My copy of Tress of the Emerald Sea arrived! Love the green ink throughout the book. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

FediForum is this week! On Thursday I’ll be demoing how Micro.blog fits into the fediverse, and I’ll join in other sessions when I can. You can see the schedule here. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Worked a bunch this weekend trying to decommission an EC2 server (hosting App.net archives!) by moving millions of little files to S3. Taking forever, often failing. I’ve been maintaining this for years and really want to turn the page on it, but can’t accept losing any data. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

With yesterday’s podcast, we hit 550 episodes. Some listeners may have noticed that we’ve slowed down a little, recording every other week while there has been a lull in sponsors. Hoping we can do a few new secret member-only episodes this year. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

On the latest Core Int, we talk about shifting deadlines for shipping Black Ink and the potential for integrating new AI tools in developing our apps. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

I like this summary by @snarfed of why HTTP content negotiation is more trouble than it’s worth. Simple, different URLs for different things are easier to debug, copy/paste between apps, etc. I often look at Micro.blog’s JSON in a web browser, no special tools needed. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Great story from the @RogueAmoeba blog about a meeting with Adam Curry, Eddie Cue, and Steve Jobs that may have saved Audio Hijack. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

We don’t use AWS for that much, but costs just about doubled last month with more CDN usage. I tweaked some settings to try to bring it down a little. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Finished reading: The Cat who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa. Books about books. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Dunno if I’m late or early to this, but I’m playing with the OpenAI API. Impressive. The folks over there know what they’re doing. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Really didn’t want to be up at midnight still dealing with attacks on our servers, but here we are. Good news is I was able to optimize a few things that will be helpful going forward anyway. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Micro.blog was acting a little sluggish so I looked at the logs and of course the servers are being hammered again by “hackers” attempting to exploit security holes that don’t exist. Blocked a bunch of stuff and should be better now. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Great article in Texas Monthly about Community Impact, a hyper-local newspaper for neighborhoods around Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, and elsewhere. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

I hadn’t been following Hachette v. Internet Archive closely, so spent a few minutes listening to Brewster Kahle’s statement. It seems part of a larger issue of whether we can own digital content or will have to rent it. The Internet Archive is such a force for good, glad they’re … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Watching some of the recent Microsoft Copilot demos and playing with Bing, I wonder what AI products they will roll out before everyone else can even attempt to catch up. Maybe a Microsoft voice assistant box? It would leapfrog Alexa and Siri. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

I really enjoyed this episode of The Talk Show with guest Jason Kottke. Their talk of 404 links after years (and decades!) of blogging inspired me to expand our archiver in Micro.blog to make it easier to preserve a copy of web pages you link to. I recorded a YouTube video with t … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

The new beta of Micro.blog for iOS is coming along really well. We’re at the point where I can see the finish line, and I’m comfortable punting some more features into the next update. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Spurs eliminated from the playoffs early this year, but you couldn’t tell by watching the 2nd half of this Hawks/Spurs game. So fun to watch. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Listening to U2’s Songs of Surrender. I think I was expecting a kind of “Taylor’s Version”-style re-recording, but it’s more a new take like you’d hear at a concert. Love this. 🎵 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Playing with FeedLand reminds me that Micro.blog doesn’t have OPML export. The reason is because some people might have private-ish RSS feeds that power their account. This is rare but I wanted to be careful about exposing the URLs. Need to first add OPML that only includes obvio … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

We’re enabling ActivityPub for everyone now, not just recent users. This is needed so that you can fully migrate followers away from Micro.blog if you want to in the future. It will cause email notifications for some folks who haven’t used Micro.blog in years, but I think it’s th … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Captured a little video of the lightning on the other side of the storm back at home. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Long day. Drove into hail somewhere before Denton, then through a thunderstorm between Waco and Austin. It started with lightning playing in the clouds and then the downpour was on us, destroying visibility as we crept down the highway with our hazard lights on. Kind of a Texas-s … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

I’ve been a software developer for about 30 years and ChatGPT is the first technology that I can barely comprehend. Still feels like magic. 🪄 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Last day on the road as we make our way through a rainy highway 287 in the middle of nowhere. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Finished reading: Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A short, great read. 📚 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Did not finish: Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft. Just couldn’t get into it. Might try to pick it up again some other time in print instead of audiobook. 📚 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

I was reviewing a GitHub pull request today for a potential upcoming feature and was struck by how well it represents my workflow with Micro.blog for major new features. Start with some basic structure for the code, add more pieces, then fix bugs and polish it up. Screenshot: | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Great milestone as Kottke.org hits 25 years. Jason writes about the early days: The updates on weblogs & diaries were smaller but more frequent than on other personal sites — their velocity felt different, exhilarating. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Enjoyed Colorado this week. Heading back to Texas today… Going to miss my new morning routine of walking to the coffee shop with a view of the mountains in the background. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Pikes Peak from Garden of the Gods. For “horizon”, day 14 of the Micro.blog photo challenge. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Royal Gorge Route Railroad. Incredible views, good lunch. Makes me want to re-read From the River to the Sea which covered a lot of building the track here. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Shiny light at Palace Coffee in Amarillo, for day 12 of the photo challenge. Be kind. ☕️ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

There’s no lesson in impermanence like spray painting your message at Cadillac Ranch only to have it covered up by someone else 30 seconds later. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Posted this week’s Core Intuition, all about social networks and blogging. Bluesky, the AT Protocol, Micro.blog, WordPress, ActivityPub, and Nostr. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

I can’t take Meta’s efforts at decentralization seriously while they don’t even have a usable API for posting to Facebook and Instagram. From Platformer: Building a decentralized network could also give Meta the opportunity for its new app to interoperate with other social produc … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Morning at Lamppost Coffee. As close to a ritual as I have, for day 10 of the photo challenge. ☕️ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Finished reading: Assassin’s Quest by Robin Hobb. An extraordinary series.📚 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

21 years ago today, my first blog post. A bunch of promising social networks have come and gone in that time. Often feels like very little is permanent, so make sure to have your own space on the web. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

What an incredible milestone for @_Davidsmith@mastodon.social: 100 million downloads of Widgetsmith. This part of his blog post resonates with me too: The Indie Developer community has demonstrated time and time again the tremendous capability of the individual or small team. Sho … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Walked up to the coffee shop this morning. The side of the road everywhere still looks like this, leftover branches from the winter storm. Cleanup trucks starting to arrive, but it’s going to take a while. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Congrats @playdate@panic.com on the Catalog release! I’m updating my Playdate now. It’s the model that I still hope we’ll get for the iOS App Store one day: a curated store + side-loading for everything else. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Worked this morning at Cuvée Coffee. Bags of coffee beans for today’s prompt “whole” on the photo challenge. ☕️ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

New Micro.blog 3.0 beta going out to TestFlight folks now, adding username auto-complete. Still has a couple glitches but should be a nice improvement when you @-mention people. We are steadily working through re-implementing the features from 2.3 so we can ship 3.0 to the App St … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Bluesky is starting to enable custom domains. This is exactly how things should work in terms of identity and portability. Micro.blog has a similar (but less ambitious) way to follow domain names. Would love to see Mastodon get inspiration from this. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Photos still rolling in every day for our March photo challenge. It’s fun to see some Mastodon posts in the mix too! Check out the grid view on the web for an overview of everything. Not too late to participate, follow @challenges for the prompt each day. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Stopped at a train crossing as an Amtrak went by. Because today’s photo prompt is “engineering”, thought of a train engineer and got this shot out the car window. 🚂 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago

Two new iOS app updates to start the week: Sunlit 3.4.4 fixes setting alt text, and another Micro.blog 3.0 beta with support for saving and publishing drafts. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 year ago