FeedCity

Our hosting provider had to do an emergency reboot on one of our servers, leading to errors in Micro.blog. Took a little while to recover, apologies for the downtime.

To read this letter, click here:

Plus MN man can't stop winning backyard ultras, a swanky new North Loop game club, and peeper returns to the streets in today's Flyover news roundup.

Charles Harley on Subway Takes: “I don’t think Black people should have to pay for ancestry.com. Why do I have to pay you to figure out where you stole me from?”

A conversation with Jim Acosta

The mascot was born around November 2016 when I asked my #Dota2 friend @dopatwo for an illustration to put on Mastodon's error page. It was meant to be a homage to Twitter's "fail whale". As you can see, the design of the mascot has changed considerably in ten years. It was cute then, but more realistic, less round. I much prefer the contemporary design, and the fact that it's not a single character.

It's interesting that my bio as seen in the demo said "Developer of Mastodon, a GNU social alternative". That was the level of my ambition at the time: GNU social had a niche, tiny as it may in the grand scheme of things, and it appealed to me, so I just wanted to make something that would be nicer to use. (My original intent was making a TweetDeck-like app for GNU social, but I quickly pivoted into writing my own backend because GNU social's API was a mess and I like things to be neat).

There is a little time capsule of the UI as it was on that exact day, as I recorded a demo video for the Product Hunt submission. You can see how some UI concepts have persisted to this day, even as the details and level of refinement changed. You can also see the original blue accent color... I took that color palette from a website where people posted various color palettes, I do not remember its name anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO1jQ8_rAMU

The codebase has been about 6 months in the works at that point (the first git commit was dated March 16, 2016) and mastodon.social had been running for a while too, since it was my way of testing how the federation works with other fediverse servers (and software, like GNU social) at the time. The API was the very first thing I worked on, and some of those API methods are still literally unchanged today, but the UI had already gone through multiple iterations by October 5.

At that point I was 23, freshly graduated from university with a B.Sc. in Informatics, living with my parents, and freelancing on the side (I had a freelancing career in web design since high school and went to university just to get a degree). I was able to save a lot from my student loan as well, so I had the opportunity to experiment with this open-source side project.

A revolutionary adman tells his story.

The post The Daily Heller: Up Close With Lowell Thompson, Big Idea Man appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Elizabeth Hurley showed off a diamond ring, and Billy Ray Cyrus followed with a post that raised eyebrows. Continue reading…

Lake, New Hampshire, 1913 #prendergast #mauriceprendergast

Trump: By the way, I wear very little makeup, and I do it myself *mimes putting on makeup*

Trump: Mohammed El Sayed. You know, I took a lot of heat for calling him Mohammed. I don't care. I'm the president of the United States. I can call you whatever the hell I want

Rally attendees start to leave as Trump rambles incoherently in Georgia

The metric might not mean much to laypeople, but leap seconds have been a source of contention in the timekeeping community for years. Now, they’re dead.

Washed-up rocker Kid Rock, who, like El-Sayed, was born in Michigan, claimed that the Democratic nominee for Senate is a sleeper agent for the Muslim Brotherhood who has assimilated into our culture and is waiting to strike a terrorist attack against the US. The latest pol...

The new edition of my ebook about Apple’s Photos app is out now:

Get to know Apple’s Photos app and how best to use it to import, manage, edit, sync, and share your photos in macOS 27 Golden Gate and iOS 27/iPadOS 27!

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