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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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. 💰

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 fighting this.

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.

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 the details.

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.

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. 🏀

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. 🎵

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 obviously-public feeds.

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 the best way forward.

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

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-sized welcome home.

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. 🪄

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

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