The rebuild of I-35 continues. This rubble is where Star Seeds Cafe used to be.

Started working on a blog post today and had to actually go do some research to make sure I was right. This is a benefit of occasional long-form writing. It’s a way to refine how you feel about something, learning a bunch in the process.

Everyone thinks they can build their own blogging engine. And they’re right! It’s easy! But there’s a reason why there are only a few very successful platforms and tools. Micro.blog is built on top of Hugo so we have a portable format and the performance of static servers. It’s robust and proven.

This morning I got three green lights in a row that are never all green, then I parallel parked perfectly in a tight space, so pretty sure everything today is going to be amazing.

Skimming Steve Troughton-Smith’s thread and commentary on the EU’s requirements for Apple. Even though I’ve been frustrated by the App Store and calling for sideloading longer than most developers, I’m feeling burned out on the drama. Huge computing platforms need to be more open. We’ll get there.

Added the snow falling plug-in to micro.christmas. ❄️

New plug-in! Snow fall adds falling snow to your blog. Check it out on manton.org. Looks best in dark mode or with a darker default blog background. One-click install for Micro.blog folks. ❄️

Right before bed last night, I had an insight for how to optimize the Micro.blog timeline for a certain segment of follower sizes. I wrote it down and then crashed. Would’ve been lost otherwise, probably for days until I hit the same part of the codebase again.

We just posted episode 622 of Core Intuition. We talk about my work on the recent photo collections in Micro.blog (before I shipped it), Daniel using Swift concurrency, and our general optimism about AI for programming.

The grass is always greener on the other side. Pretty often I see Micro.blog people explore other blogging platforms, or just post more to Mastodon, but it almost always leads to blogging less often. This is both discouraging and also sort of a testament that the Micro.blog way works.

I may have Osborne effect-ed myself a little with the blog post teasing Micro.one. Current customers: do not worry. The first phase of the plan for Micro.one is limited. If you’re already subscribed to Micro.blog, you’re in the right place.

Don’t miss the sneak peek screenshot link in Sam Grover’s update post about Mimi Uploader. I think photo collections could be a really good fit for the app.

I’ve been rolling this idea around in my head for a couple years, in various forms, and think I’m finally ready to do something with it. Updated placeholder website: micro.one

Mike McCue from Flipboard announcing Surf:

Built from the ground up on ActivityPub, AT Proto and RSS, you can create and surf amazing custom feeds that organize people, videos, articles, images and podcasts around the things you care about.

I don’t have access to the beta yet, so not entirely sure what it is, but sounds promising! Maybe a little like Flipboard merged with Tapestry.

The weather’s changing. Rain and wind, leaves falling down at Cherrywood. ☕️

Didn’t expect how much I’d like the new full-screen photos view that is built into the Micro.blog photo collections plug-in. To see it in action, scroll through my blog home page and click on a photo.

We had tickets to the Peter Pan musical last week and somehow with work and looking for a house we forgot to go. Calendars are hard. Very disappointed, both to miss the musical and also because I’m still not at the point in my life where I can just throw away money for no reason.

I sort of want to increase the border radius of every button by 1px every few days until they are perfectly rounded and see if anyone notices.

Very interested that Delta is trying Apple’s external link entitlement. There are so many gotchas, but hopefully it works for them. From MacStories:

After tapping through a full-screen warning from Apple that you’re about to embark on a dangerous adventure to the World Wide Web…

🙂

This sounds great! A New Social: “We believe in an open social web centered around people, not platforms. We build bridges, not walls.” The non-profit organization will be the new home for Bridgy Fed.

I like Apple Intelligence notification summaries enough to keep them enabled. They’re not perfect. I think the summaries get into trouble when they attempt to distill several notifications into a list of just a few words each.

This post on the news blog might seem minor, but it’s already making a huge difference. My brain had not come to terms with how bogged down the background timeline updating could get. I’m not even sure how larger platforms with millions of followers handle fan-out quickly.

Good recap at WP Tavern of State of the Word from Tokyo. Matt Mullenweg:

Some people might see 2024 as a year of distractions or attacks from bad actors in the community. But it was really a year of growth and focus where we were able to accelerate so many things that we’re doing.

Cosmic sticker. ☕️

We went to see War of the Rohirrim a few days ago. It has the feel of the battle scenes of Return of the King, but stretched to the entire 2-hour film. Worth seeing for LotR and anime fans. There is no chance to catch your breath, though. The quiet scenes are taken up with voice-over narration.