I remain convinced that normal people don’t want the Vision Pro, but I’m not willing to go quite so far as predicting a flop. The fascinating question to me is whether it’s possible to take a mediocre idea and make it succeed through excellence in tech and design alone. | Continue reading
Ray Roberts Lake State Park. First state park of the new year as I attempt to visit all 88 parks in Texas over the next couple of years. | Continue reading
I get Apple’s stance on privacy and tracking, but clearing cookies and especially localStorage after 7 days inactivity is just too extreme. Hurts legitimate usage of these web APIs. | Continue reading
Today I sent the following update to Kickstarter backers about the ePub version of Indie Microblogging. Note that the link to download the book is disabled below. This is for Kickstarter backers first, then we’ll sort out how to get it to everyone else. Today I’m making a near-fi … | Continue reading
Just published the first episode of Core Intuition for 2024. We talk about finally winding down the writing on my book, and another book Daniel is reading that is well-timed for the new year. | Continue reading
Going to roll out a slight layout change to Micro.blog on the web later this month, to better use the full browser width. I’m using it now and really like it. Might push it earlier if I get impatient. | Continue reading
At the restaurant for lunch they had the highlights from Spurs vs. Bucks on the TV. So good. I watched the 4th quarter last night… That final shot to tie it just didn’t go in. Some great moments from Wemby, including a late block on Giannis and then back the other way for a 3. | Continue reading
Added a footer on book.micro.blog to show that the book is Creative Commons (CC BY). This means you can do basically anything with it, even sell some version of it yourself. Also pushed more edits, including a new chapter in the conclusion. | Continue reading
Fun fact about my book Indie Microblogging, it has about 300 quotes. This is partly why it’s so long. I wanted to capture lots of little important quotes that might otherwise be lost to time and link rot. | Continue reading
For his birthday, Matt Mullenweg just wants you to blog. I love it because it’s actually a gift to the web. “No wrapping paper or bows. Just blogs and blogs and blogs, each unique and beautiful in its own way.” | Continue reading
Finished reading: Age of Death by Michael J. Sullivan. Fifth book and I think the weakest in the series, felt like an unnecessary detour. Still a fairly quick read. | Continue reading
ePub fiddling today. Still don’t have a great workflow. Ulysses export → ePub with CSS tweaks, then run a script to download inline images and rewrite the XHTML inside the container, then try to piece things back together with Calibre. | Continue reading
Love seeing all the “year in books” blog posts from folks. If anyone’s curious about how Micro.blog handles this, I recorded a video on YouTube a few months ago that walks through the Epilogue interface and how it integrates with your blog. For 2024, more blogs please! | Continue reading
The draft of the book is in Ulysses, each of the 70+ chapters as sheets, and the web site is hosted on Micro.blog with a couple theme tweaks for the contents sidebar. I wrote a little Ruby script that will push all my changes from Markdown files back up to Micro.blog, via Micropu … | Continue reading
Updated book.micro.blog with the latest draft. Lots of little edits, and more updates for X, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Near final, planning to link up the ePub tomorrow and call it done. | Continue reading
Mickey and Minnie in Steamboat Willie, finally in the public domain. Happy New Year! | Continue reading
Here are the books I finished reading in 2023. I thought I might finish another one this weekend, but it’s not going to happen, so might as well post this today. Happy New Year! | Continue reading
I like John Gruber’s airport lounge analogy for iMessage. Michael Tsai takes it one step further to underscore how Apple’s control still twists what is possible. | Continue reading
I’m sure I’ve blogged about this before but deploying Micro.blog is like a hilarious 15-step process. So dumb! And yet I do it at least once a day usually. Eventually it’ll be worth burning a couple days to automate it. | Continue reading
I said during Micro Camp back in May that I hoped Micro.blog would be open source by the end of the year. Didn’t happen, too much else to do. Still have plans along those lines, as soon as I can carve out time to get the structure for everything set up correctly. | Continue reading
Feeling like it’s time to travel again. For 2024, I’m going to start a new challenge: visit all of the 88 state parks in Texas, spread out over a couple years. Will try to camp at many but not all of them. Blog posts and photos along the way. ️ | Continue reading
Blogs and social networks talking to each other is still kind of magic. If you’re on the latest version of Micro.blog’s Alpine theme, replies from Bluesky can now flow into Micro.blog via Bridgy. We’ll be updating all the blog themes to support this, or you can modify your theme. … | Continue reading
“I just had this weird feeling that my money wasn’t safe here anymore.” — Sneakers Some people wondered about my vague microblog post last week. I didn’t post the details because I didn’t know everything about the situation yet, but now I do. After 16 years in the same house, we … | Continue reading
Learning from this blog post that GitHub has 1200 MySQL servers. | Continue reading
Finished watching the Dragonsteel spoiler Q&A. It took a few days, off and on. I’ve read about 20 of Brandon Sanderson’s books and I still don’t even understand many of the questions! Love the super fans. | Continue reading
In Evan Prodromou’s list of big and small fediverse traits, I lean more to big, but I don’t agree with everything in the big list. As one example, I think billion-person servers would recreate many Facebook-like problems. Evan’s list is great for sparking discussion, though. | Continue reading
I was thinking about Nick Heer’s post about the current top few social networks to replace Twitter, and specifically performance. I feel like Threads and Mastodon are fast, but it’s true that Bluesky is really fast. Wonder if federation performance will end up being AT Protocol’s … | Continue reading
Nitpick with some modern web services: I don’t like the trend of expiring URLs, like temp S3 resources for profile photos. It makes caching more difficult. In everything I design, I assume that a human might see the URL. That makes everything simpler and more stable. | Continue reading
At some point in the last few days, one of the changes to my blog has caused Hugo to go off the rails… Instead of taking a couple seconds to run, takes minutes. Having some difficulty tracking it down. | Continue reading
Watched some of the usual Christmas movies over the last week, and a couple new ones… Then went on an anime tear with Princess Mononoke, Tales from Earthsea, Weathering with You, The Wind Rises, and Kiki. | Continue reading
Happy holidays, everyone! A new episode of Core Intuition just went up, the last episode of 2023. We talk Apple Watch, Adobe and Figma, and look forward to next year. | Continue reading
This weekend I added limited support for following Bluesky users in Micro.blog. This isn’t federating with Bluesky yet. Instead, it uses a combination of Bluesky’s RSS feeds and the AT Protocol. To follow a Bluesky user who has an account username in the form username.bsky.social … | Continue reading
More good progress in Bluesky: there are now RSS feeds for all user profiles. This is just a useful baseline for supporting different things. Nice, clean microblog feeds without titles. | Continue reading
I like the new Bluesky butterfly logo. Still invite-only, but I have a handful of invite codes if you want to try it out. | Continue reading
Writing a blog post draft in Micro.blog for Mac this morning and I guess I’m hitting ⌘-S pretty often. This saves it to the server and Micro.blog keeps a copy of each version in case you need to revert back. Here’s the web version where I happened to notice the saved count. | Continue reading
Watching the Substack drama unfold but just taking notes for now. Trying to put most of my writing time into book editing, and these big picture topics of indie blogs, newsletters, and moderation fit right in. | Continue reading
Got some bad news last night that really shook me. Nothing family or health related, which is what matters, but still bummed. (Also nothing to do with Micro.blog or business or money.) It was balanced a couple hours later with some really welcome news! The world gives and takes. | Continue reading
Raining in Austin this morning. Working and having coffee at Lazarus. | Continue reading
I should’ve done more testing with audio apps after upgrading to Sonoma. Things went off the rails while recording @coreint — noise while recording and also audio getting handed off to my phone. I think we mostly salvaged it. | Continue reading
I finally installed macOS Sonoma, so I’m testing Micro.blog as a saved web application for the first time. Works well. The most awkward thing is not having an address bar. Nice that Apple included Edit → Copy Link. | Continue reading
As the year winds down, thinking about the fediverse, I want to do a better job in 2024 of making the case for independent blogs. Lots of platforms with thousands of users on each server talking via ActivityPub is great, but more blogs also helps with portable identity and a more … | Continue reading
Great article from David Pierce at The Verge about the potential of the fediverse: Forget the hand-wavy protocol stuff for a second — one of the best things about embracing ActivityPub is that it sticks a crowbar into a single Voltron-ic product like Facebook or Twitter or Snapch … | Continue reading
Continued my Redis spelunking last night and managed to cut 10 GB off our memory usage. Makes a big difference because forking and saving the db is faster, less chance of churning the disk too. | Continue reading
Love how Brandon just drops this sentence into the State of the Sanderson: Tress would make a pretty great animated feature though, don’t you think? Yes indeed. Many of his books would work really well in animation, but Tress of the Emerald Sea would be fantastic. | Continue reading
Spending the morning going through a lot of bloat in Redis, clearing out unused data. It has been a little out of control using a ridiculous amount of memory, which hurts performance saving to disk and just generally costs more to run. | Continue reading
I thought we had mostly avoided the Mastodon spam from the last couple of days, but it must’ve hit some users because there were a bunch of extra spam reports. I continue to have mixed feelings about how Mastodon handles private messages. Need to rethink Micro.blog’s implementati … | Continue reading