Finished reading: Age of Myth by Michael J. Sullivan. This was great. Really well paced, seems like a perfect setup for the series. First of six books. | Continue reading

Writing some new web page text and maybe it’s early in the morning or maybe I watched too much of the news already today, but when I tried to type “independent” I misspelled it and it auto-corrected to “indictment”. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading

Wasn’t expecting this kind of profound wisdom from the apartment sales guy today: “The world is too big to stay in one place.” | Continue reading

When the coffee shop recognizes me and remembers my regular order, it’s gonna be a good day. ☕️ | Continue reading

If you’ve been fascinated with the Worldcoin Orb, but not sure how to feel about it, check out Molly White’s comprehensive write-up: Having my eyeballs scanned by a shiny chrome orb so I can someday receive cryptocurrency disbursements because artificial intelligence has stolen m … | Continue reading

Over the last couple years, I’ve gone from mostly reading books on a Kindle (Paperwhite), to only on the iPad Mini, and now back to the Kindle (basic 6-inch). Actually prefer the smallest screen. | Continue reading

Recorded another very short screencast to show the latest Micro.blog for macOS update. Less than a minute long. It’s here on YouTube. | Continue reading

Didn’t realize how exhausted I was toward the end of the week. Yesterday shipped new features, then took a nap after dinner, then read, then had a full night’s sleep. Up early and worked on the Mac app, shipping the 3.0.1 bug fix update. Feel back on schedule now. | Continue reading

Today we are shipping a new feature for Micro.blog Premium subscribers: bookmark tags. This is a big improvement for using bookmarks, and it touches several parts of the platform and apps. There is updated documentation for bookmarks with new screenshots. There is a new version o … | Continue reading

At this point I just laugh when Xcode tells me WebView has been deprecated since macOS 10.14. I know! I could set aside a week to rewrite code that works, or wait until it’s removed from macOS, which I’m skeptical will ever happen. (Haven’t updated to Sonoma yet, though…) | Continue reading

Finished reading: Dungeons & Dragons: The Druid’s Call by E. K. Johnston. I think I was drawn to these prequels because of the fond memories I have of reading Dragonlance back in the day. | Continue reading

This time we got him! New surprise indictment: According to the court filing, Trump employees attempted to delete security footage at the Florida resort and one said “the boss” wanted a server deleted. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading

This week’s episode of Core Intuition is up! We talk about X. | Continue reading

Going to bump to version 3.0 for the update to Micro.blog for macOS tomorrow. I think it’s warranted with the new bookmarks stuff, but also because the last version was 2.9.1 and I don’t believe in .10 versions. (It’s hard to explain… Somewhere in the Core Intuition back catalog … | Continue reading

Listening to What Was I Made For?, by Billie Eilish. Went to see Barbie a couple days ago and still thinking about it a little. Really good. | Continue reading

Threads appears to count every character in a URL as part of the 500 characters. A little surprising because I’m used to either Micro.blog (with inline links so no URL counts) or Twitter and Mastodon (with all URLs counting as a fixed size). | Continue reading

Micro.blog doesn’t have full search or hashtags by design, and I know it can be frustrating sometimes. I hear it. But this report on child abuse material across Mastodon instances is part of why: During its search, the team found 554 pieces of content that matched hashtags or key … | Continue reading

Dave Winer posted a 12-minute audio recording on his blog, addressed to me but applicable to everyone who is creating tools for the social web. Listening to it, I have a bunch of thoughts. In this post, I just want to start with server-to-server ActivityPub, and leave some of the … | Continue reading

Working on a new Mac feature that would be nice with SwiftUI, but we still run back to macOS 10.14 Mojave. Would have to jump forward several versions of macOS. Not worth it. Do plan to bump up the requirements a little, though. | Continue reading

Interesting that for single-letter .com domains, only q, x, and z are in use. They were registered before ICANN reserved the rest of the letters in 1993. I typed a through z in manually but could’ve saved time by reading the history on this Wikipedia page. | Continue reading

I’m still a little stunned that Elon followed through on x.com, even though it was expected. It’s remarkable how he both fixed the last decade of indecisive leadership at Twitter and used that new power to destroy the brand, maybe the one thing at Twitter that wasn’t broken. | Continue reading

The second FediForum has been announced, coming up in September. I really enjoyed the discussions at the last event and plan to attend this next one. They also have the video for the quick demo I did of Micro.blog and how it interacts with Mastodon. | Continue reading

Occasionally I go looking for new domains and I’m always annoyed with all the new TLDs that Amazon has reserved that they don’t allow anyone else to use: .book, .read, .like, and others. They’ve been sitting on these for years. It’s like domain squatting at a massive scale. | Continue reading

Spent a few hours yesterday trying to get Micro.blog to work better with Calckey (now Firefish). Made progress but not enough. ActivityPub remains extremely difficult to debug without reading the source code for other projects. | Continue reading

Finished reading: The Ember Blade by Chris Wooding. Read the first half of this a few months ago and then took a break before picking it up again. Really gets going in the second half. Excellent. | Continue reading

A new episode of Core Intuition is out. We talk about Apple’s threat to withhold iMessage from the UK, what is acceptable for public surveillance, and the larger issue of powerful tech companies leveraging their size for good and bad. | Continue reading

Dusted off the old Drobo, which hasn’t been plugged in for a year. A little surprised it still seems to work. Don’t feel great about investing in a dead product, but might get another drive to put in it anyway. | Continue reading

Thinking about ActivityPub made me wonder what Tumblr has been working on, so I clicked around over there for a bit. I missed that Tumblr has live video now, with tipping in “diamonds”? Seems a little out of place with the rest of the platform. | Continue reading

Reminder that it’s still summer, which means we’re still offering blog hosting for only $1/month to new folks who join Micro.blog. There’s no easier way to blog that’s as full-featured and affordable. Feel free to share the link to anyone who might benefit from it! ☀️ | Continue reading

Major addition to bookmarks in Micro.blog is coming along really well. Likely will ship next week. ️ | Continue reading

Power in the house went out. Summer in Texas is never a great time for this. Hopefully not long, lots of worker trucks in the neighborhood trimming trees and scheduled maintenance on the meters. Getting almost no signal on Verizon, so had to go to the coffee shop for a while to w … | Continue reading

I still believe we should welcome Threads to the fediverse, but the news that ActivityPub seems far off has soured my experience posting manually to Threads from my microblog. They grew too big, too quickly. Meanwhile, sounds like Tumblr’s ActivityPub effort has also stalled. | Continue reading

As I think about how to add tags to bookmarks in Micro.blog, I’ve been drawing inspiration from services like Pinboard but also my own (now sadly defunct) Mac app Clipstart. This video demo was from way back in 2009… I think the tagging UI is still really good. | Continue reading

Just posted a new episode of Core Intuition all about the Threads launch. Misunderstandings about ActivityPub, judging the leadership of Meta and Twitter, and whether Threads will beat Tumblr to supporting this open standard. | Continue reading

Frustrated with emails not reaching Micro.blog users, I’ve been working through steps to make things more robust. First added SMS as an option, then Sign in with Apple, and today we’re moving a percentage of emails from SendGrid to Amazon SES so we’re not reliant on a single plat … | Continue reading

We finally installed a new smoke alarm that has only been sitting unopened in its box for about two years. Feels like a major Saturday accomplishment. Very slowly upgrading everything. | Continue reading

First thoughts on Retro: great design and for me fills a similar role as BeReal. Not a true Instagram or photoblogging alternative because it’s focused more on private-ish photos. We don’t need another silo but in that niche they can get away with not being open. | Continue reading

Love this post from @adactio not just because he’s using Micro.blog cross-posting (thanks!) but also because the approach is exactly what we believe in. Start with your blog first: When the current crop of services wither and die, my own website will still remain in full bloom. | Continue reading

I don’t plan on using Threads indefinitely, but I am curious about the user experience, both good and bad. The algorithmic timeline is so puzzling to me. Despite following people who are posting, I first always see posts from people I’m not following. Seems overly tuned to the po … | Continue reading

Over the last few days we rewatched Mission: Impossible 4-6, then went to see 7 tonight. Enjoyed it. Intense as expected. The audience was into it, laughing and clapping. | Continue reading

As the fediverse grows, new people will hear about Micro.blog and send us feedback about how we can improve. Always good! I listen to everything. On the other hand, the fact that the fediverse is so big means we can do things differently and still be successful. Not all platforms … | Continue reading

Reminded by Jeremy Keith’s post of this quote from Robin Sloan. Beautiful, true: The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when tha … | Continue reading

Finished reading: Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson. This book alone was worth backing the Kickstarter project. Loved it. | Continue reading

A new TestFlight beta is out for Micro.blog 3.1. The big changes for this release are per-post cross-posting options and video upload. (Might still be some problems for certain video files. Proceed cautiously in that part of the app.) | Continue reading

We’ve known for years that our onboarding in Micro.blog is bad. It’s tough to start with no followers and no recommended users. But even so, we’re not going to do the Threads or TikTok thing to just show a bunch of random popular crap. There’s gotta be a middle-ground to help peo … | Continue reading