted Core Intuition 623. Daniel and I talk about shipping new features like Micro.blog’s photo collections, preparing the next MarsEdit release, and the Micro.one teaser. 🎄

Feedback on my post about Matt Mullenweg over the weekend has been fairly positive. One topic that I wish I had covered: will our opinion change depending on whether the court rules in favor of Automattic or WP Engine? I think it could, but that outcome is a long way off.

Nice use of Micro.blog photo collections on David Dykstal’s photos page.

From last night, the Zilker tree at the Trail of Lights. 🎄

Strongly agree with this reaction from Ben Werdmuller on Joe Biden commuting many death row sentences:

The death penalty is a barbaric practice that has no place in the 21st century, just as it had no place in the 20th century. It needs to be abolished everywhere, for any reason.

Life in prison is enough. And it allows a reversal when we get a conviction wrong. Justice, not revenge.

We should all give people space to be wrong a few times before we lose our shit. Outrage is a last resort.

I’m falling well short of my reading goals this year. My currently reading list keeps getting bigger, but I’m not finishing anything. For the rest of 2024, just want to finish Wind and Truth. 📚

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.