Manton Reece
About Archive Photos 30 days Replies Reading Search Also on Micro.blog
  • Up early Tuesday, lots going on today… But can’t shake the feeling that it’s Saturday for some reason.

    → 8:46 AM, May 24
  • Car battery died while I left my trunk open waiting for an IKEA pickup. Feels awkward to ask strangers for a jumpstart in the time of COVID, but people are nice.

    → 11:34 AM, May 22
  • If anyone wants to play along with the in-progress books support in Micro.blog for Mac, you can grab a beta download here. Reply editing isn’t wired up and some other things need polishing before we release it. Sneak peek is on YouTube here.

    → 11:51 AM, May 21
  • I still really like Objective-C and AppKit. I can think of a lot of improvements to make, but nothing like what we ended up with in Swift and SwiftUI. Shrug.

    → 10:09 AM, May 21
  • Trying to get back into the photo challenge after missing a bunch of days. Today’s word is beverage. Stopped at a food truck for brisket tacos and much-needed bottled water on a hot day.

    → 1:21 PM, May 20
  • When I’m in a coding rut I find it really helpful to work on something fun and different for a couple days. Here’s a sneak peek on YouTube (20 seconds) of something that will be in the next Micro.blog for Mac.

    → 11:02 AM, May 20
  • Much has been written about the deteriorating Music.app experience. The new UI never really clicked for me… I barely understand the difference between Listen Now and Browse. So I’ve been trying Spotify on the web and it seems as good or better than the native Music.app.

    → 9:30 AM, May 20
  • On the latest @coreint, we talk WWDC and then react to a recent 37signals podcast about selling the byproducts of your work.

    → 8:10 PM, May 19
  • Bike and outliners with M.b

    Blogging and outlining share a long history together. Userland’s Clay Basket could create a full static site from an outline. NetNewsWire 1.0 had a built-in outliner for notes and blog publishing that would later be spun out as MarsEdit.

    Recently there have been new outliners that work with Micro.blog. I blogged about publishing to Micro.blog via Dave Winer’s Drummer. Maurice Parker wrote about his Zavala outliner and integrating it with Micro.blog via Shortcuts.

    Bike is a new Mac outliner from Jesse Grosjean of Hog Bay Software. It has a clean interface that feels closer to a text editor than most outliners, and it can save as OPML and plain text. I’m also fascinated that the native .bike file format is just HTML.

    I wired up publishing from Bike to Micro.blog with Maurice’s Humboldt that provides Shortcuts for Micro.blog. It looks like Bike has great AppleScript support. You can iterate over the rows in an outline, or you can just grab the contents as HTML like this:

    tell application "Bike"
    	set doc to front document
    	export doc as bike format
    end tell
    

    Note that the export command requires a paid Bike license.

    Screenshot of Shortcuts

    You can download my test shortcut here. It’s a little hacky. It strips out the HTML header/footer with a simple find-and-replace in Shortcuts. It will need a little more work if you want to clean up the outline and publish real blog posts with it.

    → 11:38 AM, May 19
  • Try hard. ☕️

    → 11:32 AM, May 19
  • This is cool! @sod has created a page that when clicked will take you to a random photo in the Micro.blog photo challenge.

    → 9:45 AM, May 18
  • We have a new public beta of Micro.blog for Android with a couple bug fixes. Here’s a link if you’d like to join the beta.

    → 11:16 AM, May 17
  • Expect I’ve unlocked my phone approaching 100,000 times since the first iPhone. Attempts to steal my phone: 0. Starting to question if the defaults are too secure, but there’s no perfect setting… Ideally would like it already unlocked when at home or near my watch.

    → 11:46 AM, May 16
  • For the last few weeks we’ve been reworking how Micro.blog subscriptions are upgraded. I just rolled out the changes. Shouldn’t affect existing customers much, but it’s a nice improvement for starting a new blog with Apple Pay, or managing a subscription.

    → 10:44 AM, May 16
  • Avoca Coffee in Denton. ☕️

    → 9:51 AM, May 15
  • Posted episode 513 of @coreint. We talk about whether we got accepted to the WWDC special event at Apple Park, and related thoughts and speculation about the event.

    → 9:29 PM, May 13
  • Safari back button shortcut

    Sometime recently, Safari’s back button keyboard shortcut ⌘← stopped working. I’ve preferred this to ⌘[ because it’s much easier to reach when my right hand is on the MacBook Pro trackpad. Unfortunately I can’t seem to reset this using System Preferences.

    After a few days of unsuccessfully re-training myself to use ⌘[, I gave up and reached for FastScripts to rewire the ⌘← shortcut. I wrote the following AppleScript:

    tell application "System Events" to keystroke "[" using {command down}
    

    Then set it in FastScripts to only be used when Safari is running. There’s got to be a more straightforward way to get the old Safari behavior back — and this solution annoyingly interferes with moving the cursor if a text field is focused in a web page — but for now I’m up and running again.

    → 10:06 AM, May 12
  • Last month we quietly added some better server monitoring to catch problems on hosted blogs. Happy that our uptime now shows 100% for the last month. Might be closer to 99% since it only checks every 5 minutes and won’t catch seconds of downtime, but still solid.

    → 10:22 AM, May 11
  • Wondering if I should be concerned that I haven’t received any truly negative feedback about my book. I know there are some sections that need work, but not hearing anything makes me question whether I should rework them or just continue to fix minor problems and ship it.

    → 10:07 AM, May 11
  • This is the last week to order Indie Microblogging in e-book or print editions. I know I’ve said that before, but really this time. I’ll be deploying some Micro.blog changes that disable the book order page after this week. It’ll be available to read on the web, but not offline.

    → 9:59 AM, May 11
  • Good morning! Busy day but first a little work and coffee. ☕️

    → 8:16 AM, May 10
  • Driving through our old neighborhood, a lot has changed in the 20 years since we lived there, but the little grocery store and deli remain.

    → 5:04 PM, May 9
  • “A day, a week, a month, a year. Every second brings me here.” — Arcade Fire 🎶

    → 1:56 PM, May 9
  • I submitted a request for WWDC’s in-person day, but now I’m much less interested in attending than I was when we recorded the last Core Intuition. I don’t think WWDC will ever return to what it was. 8 years ago I blogged about the “eras” of WWDC… Just feels over now.

    → 12:43 PM, May 9
  • The most surprising thing about enabling email newsletters for my blog is that I enjoy getting a copy of my own recent posts on Monday mornings. It’s a nice mini review of what I have been interested in over the last week.

    → 11:02 AM, May 9
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