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 million posts in total. I’m happy to keep hosting this archive indefinitely as long as the costs are flat. I think it’s important to have an archive of as much of the web as possible. But at the end of the day, App.net was not my platform, just something I cared about, to help bridge the gap between the early days of Twitter and newer, more open platforms.

Don’t remember App.net? I wrote a chapter of my book about it.

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 protocols. I’m fascinated with the architecture because it’s so different than ActivityPub, RSS, and IndieWeb protocols. I think it’s interesting and worth tinkering with. I’ve been personally using it through Micro.blog for about a week, so why not let other folks play with it too?

Nostr is quite technical. If you don’t want to be on the edge, feel free to wait. It’s so early that using Nostr feels like testing a prototype, letting your blog posts loose into the wild west of the internet to float between Nostr “relay” servers.

To get started, you will need a Nostr account. Unlike every other social network, in Nostr you don’t actually register on a specific server. Your account is just a private key, which you will paste into Micro.blog. For iOS, I suggest using Damus or Nos. For the web, check out Coracle.

These apps and others will create your private key, name, and profile photo. Make sure to save your key in a password manager. If you lose it, you lose access to your account.

Micro.blog’s support for these emerging protocols is essentially one-way, pushing your blog posts out to people on other platforms. Later we will consider federation, where posts and replies from other platforms and brought into Micro.blog, like we already do for Mastodon and ActivityPub. I’d like to see how much traction there is before we do more.

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 we’re launching a revamped template system for these emails, bringing much more control over what the emails look like. You can edit the template to add a header or footer, or change the HTML tags completely.

Because emails are generated outside of blog publishing, we can’t really use Hugo directly for this. I’ve written a new helper app in Go to process the templates, so they feel as familiar as possible to people customizing their blog theme. (Hugo also uses Go’s templating language.)

You can see what the default email template HTML source looks like here on GitHub. Micro.blog plug-ins can also override this template! So you could have a plug-in that provided a new email design. There’s a help page here with more details about variables you can use in a template.

This is a major improvement. A couple things to keep in mind:

• The template is responsible for assembling posts together. Because it produces HTML, you can no longer edit the Markdown of the previewed email. Instead, you can add intro text, edit specific posts, or remove posts from the newsletter.
• The template could fail if there are syntax errors you’ve introduced in edits. Make sure to test your changes by sending a copy to yourself.

You can edit the template under Newsletter → Settings. If you edit the template and then install a plug-in with a custom newsletter design, it will still keep your changes. You can clear your custom template to revert back to the default template or a plug-in’s template.

If you’re not comfortable editing HTML, that’s okay. You can continue to use the email newsletter feature and ignore the custom templates. It’s just a little more power under the hood for folks who want it, and for plug-in developers.

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 29 states:

• Texas
• Louisiana
• Oklahoma
• New Mexico
• Arizona
• California
• Oregon
• Washington
• Idaho
• Utah
• Wyoming
• Colorado
• Mississippi
• Alabama
• Arkansas
• Georgia
• Florida
• North Carolina
• Virginia
• Maryland
• New Jersey
• New York
• Massachusetts
• Vermont
• Tennessee
• Indiana
• Illinois
• Missouri
• Alaska

Not counting cities I’ve just flown through without leaving the airport. Might’ve missed some, but still feels kind of low. As anyone who has followed my 30 days lists knows, I like collecting visits to places. Now a little inspired to finish seeing all 50 states.