Manton Reece

We’ve seen a lot of people use their microblog as a daily log to track activities, from running or cycling routes, to meditation or posting photos of food. Some apps even make this easier, like indiebookclub.biz for sharing reading progress in a book.

In 2016 when I visited a different library in Austin every day, I found that the microblog format is helpful to stick to a routine. It becomes part of the day, knowing you need a quick post to your blog to record the visit or activity. Encouraging this kind of posting consistency is also why we have special pins you can unlock, such as the “Photo Challenge” pin after posting a new photo each day for a week.

For the last 11 days I’ve been writing about the way people are using Micro.blog: custom designs, microcasts, photo blogs, and more. You can find the rest of the posts in this 12 days of microblogging series over on the help site. Tomorrow we’ll wrap up with a final post.

I woke up this morning, picked up my phone like I always do — to make sure that Micro.blog servers hadn’t quietly burned to the ground in the middle of the night — and the first thing I saw was a notification about Apple’s new campus in Austin. Here’s John Voorhees writing about it for MacStories:

At the center of the announcement though is a new facility that will be located in North Austin not far from Apple’s current Austin campus. The new office will cost over $1 billion to build and sit on a 133-acre site, 50 acres of which will be set aside for open space. Initially, the Austin campus will house 5,000 employees, with the ability to expand to as many as 15,000. The new complex will run on 100% renewable energy too.

I love the contrast to Amazon’s over-hyped search for a 2nd major campus. Apple made a decision and announced it, without leaving the world hanging for months. While Apple has always had other smaller offices outside Cupertino, it’s great to see such a significant new commitment in other parts of the country.

Does anyone know the location for the campus yet? Near the current campus in Austin there are huge stretches of undeveloped property — old ranches that you can see along Parmer Lane or from the other side when taking the train from Lakeline Station. For years I’ve dreamed that this area could be preserved somehow as a park, not just eventually overrun with condos and restaurants. I’m excited that Apple is setting aside 50 acres of the new campus for open space. I hope they consider expanding that even more.

Update: This KUT article has a map of the planned campus.

Very nice design customization to the Kiko theme on Micro.blog by Kahlil Lechelt.

It’s the 10th day of our 12 days of microblogging series, and today we want to highlight some of the authors who are using Micro.blog. Last month was National Novel Writing Month, and many posts about NaNoWriMo were collected in a special section of Discover on Micro.blog. Congrats to everyone who participated!

Serena finished the month with 50,344 words. Cheri Baker posted updates about her writing and announced her new novel. And for non-fiction, Rosemary Orchard has a new book about OmniFocus.

Josh de Lioncourt is another member of the community who has participated in NaNoWriMo. He joined Jean earlier this summer on the Micro Monday podcast. On Halloween this year, Josh recalled his first NaNoWriMo from 2013:

I’d promised myself that if I finished chapter one that night, I’d continue writing the rest of the book throughout the month of November as a NaNoWriMo project. As it turned out, I did finish chapter one. The next day I wrote chapter two, and by the end of November I had nearly sixty thousand words, fifteen chapters, and about one-third of what would become Haven Lost written in first draft.

We love books and want to do more to support writers. As I wrote about at the beginning of the year when introducing the emoji collections, we started with books:

Today we’re introducing a search collection using emoji, starting with books. Just include 📚 with your microblog text about a book you’re reading or related topic, and your post will automatically be collected on /discover/books.

For more posts in this series, check out our help page.

For the 9th day in our 12 days of microblogging series, we want to talk about developer blogs. Most developers on Micro.blog use their blogs like everyone else — posting photos, sharing stories, recording a microcast, or linking to articles they’ve read — but some developers use the microblog format as a programming journal, writing about coding problems and eventual solutions through a series of posts.

Brent Simmons helped popularize this format in the iOS developer community back in 2013 when he published 16 posts while working out how to implement syncing. I’ve noticed at least a few developers adopt a similar format during the development of Micro.blog third-party apps, such as Isaiah Carew working on Kiwi earlier this summer, Vincent Ritter on Gluon, and Mike Haynes designing Dialog.

Blogging is a great way to work through an idea. When you take time to write a few sentences or paragraphs about an opinion on almost any topic, you’ll find that you have a stronger understanding of it by the time you hit publish. It can be the same way for a programming challenge.

There have already been 8 other posts in this series, and we link to all of them over on the Micro.blog help site. Three more posts to go this week to finish out the 12-post series!

Icro is a beautiful third-party iPhone app for Micro.blog. Version 1.2 just shipped this week with new icons and other improvements. Here are a couple of screenshots from the updated Discover tab:

You can download Icro from the App Store.

Micro.blog’s default design for hosted sites is based on an original theme that shipped with Jekyll. It is very plain, but works well on desktop computers and mobile devices. It’s also pretty easy to customize.

I recently set up the new Micro.blog news blog and wanted to apply a few minor improvements to the design: adding a logo to the header and fixing how cramped the quoted text looked. To add a logo to the header, you can use CSS to shift the text to the right, making room for the logo, and then add the logo as a non-repeating background image.

Here’s what my custom CSS looks like:

blockquote {
	letter-spacing: -0.5px;
	line-height: 1.6;
}

.site-title {
	background-image: url(https://help.micro.blog/assets/images/icons/ios/icon-60.png);
	background-size: 30px 30px;
	background-repeat: no-repeat;
	background-position-y: 12px;
	padding-left: 40px;
}

You can edit the custom CSS for your blog by clicking Posts → Edit Domain & Design → Edit CSS. I also posted during out 12 days of microblogging series about other custom designs from Micro.blog users.

Upgraded from Ruby 2.3 to 2.5 this morning and it appears to have completely fixed some issues I was having with Sidekiq processes unexpectedly quitting.

On last week’s Core Intuition, Daniel and I talked more about WordPress 5.0 and the disruption that will be caused by the new block-based editor, Gutenberg. Daniel also addresses compatibility with MarsEdit in a blog post.

Meanwhile, WordCamp US was a few days ago in Nashville. WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg gave his State of the Word talk to wrap up the conference. The talk + Q&A is long, over 1.5 hours, but provides a detailed overview of Gutenberg and where WordPress is going.

There were a few things Matt said that stood out for me, all in response to the same question. Matt says:

I think our mistake — really the mistake of the past decade — is we didn’t do the work to create Gutenberg until 2 years ago. We didn’t start it. Because every time we’d start it, it got really controversial, or it got mired in technical details, or it was just too acrimonious. We’d be too worried about backwards compatibility or something to really take it to term, to fruition, to where it’s something we can actually take and present to the world.

And then:

Twitter used to be called microblogging, right? Many of them have these basic elements of publishing, embedding images, commenting, sorts of things. And you could actually build most of these services on a WordPress backbone. They weren’t because because we weren’t innovating enough on the user experience. I think we’re actually now leapfrogging.

And closing the answer with:

And this I think gives us an opportunity to recapture the web that was. And whether we do so or not, though, depends 100% on the user experiences we create.

I love Matt’s answer to this question, and I think Matt’s right that Gutenberg is what WordPress needs to take it through the next 15 years. But I don’t think it’s great for short-form blogging. As WordPress becomes more sophisticated to meet the needs of web folks who want more advanced layout or CMS-like features, I want to make Micro.blog easier and faster for blogs.

It’s the 8th day in our 12 days of microblogging blog post series. Most Micro.blog accounts use the author’s name — personal blogs, writing about everyday topics or sharing stories and photos. But since Micro.blog-hosted blogs can have a custom design, separate pages, and a domain name, you can also have a microblog for your business, or use it as your main web site.

Because one of the goals of Micro.blog is to encourage people to post to their own blog more often, using a blog for your business site can also help keep it up to date, so that when customers visit there is recent news or product updates. The Omni Group has taken this one step further for their microblog at microblog.omnigroup.com, posting not just links to new software releases and screenshots of features, but also fun stuff like what they’re having for lunch at the office and cat pictures.

For Micro.blog, we realized recently that we were missing a company blog. We have the help account and we have my personal blog, but not everyone should have to follow me to get important news such as the latest iOS update or even the blog post series you’re reading now. So today we’re adding a new blog: news.micro.blog.

This new microblog will mostly link to other blog posts from me or Jean or Jon, as a way of collecting everything in one place. As we expand it, we’ll integrate it into the help site and Micro.blog home page.

Previous posts in this series included topics like podcasting, photos, travel blogs, and sharing your content to other social networks, which is particularly useful for business blogs. See the full list here.

For the 7th post in our 12 days of microblogging series, I want to talk about linkblogging. Micro.blog users have a variety of approaches to posting links on their blog. Some people read an interesting article and type in a summary of it, pasting in the URL to the full article, and some people prefer quoting a portion of the text directly in their microblog post.

I blogged a couple of years ago in detail about the technical approaches to links in RSS and how linkblogging has evolved, using examples from Dave Winer and John Gruber:

Instead of just including a URL, authors use a quote from the linked material as the foundation for the post. The majority of Daring Fireball posts adopt this format. While John Gruber is known for his full essays, those longer posts are infrequent today. He keeps his site active by linking to other interesting essays and tacking on his own brief opinion.

Posts on Micro.blog are formatted with Markdown. If you’re reading a web page on iOS, you can share it to the Micro.blog app to automatically fill in the basic structure of a post, leaving the cursor at the beginning of the post to add your own thoughts.

In the screenshots above, I’m sharing from Safari on iOS. Micro.blog adds a Markdown link back to the original post with the web page title. Or if there’s text selected, Micro.blog includes that text as a quote.

Note that Micro.blog will truncate posts in the timeline when they are over 280 characters. For a longer quote, it’s best to give you microblog post a title, turning it into a full blog post.

Previous posts in this blog post series covered photo blogs, microcasting, travel blogs, custom designs, artwork on blogs, and more. Check out the full list on our help page.

I love road trips and travel blogs. We have a family blog that we started a few years ago, adding new daily posts for summer vacations with the kids and other trips. A blog is a great way to combine text and photos to remember a trip, with the flexibility to keep it for yourself or share it on social media.

For the 6th day of the 12 days of microblogging series, we wanted to highlight 2 travel blogs using Micro.blog. Mary Hatfield writes on her microblog with incredible photos of trips across the United States and even to Antarctica:

When we woke up this morning we were in the Neumayers Channel (below Anvers) located on the western side of Wiki Island ready to take the zodiacs onshore. The weather was quite perfect this morning and it was our turn […] We walked across the fresh blanket of snow to the Damoy Hut, which was built in 1975 and kept in use until 1995.  It has now been restored to its original form and is used as a museum. The land here was an airstrip that enabled personnel and stores arriving by ship to be flown on to Rothera Station in early summer when sea ice prevents dirt access to the station by ship

Arin Mearig kept a daily blog for a 3-month trip to Switzerland, posting photos every day with captions for people she’s met and places she’s visited. From day 34:

quick recap - left the house at 5am, went to 4 cities, hitchhiked for the first time, went on buses, trains, cable cars, and a funicular, ate a delicious burger, saw some of the greatest views ever, and just walked in the door at 10:45pm

I’m inspired by these blogs to write more while traveling. Consider capturing some of your next trip on an existing blog or new microblog.

See this help page for previous posts in this serious, covering topics like photos, microcasting, custom designs, and more.

Preparing today’s blog post about travel microblogs and getting lost in people’s incredible photos of their trips.

Love the way the Spurs finished this game against the Lakers tonight. First of 6 games at home, might be the turning point to climb back into the playoffs picture. 🏀

It’s day 5 of our 12 days of microblogging series. Yesterday I highlighted what Micro.blog users are doing to create unique custom designs for their blog. Today we want to highlight how artists are using Micro.blog to showcase their work.

I’ve loved seeing the drawings from Audra Ann Furuichi, who posts web comics and illustrations on her own site. Sky Sandison has sketches from around Edinburgh, Scotland. And Mike Hendley shares digital paintings as he works through them on his iPad.

Plus there’s great sketchnotes from Mike Rohde and Ben Norris, including one by Ben about my talk from Peers Conference earlier this year.

October was also Inktober, with many bloggers posting sketches to their microblogs every day. We have a special section of Discover for Inktober that collects many of those posts together.

While the iOS apps for Micro.blog are designed around JPEG photos, you can use Micro.blog on the web to upload other formats like PNG and GIF, which might be more suitable for illustrations. Just click Posts → Uploads.

Showcasing artwork on Micro.blog uses many of the same features as photo blogs, which I wrote about on day 2 of 12 days of microblogging. For previous posts in this series, check out our help page on Micro.blog.

It’s day 4 of our 12 days of microblogging series. Today we want to highlight how Micro.blog supports blog themes and what people can do to give their blog a unique design.

There are 3 ways to customize your microblog:

Pick from one of the default 7 themes. These themes are based on existing designs using the Jekyll blogging framework, but modified to work consistently with Micro.blog. We’ve open-sourced all our changes to these themes on GitHub.

Edit the custom CSS for your blog. I’ve been really impressed with what creative Micro.blog users have come up with. You can use CSS to change colors, fonts, hide elements, and more. Here are a few examples from Kitt Hodsden, Michael Barrett, and Khaled Abou Alfa.

Add a custom footer. The footer HTML is a good place to put extra information or JavaScript.

If you have any questions about using CSS, ask in the #design channel on Slack. And if you have any tips, write about it on your blog so that others can learn from it. I’m currently working on a major upgrade to the themes on Micro.blog that I can’t wait to share more about.

Previously in the 12 days of microblogging series, I wrote about microcasting, photos, and using your own blog as a home base.

For the 3rd post in our 12 days of microblogging series, we want to highlight how Micro.blog can serve as your social media “home base”. By centralizing your writing, photos, and other web pages at your own domain name, you can control your content but still share it out to other social networks.

Micro.blog has cross-posting for Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Mastodon. This feature is available for free if you host your site on Micro.blog, or $2/month if your blog is hosted elsewhere. It includes automatic posting to all 5 of those social networks and any new platforms we may add later.

Here’s how I personally use this feature. I never post directly to Twitter. I publish short posts on my own blog, and Micro.blog automatically sends them to Twitter and other networks. Occasionally I’ll sign in to Twitter and check if I have any @-mentions that need replying to. This way I can avoid the distraction of the Twitter timeline and focus on adding content where it’s most important to me: my own site.

With Mastodon, you have another option beyond cross-posting. Because Micro.blog supports the ActivityPub API, Mastodon users can follow your Micro.blog-hosted blog and you can follow and reply to Mastodon users directly in Micro.blog. I posted more last month about how this works and why it uses your own domain name:

Sometimes in the Mastodon world your identity can get fragmented across multiple instances. You might start on mastodon.social but then move to another instance, effectively breaking the link between your readers and your posts each time you move, with no way to migrate posts between instances. By supporting Mastodon and ActivityPub in Micro.blog, you can consolidate your identity and posts back to your own blog at your own domain name.

Your blog is also a great place to centralize your photos, while still integrating with Instagram and these other social networks. Instagram doesn’t allow automatically posting from your blog to their service, but you can use OwnYourGram or our Mac app to copy Instagram photos to your blog, and from your blog to everywhere else. More links in yesterday’s post.

For details on how cross-posting works — and the extra rules Micro.blog uses to make sure that your posts look good on other networks — see this help page. Happy cross-posting!

Speaking of tonight’s Homebrew Website Club, Tom Brown and I were guests on the Plutopia podcast that just posted this week, talking about the IndieWeb, posting to your own blog, and Micro.blog.

I misspoke at the beginning about the founding of the IndieWeb, incorrectly saying “Distributed Web Summit” when I meant “Federated Social Web Summit”. I actually interviewed Tantek and Aaron about those early days of the IndieWeb when I was in Portland this year, for my upcoming book Indie Microblogging. I’d love to get part of that transcript out soon since there’s a lot of good history in it.

Good morning, Austin! Tonight is Homebrew Website Club, 6:30pm at Mozart’s Coffee. We’ll meet at a table outside to talk about the IndieWeb, plan for the upcoming IndieWebCamp Austin, or work on your own web site.

We released a new version of Micro.blog for iOS today with several new features and improvements:

• Added full-screen viewer for photos in the timeline.
• Added auto-complete of usernames when composing a new post.
• Added tapping on your blog hostname in the post screen to switch to a different blog if you have multiple Micro.blog-hosted blogs.
• Added option to set description on uploaded photos for better accessibility. Tap an attached photo thumbnail before posting to edit the text.
• Updated the following count in user profiles to show people you are not yet following to help you discover new people to follow.
• Fixed maximum size when scaling uploaded photos.
• Fixed potential crash when sharing photos from other iOS apps.
• Fixed layout issues on new bigger iPhones.
• Fixed sharing some web page titles.
• Improved accessibility of menus and buttons in the app.
• Improved showing push notifications in the app.

You can download Micro.blog version 1.4 from the iOS App Store.

Yesterday we started the 12 days of microblogging blog post series to mark the 1-year anniversary of the public launch of Micro.blog. I posted about making it easier for people to share their stories in audio form with microcasting. Today I want to highlight photoblogging.

Sharing photos is an important part of Micro.blog. I put a custom photo picker and filters in the original Micro.blog iOS app to encourage everyone to post photos to their blog, so that you end up with a great collection of your best photos at your own domain name. Because photos are square by default, they look great in the Micro.blog timeline, and with cross-posting Micro.blog can attach photos to your tweets or send posts to other social networks.

We also have a companion iOS app just for photos called Sunlit. It has an Instagram-like timeline for browsing photos from your Micro.blog timeline, with the focus around blogs that I wrote about in my preview post as we were relaunching Sunlit 2.0:

To play nicely with microblogs, we introduced a new post type in the app for single photos. For longer posts, you can still collect multiple photos together, add text, and post them as a story directly to your blog.

Some people on Micro.blog focus almost exclusively on posting photos, like Robert Brook. Some people have even created separate blogs just for their photos at their own domain name hosted on Micro.blog, like burk.photos. There’s a special section of Discover that features photos from more Micro.blog users.

A couple of weeks ago, Jonathan LaCour on Micro.blog submitted a feature request for a photos JSON Feed. He used this feed to build Microgram, a snippet of HTML that you can paste into your blog to provide a grid of photo thumbnails. You can see my photos page at manton.org using Microgram in this screenshot:

One of the most common questions we get is how to migrate photos from Instagram to Micro.blog. I think we have 2 really good options for this:

• Micro.blog for macOS has a built-in Instagram importer. It will take the archive you get from Instagram and allow you to batch import your Instagram photos to Micro.blog, preserving the original dates and text from Instagram.
• OwnYourGram is a web-based app that connects to your Instagram account to automatically copy new Instagram posts to your own blog. Because it’s based on IndieWeb standards, it can also post directly to Micro.blog-hosted sites.

I hope you enjoy posting and browsing photos on Micro.blog! Tomorrow I’ll have the next post in the 12 days of microblogging series.

Some of y’all noticed that Micro.blog was slow or not responding this morning. Sorry! I explain why on today’s episode of Timetable.

Thanks everyone for the congrats and feedback about the last year of Micro.blog! Coming up today, another post in our 12 days of microblogging series. Also a chance that the new iOS version is approved.

One year ago today, after months of feedback from Kickstarter backers, we opened up Micro.blog to the public. In that time, we’ve watched the community grow, seeing more folks than ever writing on their own blogs while sharing in the Micro.blog timeline and participating in conversations. We are proud of maintaining our commitment to a safe community space where harassment is not tolerated while promoting independent blogging.

We’ve also added a lot of functionality to the platform during this first year. To mark the anniversary, we are highlighting 12 features of Micro.blog over the next 12 days. We’re kicking off the 12 days of microblogging with a major hosting feature that rolled out earlier this year: microcasting.

What are microcasts? Just short podcasts. A major idea behind Micro.blog is that if blog posts are shorter and easier to post, more people will stick with writing on their own site every day. Podcasting should be easier too.

As I wrote when announcing microcast hosting and our companion app Wavelength:

Everyone has a story to tell. Whether that’s through short microblog posts, longer essays, photo blogs, conversations with friends, or now through podcasts, I hope that the Micro.blog platform and suite of apps can help.

I’ve been so excited to see new podcasts launch on Micro.blog, including our very own Micro Monday hosted by Jean MacDonald. For today’s episode, Jean interviews long-time blogger and Mac developer Brent Simmons about his podcast The Omni Show and working on the new NetNewsWire feed reader.

You can find recent episodes from a variety of microcasts in the Discover section of Micro.blog. Also check out Microcast.club, a directory of microcasts. Get started with your own microcast with this help article and join our Slack community where the friendly folks in the #microcast channel can help with questions.

Tune in tomorrow for day 2 of our 12 days of microblogging series.

Having fun wrapping up the next iOS version of Micro.blog with @cheesemaker. 3-4 new features that add up to a very nice release. I’d love to ship it Monday for the official 1-year anniversary of the public launch of Micro.blog.