Beautiful photo from aows. When I retire, I’m just going to blog photos of train tracks. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 10 months ago

Thanks again to @vincent for fixing one of the servers yesterday while I was in Rocky Mountain National Park with no cell coverage. Not happy with the blips in downtime recently, going to reprioritize this. Enjoying the morning with good wi-fi and coffee at Inkwell & Brew in Este … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 10 months ago

Traveling today. Got to the airport early, plenty of time to catch up on a couple things. Submitted Micro.blog 3.0.3 to Apple to review. Hope everyone’s having a nice Friday! | Continue reading


@manton.org | 10 months ago

Other things I learned about video games this week while we were temporarily without a Switch: the Wii with Skyward Sword still works, the N64 sort of works and then doesn’t, and the Game Boy Advance SP battery is starting to bulge, but replacements are just $10. ️ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 10 months ago

We caved and bought another Nintendo Switch. The OLED Zelda edition. So nice. ️ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 10 months ago

Ugh, this is a new pattern for me in Wordle. 712 X/6. ⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩 ⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩 ⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩 ⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩 ⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩 ⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 10 months ago

App.net archive migrated

I’ve migrated the App.net posts archive to S3, to simplify hosting the archive. I’m not going to do any more work on this. No import feature for Micro.blog. The data files are there if anyone needs them. Please only download your own posts, not everything. There are about 44 mill … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 10 months ago

I like this post from Dave Rupert on lessons from old Russian small nuclear generators: I wonder if software has a kind of digital entropy, where even good software left untouched for a short timeframe rots and stops working. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Finished Ted Lasso. Overall really enjoyed it. This season almost lost its way a couple times, sometimes overthinking itself, but it wrapped up perfectly. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

I seem to have made a serious AWS pricing miscalculation, transferring a bunch of small files from EC2 to S3. Data transfer is free, but PUT requests aren’t. With millions of requests, adds up to real money. This is why I usually prefer Linode’s flat pricing. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Introducing Nostr cross-posting

Similar to my announcement last month about supporting Bluesky, we’re adding Nostr cross-posting to Micro.blog starting today. You can enable it under Account → Edit Sources & Cross-posting: Nostr might have the most uncertain future among recent up-and-coming social web protocol … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Thanks everyone who sent me feedback about how you are using Micro.blog’s email newsletters. I took this into account while finishing the new feature, but I realize it’s a functionality change. It is very rare that we change a feature so significantly. Felt like it had to be done … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

New email newsletter templates

Micro.blog Premium includes an email newsletter feature, so readers of your blog can subscribe to receive posts by email. It’s designed around microblogs. For example, Micro.blog can gather up lots of short posts over the week or month and collect them into a single email. Today … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

This article in Forbes has some new (to me) details on the creation of Nostr. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Trying audiobooks in Spotify for the first time. I’d like to see some UI tweaks for books, like less emphasis on chapters (books are not albums) and showing the time remaining with the speed taken into account. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Launching new features tomorrow. Going to lay low this afternoon instead of deploying major changes near the end of the day, which I’m sure I would regret. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Spilled a glass of water all over my MacBook keyboard. So that’s how my morning is going. Seems okay so far. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Working on improvements to email newsletters in Micro.blog. I’d like to split out the editing of queued newsletters to instead have a separate per-newsletter “intro” text, with the rest of the email not editable. Does that cause a problem for anyone? Will allow more flexibility i … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Love this from Matt Mullenweg. It’s what we believe at Micro.blog, too. …it’s not about how many views you have, how many likes, trying to max all your stats… sometimes a single connection to another human is all that matters. Happy 20th to WordPress. Heck of an achievement. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Did my daughter come to visit this weekend to see us, or to take the Switch and Tears of the Kingdom back to her apartment? Who can know. Anyway, we’re busting out the N64 and Ocarina of Time… As soon as we get an RCA → HDMI adapter. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

I’m testing Calckey to improve compatibility with Micro.blog. Some of the UI is quite busy and not for me, but I love how they are showing ActivityPub usernames, with the profile photo and dimmed domain name. Might borrow this. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Went to pay our respects to my uncle, for Memorial Day. Tomorrow would’ve been his birthday too. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Love seeing all the “Where have I been?” posts. I blogged it on a whim and it’s so much more interesting to see the places other folks have gone. I also just realized I left Alaska off! Will edit. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Tinkering with something in Go this morning. Always felt like it would be a good language to know more about, and now finally have a real need. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Where have I been

A random conversation today made me curious about what countries I’ve visited in Europe. I got lost looking at maps and thought I might as well try to make a list. Apparently 9 countries in the world: United States Canada Mexico England France Germany Italy Greece Switzerland And … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Just watched way too many replays and commentary on the final seconds of Celtics/Heat. Another memorable game 6 in Miami. Bring on game 7! | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Listened to a couple hours of the Texas house debating impeachment against our corrupt attorney general. Kind of shocked to hear the final vote, overwhelmingly for the articles. Paxton is removed from office pending the trial. Wow. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Seems unlikely that we’ll end up with a single unified social web platform. I like Mastodon’s focus on communities. I like Bluesky’s thinking on distributed moderation. I like the IndieWeb’s principles of ownership. I like Nostr’s private messaging. How will we tie all of this to … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

This week Bluesky rolled out their custom timeline feeds. Pretty interesting approach. However, I’m going to disable automatic cross-posting from my blog to Bluesky for a while… Bluesky feels so much like Twitter that it has been too distracting for me. Will check back in later. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Next steps for the community

Jean and I have been talking this week about what’s next to prioritize around the Micro.blog community. I often focus on technical improvements to blogs, but we’ve had some good momentum recently with community features too, such as rolling out profile pronouns, user blocking, an … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Joking aside, I really like Nostr. Something about it is very elegant. You just have to ignore 80% of it, especially anything around cryptocurrency. It’s a wild west platform with a few nuggets of gold. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Folks, Nostr is really easy to understand. Your username is 64 random letters and you just enable NIP-5, NIP-39, and put your private key in a hardware wallet. Simple! Mainstream adoption for non-technical users will not be a problem. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Good morning! Took an early walk. Coffee now at Summer Moon and I have some server changes to deploy. Also way behind in email and hope to catch up over the next couple days. ☕️ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

I’m testing cross-posting to Nostr. I’m still not really sure how to link to Nostr accounts… If you’ve ventured out into the wild west of Nostr country you might be able to find me with @manton.org or npub1ae42p0d24pmccr47unf2a3hv2trmk9lrmr65ges4v3x5pscs4yrquu7ul9. 🤪 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Adding a new query to Micro.blog’s server status check to throw an error if the queue backlog is unusually high. Will be able to better track this error as platform downtime. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Upgraded Ruby last night and thought everything was stable. But no. Putting my sysadmin hat on for a bit this morning while everything gets back to normal. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

The new episode of Core Intuition covers last week’s Micro Camp and looking ahead to WWDC. Thanks for listening! | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Been thinking a lot about Nostr this week. Finally realized that it resonates in a “worse is better” way. This is a good thing and will help me grok how it fits alongside ActivityPub and Bluesky. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

I’m continuing to use ChatGPT all the time. On a whim today I asked it what the philosophy of Micro.blog is and it nailed it. You can read the transcript here. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Some questions we missed at Micro Camp

At last weekend’s Micro Camp, we had a panel session with me, Jean, and Vincent where we answered questions from the live chat. We didn’t have time for all the questions, so I wanted to try to answer a few more that we missed. Here we go… Re: long posts and how they get truncated … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

The more I tinker with Nostr, the more I understand the appeal for developers. It is fun. But there are so many usability challenges. User search and discovery are difficult. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

About blocking in Micro.blog

When we added muting to Micro.blog, there was a discussion about whether user blocking should be added at the same time. My feeling was that Micro.blog is built around public blog posts on the web, so blocking didn’t seem particularly useful, and might even give someone a false s … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Great game and series. Didn’t really feel like a sweep with the Lakers in each game until late. Congrats to the Nuggets. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Checking out the Kagi search engine, via Daring Fireball. I remember hearing about this but never tried it. Looks clean, fast. I don’t think I’m at the point of wanting to pay for web search quite yet. So tired of ads, though. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

San Antonio Museum of Art, raining. Used to be the Lone Star Brewing building. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

One reason web development appeals to me is that while it can be complicated, it doesn’t have to be. You can build for the web like it’s 1995. For native apps, the complexity is required with tools, code signing, stores. Thinking about this as I wait for my code to be crunched an … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

Did not expect to be installing a new version of Movable Type on EC2 this morning for testing, but here we are. Looks about the same as it did a decade ago. Nice to see it still works and is supported, though. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago

We shipped Micro.blog 1.7 for Android, available on Google Play. This syncs up the release with the features from the new iOS version. Lots of new stuff, like managing posts, uploads, username auto-complete, and external blogs. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 months ago