I’ve been putting off an infrastructure upgrade because , going to bring online another new server today. This would be a great time for everyone to upgrade to Micro.blog Premium. Seriously though, you’ll get a major new feature launching next month. | Continue reading
Matt Haughey in a blog post about renting a Tesla: I wish other EVs could be this good. I will never own a Tesla, but I can see the appeal now. It was easy to drive, even easier to recharge, and was quite comfortable and made every other car I’ve driven feel like a relic from a p … | Continue reading
Finished reading: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. Absolutely wonderful. | Continue reading
Can’t believe I’m still working on the book. Just a few final end-of-year updates. New excerpt: Even the name itself and the bird branding are gone. The letter X feels like an appropriate placeholder for the platform’s grave. Here lies a dying platform. X marks the spot where it … | Continue reading
Tweet Marker’s whole purpose was for cross-platform, cross-app timeline sync. There was never anything like it because it’s not actually a profitable idea on its own. But there are many apps that could benefit from something like this. Imagine note sync across Ulysses, iA Writer, … | Continue reading
The future of Nostr might not actually be for microblogging but instead as a cross-platform generic sync API for any type of small data. I know this was baked into the original idea, but the more I think about it, the more it feels like a unique solution to several things. | Continue reading
Apple Pay has made me lazy about credit cards and it finally came back to bite me. Drove to Dallas yesterday and forgot my wallet in Austin. Generally hasn’t been a problem… restaurants, gas, movie, coffee, all fine. Until the hotel where they assume you’re a criminal if you don’ … | Continue reading
Went to the early IMAX screening for Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron tonight. Managed to avoid seeing any trailer, plot summary, or review, so everything was a surprise. Still thinking about it so won’t say more for now. Subtitled, and I’d like to see the dubbed version later. | Continue reading
Starting to see “included in Premium” free audiobooks in Spotify. This is going to be great. | Continue reading
I’m excited that Texas is in the playoffs, but only picking four teams is always going to leave someone out who should have a shot at it. College rankings have always felt subjective to me so I don’t give it much thought. The Longhorns barely lost that game anyway. | Continue reading
My quick 5-minute demo from FediForum is now on YouTube. I show off Micro.blog and fediverse integration. It’s a whirlwind tour of several different things including how we think about cross-posting. | Continue reading
Just published Core Intuition 578 about the MarsEdit 5.1 release, AI and copyright, software licensing, and more. Lots of good stuff in this episode I think. | Continue reading
Working more this weekend on the feature I teased about a few days ago. Work has accelerated and now I’m confident in the design and technical bits. The hardest part is pulling myself back every day to work on smaller fixes and improvements. | Continue reading
Castro is back online and Tiny is considering finding a new home for the app, via Rob Fahrni. For Micro.blog we host podcasts, and we have our Wavelength app, but we’ve thought about doing more. Kind of neat to imagine Castro in our suite of apps if we had a non-$0 acquisition bu … | Continue reading
Glass announced they are raising their prices for next year, but it looks like even with the change I would save money if I switched to the yearly plan. Interesting to see how different companies handle yearly discounts. 50% off is an unusually good deal. | Continue reading
December already! I still have 9 books left on my reading goal for the year. I’m halfway through a couple things already so I might hit it if I read more over the holidays. | Continue reading
Nice approach in iA Writer 7 for pasting ChatGPT output into your writing and tracking your edits to make it your own. There is also a Markdown extension for attribution in a range of text. However, I found this part of their blog post a little puzzling: While the format is open, … | Continue reading
Seems there aren’t many notes apps that are end-to-end encrypted. Obsidian is one, and there’s also Day One for journals. Wondering how important this is to folks. Personally, I like that Day One is encrypted but I would use it even if it wasn’t. And most of my notes are just on … | Continue reading
Putting on my sys admin hat this week, evaluating what we can improve. Our primary MySQL server has been running for over three years without a restart. Not bad! (Hopefully I didn’t just jinx it.) | Continue reading
One year ago today, ChatGPT was released. It’s not that often that products truly change things. Whether you think artificial general intelligence is just a few years off or that it will remain a pipe dream forever, there’s no question that some form of AI is going to be part of … | Continue reading
Not sure what to make of Elon Musk’s interview yesterday. It’s so easy to say he’s unhinged that I’m questioning whether I should dig deeper. Ultimately my core belief about huge social networks hasn’t changed in years: too much centralized power opens the door for user-hostile, … | Continue reading
MarsEdit 5.1 is out with support for posting to Mastodon and improvements for Micro.blog too, like attaching photos in the micropost window and updated character counts. Congrats @danielpunkass! | Continue reading
Usually I work on improvements to Micro.blog for a couple days or weeks and roll them out. Very rarely does something sit for months before customers see it. But sometimes very big features need a little more process and restraint… Working on something new off and on that will la … | Continue reading
Interesting conversation about web hosting and AI in this interview on Decoder with Avishai Abrahami, CEO of Wix. But this also stuck out to me: The developers, they just read a very fantastic post by somebody on how to do something in a much nicer or interesting way, and then th … | Continue reading
Today we’re rolling out some major improvements to domain name support in Micro.blog. We’ve had domain name registration for a while, but it was fairly limited. Now you can transfer domain names to Micro.blog hosting and let Micro.blog handle all the details. We also have a bette … | Continue reading
Playing around with Raindrop.io today. It’s really nicely done. I’ve added support for importing Raindrop.io bookmarks to Micro.blog bookmarks. There’s also an API, so maybe we’ll have more integration later. | Continue reading
There have been a bunch of “what apps am I using?” blog posts recently, inspired by an episode of Hemispheric Views. Robb Knight has a page with links to other people’s posts. Here’s my list: Mail Client: Hey Mail Server: Fastmail and Hey Notes: Ulysses ✅ To-Do: Basecamp, GitH … | Continue reading
I’ve been eyeing a specific domain name for several months. It’s a premium TLD and I can’t really justify the price. But every once in a while like today I come this close to grabbing it, then talk myself out of it. Whew. | Continue reading
Reminded by this post from Vincent that Arq exists. I used it years ago when I was frustrated with something from Backblaze, but I didn’t stick with it. Going back to it, backing up to S3 and skipping a backup subscription altogether. | Continue reading
Sarah Perez writing at TechCrunch about Evernote’s experiments with a more limited free plan: …a pop-up message that informed them that unless they upgraded to a paid plan, they would now be limited to only 1 notebook and 50 notes. That change would dramatically limit the service … | Continue reading
Roomba vs. dog. It takes a lot for Ollie to move… Certainly more than a robot nudge. If he’s sitting in front of a door you want to open, for example, forget it. | Continue reading
Fixing one last thing after our server problems yesterday. I almost finished it last night but realized I was too tired to risk making a mistake restoring data. Much better in the morning with coffee and triple-checking backups and scripts. One day we’ll have a full-time sysadmin … | Continue reading
We talk about domain names as your web identity, how it’s more permanent and meaningful when you’re microblogging on your own site instead of someone else’s domain. Some social network is down? Shrug. Your web site is down? That feels personal. We’ve had good uptime but it’s gott … | Continue reading
Dealing with fallout from another server failure. We have pretty good redundancy most places, except ironically some of the most stable parts that always felt low on the list to prioritize because they never failed… until they did. Picking up the pieces, improving a few things fo … | Continue reading
Cool driving by REI on Black Friday and seeing the store closed. Kudos for thinking of employees and customers before profit. On the other hand, we participated in the shopping craziness by getting a Roomba. Figured the vacuum robot tech must be well along by now. Mixed results i … | Continue reading
Super Mario Wonder is excellent on replay. I’m slowly finding all the levels I missed. Some of the levels are actually kind of difficult, which I love, and seems rare since the NES and SNES days. | Continue reading
The ads on TV for Humane’s pin are pretty effective. I don’t expect much success for the first version of the pin, but I do think they’re on to something if they can keep iterating. Best comparison is the Newton — a little ahead of its time. | Continue reading
Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃 I finished Mario Wonder. Great game, I’ve been playing a couple levels every day since its release. Missed a few things that I can still go back to, or play different characters. ️ | Continue reading
We just posted a new Core Intuition all about the chaos at OpenAI over the last several days, including the resolution with Sam Altman returning as CEO. The full episode is all on this, the relationship with Microsoft, the odd company structure of OpenAI, and the impact of AI on… … | Continue reading
Happy to keep growing the list of formats that Micro.blog can import to your blog. As of today: Twitter, WordPress, Medium, Tumblr, Ghost, Markdown, Substack, Goodreads, and Write.as. Plus cross-posting out of Micro.blog: Medium, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr, Bluesky, Nostr … | Continue reading
Doing a little more tinkering with Stimulus. @vincent and I have talked about refactoring more of my clunky, old-school JavaScript to use Stimulus. It would at least provide a nice structure for all the code without feeling too abstracted and bloated. | Continue reading
Most companies would delay any product changes if they were in the middle of leadership chaos. Rolling out ChatGPT Voice to everyone this week says a lot about their confidence. Who is even CEO? Who cares, let’s ship it. | Continue reading
Pretty big deal that Spotify didn’t have to pay Google the usual in-app purchase fees. The inconsistencies across developers is just as unsustainable as the high 15% or 30% cut. As I’ve been saying forever, the ultimate solution is side-loading and external payments. Getting clos … | Continue reading
Uptown in Dallas over the weekend, coffee and work at Foxtrot as the trolly goes by in the background. | Continue reading
Marlin from Finding Nemo: I just can’t afford any more delays and you’re one of those fish that cause delays. And sometimes it’s a good thing. There’s a whole group of fish. They’re delay fish. I think about this when I’m trying to get something done and not making progress. What … | Continue reading