Last year after Twitter changed their streaming API so that apps like Twitterrific and Tweetbot could no longer use it, I blogged that I wanted to do everything I could to support third-party Micro.blog apps:

With that in mind, I’ve mentioned before that I’d like to offer a push notification service for developers. iOS and Android developers could upload their push notification credentials from Apple and Google. Micro.blog would store them and deliver push notifications directly to third-party apps.

That is now a reality. Today there’s a new beta of Gluon for Micro.blog that includes push notifications. Micro.blog sends the notifications on behalf of Gluon so developer Vincent Ritter doesn’t need to run his own server.

The other popular iOS app for Micro.blog is the open source Icro. I’ve added a comment to this Icro issue on GitHub with details on the new API. I’m looking forward to working with anyone building native apps for Micro.blog to enable push notifications for their app.

I can’t believe it’s been 2 years since Brent Simmons announced JSON Feed. In the first months after the spec was released there was a lot of activity on GitHub and interest from developers. The format has proven really useful in Micro.blog, in feed readers like Feedbin or Brent’s own NetNewsWire 5, and just to make it easier to build new web tools.

We’ve received some great feedback, and I’ve been reviewing a bunch of the issues on GitHub. There are a few things that we want to incorporate into the spec. I’ve posted a list of proposed changes over on GitHub.

Richard Williams passed away a couple of weeks ago. The day after, my family and I went to see the Animation Show of Shows at the Alamo Drafthouse. It was a wonderful collection of films — beautiful to experimental, funny or thoughtful, with a variety of different mediums.

But thinking about it now, none of the short films were really in the painstaking hand-drawn style of Richard Williams, who had incredibly high standards for what animation could be. He would embrace doing the work of drawing every frame, with few holds or shortcuts.

The films in the show weren’t trying to do that, and that’s fine. But I hope someone again picks up the depth and quality that Richard Williams brought to the industry. I blogged about him back in 2013, and I remain inspired today.

Blogs hosted on Micro.blog provide a lot of flexibility with custom CSS, themes, and Hugo templates. But if you are making major changes to the design of your blog, you may not want to do that live and risk breaking anything for your site visitors.

I often test out changes on a 2nd fake blog I created on Micro.blog. It’s like an extra sandbox that I can play in to edit templates without touching my real blog, and it’s useful enough that I want everyone else to be able to do the same thing.

Micro.blog now lets you create a free test blog for your account with a URL like username-test.micro.blog. There’s a button to create the test blog under Posts → Design → Edit Custom Themes. It will appear as a free 2nd blog on your account, and you can post to it, upload files, or try out custom themes.

Because custom themes on Micro.blog can be shared across multiple blogs, when you’re happy with any changes you’ve made in your new theme, you can assign the theme to your main blog and all those changes will be applied to both sites. I’ve also added a “duplicate” option that makes a new copy of the theme so you can edit templates in the duplicate theme on your test blog.

I’ve updated Micro.blog today to help Mastodon users follow people on Micro.blog. It used to be that if you clicked from Mastodon to a Micro.blog user, you just ended up their blog home page. Now it redirects to a special version of the Micro.blog profile screen which includes a follow form.

This is very similar to Mastodon’s default remote follow form, or Aaron Parecki’s profile page. For more about how to use your own blog’s domain name as your Mastodon-compatible username, see this Micro.blog help page about ActivityPub.

DHH blogs about giving a chance to smaller companies to help fix the problems with massive tech companies controlling so much of the web:

The world is full of alternatives to the Big Tech offerings that give you 95% of the utility for 0% of the regret. But if you can’t even be bothered to give up 5% to help an alternative along, you also can’t be surprised when the alternatives are so few and far between.

This is how I’ve been feeling about Instagram. I hear people complain about Facebook all the time. But then some of those same people turn around and post photos to Instagram instead of their own blog.

Complaining helps when the company listening cares about the same problems we do. For example, Apple and privacy. But the solution to massive social networks is already in our hands.

Curtis Herbert has a great blog post about starting an Android version of his app Slopes. Adding social features made it more compelling to support multiple platforms:

In any given group of friends the odds of a mix of both Android and iOS users is very high (not to mention Europe is a big potential market for me, and Android is much larger over there than in the states). If someone on iOS loves Slopes, but their friend group ends up using one of my competitors because it supports both platforms and therefore the entire group can join in on the in-app fun, that’s going to go poorly for Slopes.

What I find so interesting about this decision is that Curtis seems to be intentionally expanding the scope of Slopes. Everything he writes about with Android makes sense if you first assume that the social features will be an important selling point and grow the audience for the app. Other indie developers might instead choose to keep the app focused on iOS and solve a more narrow set of problems, and that’s fine too.

I’m thinking of my discussion with Daniel Jalkut on last week’s Core Intuition about whether we should try to change the world (which often means bigger apps and more platforms to reach the most people) or focus on just building an app that’s really good at what it does (but might not be revolutionary).

Micro.blog would benefit from an official Android version, so a lot of Curtis’s post resonated with me. Luckily the third-party app Dialog (and upcoming app Gluon) can help fill that void in Micro.blog in a way that isn’t possible with non-platform apps like Slopes.