There are a bunch of things I want to add to my Honda Element to make it my own. I just finished the first upgrade: CarPlay. I didn’t really know what I was doing but somehow stumbled through it. It is a huge improvement compared to the 15-year-old factory radio.

Documentation online is a little inconsistent for this kind of upgrade. I wasn’t totally sure if the parts were correct until they arrived. In the end I used these:

• Sony XAVAX1000, 6.2-inch media receiver. Simple, clean design with an actual knob. I think it’s discontinued but Best Buy had one.
• Metra 70-7863, stereo wiring harness. With RCA cables that go to the Sony unit. Ordered the wrong kit at first, then found the right one at Custom Sounds in Austin instead of waiting for shipping.
• Metra 95-7863, plastic dash kit. I was honestly shocked when this arrived and it was the right shape. It was hard to tell from the online photos.

If you are reading this in the future to upgrade your own car, note that I have a 2008 Honda Element SC. I don’t know if these parts would work perfectly with earlier or later models, or the EX or LX trims.

First step, disconnect the negative on the battery. Finding the right socket wrench in our garage took nearly as long as anything else.

With a little plastic removal tool, I popped up the faceplate around the radio. After that it’s easy to unscrew the old unit and take it out.

I stripped the wires on the new Sony unit and connected them to the appropriate wires on the Metra wiring harness. I didn’t have any fancy wire connectors so just threaded them together, twisted them, and wrapped in electrical tape. I went very slowly and think it turned out fine.

Finally, all that was left was to install the unit. I screwed everything in and popped on the new plastic covering. Some of the original wires from the car weren’t used so they are just dangling hidden inside. Hopefully they weren’t too important!

I also fed the microphone wire down to the floor so it can attach on the dashboard or behind the steering wheel. Haven’t totally figured out the best place for it yet.

Very happy with this upgrade overall. I probably should’ve had a professional do it, but I learned a lot. My car feels like it belongs in this decade now.

Today we added Pixelfed cross-posting to Micro.blog. This joins our existing set of cross-posting services like Mastodon, Tumblr, Flickr, Bluesky, Nostr, and others.

Now you can post photos to your own blog, at your own domain name where you control your identity, and have Micro.blog send a copy elsewhere automatically. When posting, you can optionally select which services you want to include:

Because Micro.blog has built-in support for ActivityPub, your friends on Mastodon can also follow your blog directly without you needing to copy anything, or without you needing an account on any other platforms. There’s a lot of flexibility in how you want to configure this and which services you want to use. Some people even like to create a separate microblog just for photos.

As with all Micro.blog features, we’re looking forward to hearing how people use this. Photos are special, and there’s always more we want to do with them. We’ll continue to tweak the Pixelfed cross-posting based on feedback. Enjoy!

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.

Today we updated the web version of Micro.blog (and the Mac app) to provide better control over how new posts are routed to external services like Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn, etc. Just like showing blog categories, you can show checkboxes and uncheck which services you don’t want Micro.blog to cross-post to. This setting is remembered only for the current post and by default posts go out everywhere.

This is a fairly big change. I expect we’ll learn more as people actually use it. I wanted to get it out for the web and Mac first because we can ship those without waiting for approval from Apple and Google. Mobile versions will follow.

Some of the gotchas you might run across:

• This is designed for setting on new posts. There’s no interface for changing it when editing a draft post yet.
• Micro.blog will only show the cross-post services you have enabled in Account → Edit Feeds. If you have multiple feeds, things might be a little weird if there’s no obvious mapping between feeds and your blog.
• This is for blogs hosted on Micro.blog. If you are posting to an external blog like WordPress, there’s no mechanism to customize cross-posting other than the existing global options.

We’ve also expanded our support for the Micropub API to include syndicate-to fields. This is well-covered in the spec. The Mac app is open source and uses the same public API.

Another week, another round of ActivityPub-related improvements! Over the last few months we’ve been filling in little details for Mastodon compatibility in Micro.blog. Were at the point where Micro.blog is a good fediverse citizen and has everything most people should need.

Today I rolled out initial support for setting a Mastodon profile header image. This is a feature that Micro.blog doesn’t currently have for its own profiles. Should it? I’m not sure, but in the meantime I didn’t want it to hold back anyone who likes profile headers on Mastodon.

You can upload a profile header in Micro.blog under Account → View Mastodon Details. When Mastodon users follow your account, they will see the header on Mastodon. Here’s a screenshot of part of the settings screen:

Micro.blog also does a better job of notifying followers on other servers when a profile photo updates. Mastodon generally has a different philosophy for storing images than Micro.blog does. Micro.blog loads most images as needed when they are viewed and caches them for a certain length of time, whereas Mastodon waits for a server to tell it that a profile or post has updated and then copies any images to its own server.

We could take most major features in Micro.blog and keep fine-tuning them indefinitely. Mastodon support is no exception, but I think this is a good time to pause. Next week I’m excited to revisit some pieces of the core Micro.blog platform that don’t necessary have anything to do with the fediverse.

One of the last missing pieces for Mastodon compatibility was improving DMs, which I rolled out yesterday. We don’t have DMs as a core feature on Micro.blog because I think private messaging needs to be handled very carefully, and not every social network should have its own messaging system. iMessage and Signal are better for this.

DMs just going into the void isn’t good either, though. The compromise we’ve settled on is that when someone from Mastodon sends you a DM, Micro.blog forwards that message to you in email. The email now includes a link to a form for you to send a reply back to Mastodon:

There is no message history and messages are deleted automatically after 60 days.

Happy New Year! We shipped an update to Epilogue today that makes blogging about last year’s finished books more discoverable. If Micro.blog found any blog posts to include in your reading goal for 2022, it will show this at the top of the Goals tab:

Unfortunately I discovered after the calendar flipped over to 2023 that sometimes this button doesn’t show the right default new post text. I’m working on an update to fix that. (The button icon and spacing is also wonky.)

I’ve been going back and forth on how to expand the reading goals feature so that it can find more books. Currently it only works if you blogged about a book as you finished it. 2022 was a bit of an experiment, but 2023 is an opportunity for new habits. More blogging, less Goodreads.

We released a new version of Epilogue for both iOS and Android. I’m finally getting these platforms in sync. I think our bet on React Native is paying off.

This version adds a new post screen to your reading goals. As you blog about books you finished reading, Epilogue keeps track of them. At the end of the year, you can use the new post screen to compose a blog post with all the books you’ve read. Each book cover links to your blog post about the book.

You can see what my books post for 2022 looks like here.

This uses a new Micro.blog plug-in called Book reading goals. If you don’t have the plug-in installed yet, Micro.blog will automatically install it when publishing your blog if needed. (Epilogue works with any blog that supports the Micropub API, but this feature is only for Micro.blog because of the plug-in.)

Here’s a screenshot of the new screen on iOS. You can edit the text before posting.

With this feature, I’ve completed the transition away from Goodreads, and don’t plan on using it going forward. Good luck with your reading goals in 2023!

Micro.blog has always tried to put all the important URLs for your blog at your own domain name if you have one, including URLs for photos you post to your blog. I like this because it’s consistent with prioritizing content ownership, and makes migrating photos to another blog host easier in the future. We like clean, simple URLs.

Today we’re adding an option to enable serving photos from a content delivery network. This will update your photo URLs to use the CDN, while your home page and other blog pages will still use your own domain name. As your blog grows, especially with years of uploaded photos, this can really improve performance as people visit your blog from all over the world.

To enable the CDN, click on Design and look for the “ Use content delivery network for images” checkbox:

There is no extra charge for this feature, and it’s included in all plans. Happy photo-blogging!

Mastodon has a feature to move accounts from one instance to another instance. I spent some time recently exploring how this works so that we could support it in Micro.blog. I used this to consolidate my ActivityPub presence from multiple Mastodon accounts to just @manton@manton.org, powered by my blog and Micro.blog.

From what I can tell, this feature is not well-documented. It does not exist in the ActivityPub spec. The “Move” activity examples in the companion ActivityStreams spec also do not cover moving accounts. So I’ll document some of the technical bits here in the hope that it’ll be helpful to other folks.

To move accounts, 2 things are required:

• From the new instance, set up an “alias” that links your new and old accounts.
• From the old instance, initiate a migration to the new instance.

The Mastodon documentation says that aliases should be set up on both sides of the migration, but this does not seem to be required. In my testing, an alias is only needed on the new instance.

Because I wanted to move to Micro.blog, I added an alias in Micro.blog that references one of my old accounts: @manton@mastodon.social. You can find this in Micro.blog under Account → View Mastodon Details → Aliases.

Aliases are added to the ActivityPub profile information in the field alsoKnownAs. Here’s a snippet of my info:

{
  "preferredUsername": "manton",
  "name": "Manton Reece",
  "alsoKnownAs": [
    "https://mastodon.social/users/manton"
  ],
  …
}

For debugging, I often use curl on the command line to poke around at people’s accounts. To see my full ActivityPub JSON, use something like this with the “actor” URL returned from WebFinger:

curl -L -H "Accept: application/activity+json" https://manton.org/activitypub/manton

The next step is to sign into the old Mastodon instance and tell it to move to Micro.blog. Mastodon will take a few actions when this starts:

• It will verify that there’s an alias on Micro.blog, confirming that both accounts are yours.
• It will lock your Mastodon account, updating the profile to tell people about the new Mastodon instance. (In my case, actually powered by Micro.blog.)
• It will send a “Move” activity to all the instances for all your followers, telling them to update their references to point to your new username.

The “Move” activity is sent to each follower’s inbox just like other activities such as “Create”. It includes a field target for the new instance that the user is moving to:

{
  "actor": "https://mastodon.social/users/manton",
  "target": "https://manton.org/activitypub/manton",
  …
}

Mastodon won’t add alsoKnownAs to your ActivityPub profile on the old instance, but instead it will add a similar field named movedTo with the new actor URL:

{
  "preferredUsername": "manton",
  "name": "Manton Reece",
  "movedTo": "https://manton.org/activitypub/manton",
  …
}

Updating your followers can take quite a while. Likely hours and possibly over a day, if you have hundreds or thousands of followers. It makes sense that this is a very low priority background task. You can watch the progress as Mastodon essentially decrements your follower count on the old instance.

Here’s what Mastodon now looks like for my account, to tell people that I’ve moved:

This is a fairly new feature in Mastodon, and I expect we’ll need to keep refining our support for it as there is more real-world usage. If you’re using Micro.blog, also remember that Micro.blog is not Mastodon. You can follow and reply to anyone on Mastodon, but you can’t use Mastodon-only clients like the upcoming Ivory from Tapbots.

What about moving in the opposite direction, away from Micro.blog to Mastodon? We’ll be adding that later. ActivityPub is only currently enabled for new Micro.blog users, or if you’ve manually enabled it, so I want to wait until we’ve enabled it for all users. Otherwise there will be no way to move Micro.blog-only followers.

Last month I flew out to Portland and rented a van from Escape Campervans. The trip started because of meetings but it kept getting extended as I tacked on more places to visit. I posted some photos while I was on the road, which I’ll link again below, but I wanted to summarize a few thoughts now that the trip is over and I’m back in Austin.

It was a fantastic experience. I figured at the end of it, I’d either be completely burned out on the van lifestyle or ready to stay on the road. I’m glad to be home, but not burned out.

My daughter and son joined me for a few days at the beginning and end of the trip, too. It was great to share part of the experience with them and helped avoid loneliness while so long away.

Here are the main camping locations from the trip:

• Ainsworth State Park, Oregon. Literally the last night the camp was open before winter. Had the Multnomah Falls basically to myself because it was cold and rainy and kind of a miserable early morning outside.
• Fort Stevens State Park, Oregon. Loved exploring around Astoria. Planning to be back.
• Cape Lookout State Park, Oregon. Rained all night. Not good beach weather, but a good stop while heading down the coast.
• Umpqua Lighthouse State Park, Oregon. Still want to eventually visit all lighthouses on the west coast.
• Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, California. Beautiful trees, so much to see in nearby parks. Driving through Avenue of the Giants was a highlight.
• Salt Point State Park, California. Beautiful rocky views of the ocean after the twisting turns of Highway 1.
• Courtyard at Fisherman’s Wharf, California. A hotel! Ditched the van in a parking lot for a day to explore the city. Felt luxurious.
• New Brighton Beach, California. Outside Santa Cruz, stayed here 3 nights. 10 minutes to nice coffee shops to catch up on work.
• Terminal 4, California. Interesting campground on the water, north of the Richmond Bridge. Abandoned buildings everywhere, felt like a post-apocalyptic drive to a view of San Francisco.
• Marriott at Union Square, California. Splurged on a hotel again for the final night. Saw Bono’s show at the Orpheum Theatre.

Stopped at many other parks, coffee shops, bookstores, and beaches along the way. I’m going to publish my check-in history later.

The timing wasn’t ideal because it felt like Twitter was imploding as I was on the road. There was a lot of new interest in Micro.blog. I worked a little every day, but some days not enough. Even so, having the flexibility to just pull over into a park and use my laptop on the table inside the van from anywhere was pretty great.

I can’t overstate how different it is to have a van to eat and work and sleep in compared to tent camping. It rained for a significant part of the trip, pretty much every day in Oregon, but it never ruined anything.

Feel very lucky to have been able to take this trip. I learned a lot of what to do and not do. Wasted some money on food I could never finish using. Spent a fortune on gas. Nervously navigated cities in a van larger than what I’m used to driving.

But the good days made it so worth it, and even with occasional extra stress of last-minute planning I felt that time slowed down… Awake with the sun, coffee and work, beautiful vistas, some driving, cooking dinner, popping open a can of wine, then reading and bed when it got dark. It was very freeing. I don’t think it was a midlife crisis, but I did feel a few years younger, reminding me of backpacking in Europe ages ago. After some months back at home, pretty sure I’ll be ready to get back out there.

Today we’re rolling out better support for attaching multiple photos to a post in Micro.blog on the web. The native apps have been able upload to multiple photos with a post for years, so it’s a little embarrassing that it has taken so long to get the web version updated too.

If you click on an attached photo, you will also see new options for removing the photo or setting a description for the photo, which is included in the HTML’s alt tag.

Attached photos are added at the end of a post. We think this streamlined approach to the UI is the best default for most people. If you want to mix the photos in between paragraphs of text, you can continue to use the “Copy HTML” button on the Uploads page and paste the img tag into your post. Our companion iOS app Sunlit also has more control over post layouts.

Note that these improvements do not change how photo posts are displayed in the Micro.blog timeline. Short posts with a single photo or a few photos are shown inline, and longer posts are truncated with a link back to your blog.

Enjoy! Happy photo-blogging.

Over the summer, Jon Hays and I started working on a new project to build a places database that can power location check-in apps. It’s based on OpenStreetMap, but focused just on places. We call it Meridian, and it has the amazing domain name latl.ong.

For years I’ve been using Foursquare to check into places like coffee shops, restaurants, and landmarks. I love having a record of places while traveling, and I’ve published many of them to a special blog. I just don’t like depending on a single company for this data.

Meridian is open source and separate from Micro.blog, but it will form the foundation for location check-in features in our apps like Sunlit and Micro.blog. You can see a little of what we have planned for Sunlit in these screenshots:

Why build something new like this? There seemed to be a missing platform for small location apps. Foursquare is increasingly interested in business customers. Google is full of ads. OpenStreetMap is a great start, but also has quite a learning curve. If all you want is nearby places, it’s too much work to bring along all the overhead of a full mapping API.

The architecture of Meridian will allow other platforms like Micro.blog to host their own copy of the data, feeding back into Meridian and OpenStreetMap. The goal is to design something as distributed as possible, where multiple people using different apps can add new places to grow the database, while still having an API that is simple to use. We’ll iterate on it slowly but there are already some pieces in place to start experimenting with. Should be fun!

Today we’re excited to announce an early preview of Micro.blog 3.0 for iOS. We are rebuilding the app to move closer to feature parity across iOS and Android. We’re updating the user interface based on years of feedback, adding a tab bar and cleaning up some screens in the app.

This is a major update, and it will take time to get right. The first 3.0 beta is missing several features from the current 2.3 release for iOS. Post editing, managing uploads, creating pages, external blog posting, and more will follow in later betas. There also is no special iPad split view yet. If you want to try 3.0, we’d love to hear what you think, but note that it may be months before the beta catches up with the current shipping iOS release.

You can join the new TestFlight beta here. You can’t have both versions installed at once. If you want to go back to the 2.3 release, just download it again from the App Store.

I take a lot of photos at coffee shops. For some reason this morning I thought it would be fun to create a page on my blog that just shows coffee photos. I already use Micro.blog filters so that whenever I include the ☕️ emoji in a microblog post, it assigns the Coffee category:

The next step was to create a template layouts/_default/coffee.html in my custom theme that would pull posts from this category. It grabs the latest 100 posts, then also checks if the post has a photo (“photos not equal nil”):

Finally, I created a template content/coffee-photos.md to tell Micro.blog to use that template when creating the web page:

Voilà! Looks pretty good.

We shipped version 2.5 of Micro.blog for macOS today. I had originally intended to just add a new Replies section of the app for this version, but it looked kind of lonely by itself, so I added Bookshelves too, with a multi-window interface for managing books you want to read or blog about. This uses our existing JSON Feed-based API for books data.

Here’s a screenshot of my bookshelves:

You can download the latest version from the help page or choose “Check for Updates” from within the app.

If you’re puzzled by why Micro.blog has all these book-related features… We have a lot of members of our community who love to read and write. If it’s easier to blog about books you’re reading, we can eventually build a distributed, web-scale alternative to Amazon-owned Goodreads. This won’t happen overnight. It’s a years-long goal and just one of many facets of the IndieWeb that we’re interested in.

Books are also great for mental health and thoughtful commentary, broadening our understanding of other perspectives, which maybe the world could use right now.

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.

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.

Today we launched a design update for the Micro.blog web interface. Vincent has been working on this with a focus on the mobile interface especially, and it looks great on the iPad as well.

In the previous version, when viewing on mobile the sidebar would collapse and you’d get a hamburger menu that was clunky to use. Now, the most important menu items like Timeline, Mentions, and Discover will move to the header, with a new popover menu for accessing other features.

You can see the new layout even on desktop by just resizing your window smaller. Here’s what the header looks like on tablet and at small desktop window sizes:

And on the iPhone, with the new popup menu open:

We are very excited to roll this out. The iOS and Android apps will always be a great choice for posting or checking replies, but they can’t do everything the web version can do. The web version of Micro.blog is now much nicer to use everywhere.

Today we rolled out a few improvements to bookmarks, including an import from Instapaper and Pocket. This is meant to complement Micro.blog’s bookmark archiving, where Micro.blog archives a copy of a web page and allows making highlights in it. Like the archiving and highlights, the import feature is for Micro.blog Premium subscribers.

I’ve personally wanted to consolidate my bookmarks to Micro.blog, because I’ve had some things in Instapaper and some newer posts in Micro.blog. Micro.blog is not designed as a replacement for every feature in other read-later services, but instead a quick way to save links and either reference them later or start a new microblog post from a highlight.

To learn more about bookmark archiving and highlights, check out the video in this post on the news blog from when we announced Micro.blog 2.0.

I’ve also improved other aspects of bookmarks, like faster loading, paging through many hundreds or thousands of bookmarks, and better profile icons for domain names that are added to Micro.blog.

The goal in my experiments with React Native is to build an app that feels as native to iOS as possible. Early on I tried to use SF Symbols and couldn’t get it to work, so I dropped in some custom icons instead. But the more I used the new version of Epilogue on my iPhone, the more this compromise bugged me.

I briefly considered exporting the symbols I need as SVGs or PNGs and using them in the app only on iOS, but that’s against Apple’s license. Not worth even the small risk. Sticking to real SF Symbols also ensures the icons match other apps if Apple redesigns them slightly in future versions of iOS.

I revisited using SF Symbols today with the component birkir/react-native-sfsymbols. A default install shows a runtime error when attempting to load a symbol. Luckily there’s a work-around mentioned in one of the issues.

I copied this file from the repo and saved it as SFSymbols.tsx. Then instead of importing from the Node module, I just import that file:

import { SFSymbol } from "./SFSymbols";

It works! Here’s a quick screenshot of my navigation bar now:

I’m continuing to plow ahead with the Epilogue rewrite. I’ve added a storage class to wrap AsyncStorage, making it easier to persist various bits of data. I’ve added searching for books using the Google Books API, largely copying JavaScript code from the previous version. The fetch() calls are the same between web browser-based JavaScript and React Native.

Today I’m working on adding the posting screen. This shows a modal text view with some default blog post text for the current book, so you can quickly blog about what you’re reading:

Just like the navigation controller, the modal uses React Navigation so that it looks and feels the same as any native iOS app. In the JSX, we add a group containing the new modal screen declaration:

<NavigationContainer>
	<Stack.Navigator>
		<Stack.Group>
			...
		</Stack.Group>
		<Stack.Group screenOptions={{ presentation: "modal" }}>
			<Stack.Screen name="Post" component={PostScreen} />
		</Stack.Group>
	</Stack.Navigator>
</NavigationContainer>

For this version, I’m using a simple multi-line TextInput class. This appears to use a real UITextView under-the-hood.

One thing I’d like to experiment with later is integrating the Markdown syntax highlighting Objective-C code from the current Micro.blog app, making it a component that we could use in multiple apps. It obviously wouldn’t work on Android, but we’ll need something like it when we’re ready to switch the official Micro.blog iOS app over to React Native.

Even though Epilogue 1.0 was simple, it did support Dark Mode on iOS. I always run my phone in Dark Mode, so I didn’t want to lose that when rewriting Epilogue in React Native.

There are a handful of helper utilities to access iOS-only features in React Native, like Platform.isPad . There’s also useColorScheme, which can be used to check if we’re running in Dark Mode:

const is_dark = (useColorScheme() == "dark");

There doesn’t appear to be built-in support in React Native to use different sets of styles automatically. There are, however, at least a few third-party libraries to make this easier, including various dynamic stylesheets and React Navigation’s themes. I started to go down that rabbit hole, then stopped… There’s a lot to learn and I’d rather adopt a quick “worse is better” approach to first get a feel for how painful it is to style my views manually.

I have a Styles.js source file that looks like this, controlling layout and colors for UI elements in Epilogue:

import { StyleSheet } from "react-native";

export default StyleSheet.create({
  bookTitle: {
    marginTop: 8,
    paddingLeft: 7
  },
  bookAuthor: {
    paddingTop: 4,
    paddingLeft: 7,
    color: "#777777"
  },
  ...
}

To use this style in JSX, I have something like this:

<Text style={styles.bookAuthor}>Neil Gaiman</Text>

To support Dark Mode, I’ve added a special “dark” field to the styles object. This will only have style properties that I want to override from the default light mode. In the case of bookAuthor, there’s no need to change the padding, just the text color:

bookAuthor: {
  paddingTop: 4,
  paddingLeft: 7,
  color: "#777777"
},
dark: {
  bookAuthor: {
    color: "#FFFFFF"
  }
}

Back to the JSX, I check my is_dark variable and then reference a different set of styles. JSX lets me pass an array of styles, so we’ll include both the light mode version (styles.bookAuthor) and then the dark value (styles.dark.bookAuthor) that will override the color:

<Text style={is_dark ? [ styles.bookAuthor, styles.dark.bookAuthor ] : styles.bookAuthor}>Neil Gaiman</Text>

Here are a couple screenshots showing each mode side by side:

The JSX code is admittedly a little clunky. I can see how it could be cleaned up and more readable with other solutions. But the app only has a few screens, so I’m going to run with this for now.

Micro.blog 2.3 is now available in the App Store, including these changes:

• Added syntax highlighting for HTML when creating or editing posts.
• Fixed compatibility with some Micropub servers.

We’ve supported color highlighting in Markdown for a while, and now this release adds HTML too. I’ve found this most helpful when editing a blog post that includes images, where the img tag was probably added by Micro.blog:

I also fixed a bug with Micropub servers, no longer requiring the me parameter from some IndieAuth API calls. There has been some related housekeeping of the IndieAuth spec recently, and I want to make sure Micro.blog can post to as many non-Micro.blog servers as possible.

Today we’re releasing the first public beta of Micro.blog for Android. You can download it here on Google Play.

Vincent Ritter led the development on this and there’s a ton in it for a first beta. Some of the features in this initial version:

• Timeline, Mentions, Bookmarks, and Discover.
• Creating new posts and replying.
• Uploading photos.
• Viewing conversations.
• Emoji picker in Discover.
• Multiple blogs and multiple Micro.blog accounts.
• Choose categories when posting.
• Viewing profiles and following new users.

We have a few more things to wrap up before we officially call it 1.0. For example, push notifications will make the final release but they aren’t in this beta. There will be bug fixes, UI tweaks, and other improvements based on feedback.

Enjoy! Let us know what you think.

Today we released an update to the Mac app that adds a preview window. This is handy for longer posts with lots of Markdown or HTML, so you can check what they will look like when published.

I decided to make this a floating window that previews whatever post window happens to be open. You can move it off to the side of your screen and then quickly show or hide it with the keyboard shortcut whenever you need it.

Full changes:

• Added View menu → Preview when writing a blog post. The preview floats over other windows and will show you what the current Markdown or HTML will look like.
• Fixed posts list not updating when saving a new draft.
• Fixed post button for drafts to show that the draft will be published. Use File → Save to keep saving as a draft on Micro.blog.

As always, the download link is on the help site, or choose “Check for Updates” if you’re already running an older version.

A few weeks ago, something in a discussion prompted me to look up the site 43 Things, which I used in 2005 to keep track of big things I wanted to do. The site is long gone, but a lot of it is preserved in the Internet Archive. I took a screenshot of the 10 things I had on my list back then:

The site was peak Web 2.0. Part personal to-do list, part community, part API. Something about the design was fun to use.

Now that it has been 15+ years, I thought I’d revisit my list and see how I’m doing now, with some context from 2005:

1. Finish my degree — I spent a year at UT Austin, but I was more interesting in working at tech companies than attending school. Later I went back to take classes at night. I always thought I’d eventually get my college degree. Seems unlikely at this point.
2. Animate a short film — Might be something I’ll get back to one day. A couple years ago I dug up some drawings and posted them to my blog.
3. Run a half marathon — Still haven’t done this. I’ve run a couple 5Ks.
4. Watch a space shuttle launch — Sadly the space shuttle is gone. There are more rockets than ever, though, so this seems doable.
5. Write a book — I consider this done.
6. Drive across the USA — I’ve driven from Texas to the west coast and to the east coast. Never all the way across. Can’t see this one happening unless I actually live on one of the coasts.
7. Learn Ruby — Done.
8. Work on a political campaign — I’ve volunteered for a few campaigns to call voters and knock on doors. Seems good enough.
9. Read 50 books in 2005 — I’m sure I didn’t ready that many books in 2005, but I could still do this for another year. Last year I read 33 books and this year my goal is 40.
10. Live to see Halley’s Comet return in 2061 — The most difficult thing on this list. I would be 86.

Daniel and I also discussed this list on Core Intuition 402 from 2020.

There has been a lot of activity around Micro.blog plug-ins lately, inspiring me to improve the theme and plug-in system. Under the hood Micro.blog uses Hugo to process blog templates, and we’ve been running an ancient version of Hugo. Having such an old version has held back some plug-in features, so today I started the process of migrating to the latest version of Hugo.

It’s a big jump, from version 0.54 released in 2019, to 0.91 released just a couple weeks ago. Some things are likely to break, so instead of updating everyone’s blog automatically and dealing with the fallout, we’re going to take it slow. The new version of Hugo is opt-in for now, under the Design screen:

Each blog on your account can use a different version, making it convenient to run Hugo 0.91 with a test blog while keeping your main blog as-is.

I don’t recommend updating unless you are working on a theme or plug-in that needs a specific feature from newer versions of Hugo. I’m testing all the built-in themes with the new Hugo and will keep updating them with tweaks until we’re happy that everything is running smoothly.

If you do try Hugo 0.91, I’ve already updated the Default and Marfa plug-ins — as well as some built-in Micro.blog templates — to work with the new version. You can install the latest versions of the plug-ins for those themes to get the latest versions, instead of waiting for Micro.blog to update.

The most common problem I noticed was using .Data.Pages. That’s a quick fix to use .Site.Pages instead so that it’s compatible with both versions.

I’ve also fixed some HTML escaping issues this week. Micro.blog is now smarter about not escaping special characters like “<” and “{{” when inside a code block.

It was way back around IndieWebCamp Austin 2017 that I proposed a new archive format for blogs. These .bar files are essentially ZIP files that contain HTML with Microformats, JSON Feed with original Markdown or HTML, and uploaded photos. The nice thing about this format is that you can unzip them and preview your entire site in any web browser, and it contains all the related photos and other files.

I’ve been working on improving support for Blog Archive in Micro.blog. Version 2.3 of the Mac app can now import .bar files with a nice preview window and progress. It can import into Micro.blog or external Micropub and WordPress blogs.

When the Mac app uploads photos for your blog from the archive, it rewrites img tags in your HTML to use the new URLs, so it’s a good way to migrate a blog with no or minimal cleanup needed afterwards.

Tools that want to process these files can choose between parsing the Microformats or JSON Feed version of the blog. IndieWeb-friendly tools may find it easier to work with Microformats, and new apps can use any JSON parser.

When generating a .bar file, I recommend having plain HTML in index.html with common Microformats like h-feed, h-entry, u-url, dt-published, and e-content. In the JSON Feed, you can use content_text for the source Markdown or HTML if you have it, and then HTML in content_html. Micro.blog will prefer content_text if it’s there.

For an example to test with, check out this file: example.bar. This contains a few posts and screenshots from our Epilogue blog.

I really hope this format catches on. The files can be big, but they give you a single file that you can backup anywhere.

I’ve updated the Mac app with some improvements around drafts and scheduling posts. There’s a new File → “Schedule Post” menu command to tell Micro.blog to publish a post at a date in the future.

This update includes a handful of other fixes and minor changes too. See the help page for the download link and full release notes. Or choose “Check for Updates” in the current app.

Today we’re announcing a major new feature for Micro.blog Premium subscribers: email newsletters. Micro.blog can now manage letting readers subscribe to your blog and receive emails for new blog posts. It’s deeply integrated into Micro.blog and works great for collecting multiple microblog posts together automatically.

Why are we creating yet another email newsletter feature when there’s already Substack, Buttondown, HEY World, SendGrid, MailChimp, and others? We always want to make blogging easier and to encourage more people to blog. We think many people want to publish to the web and email, instead of splitting their writing off into a members-only newsletter.

Micro.blog’s email newsletters are like Micro.blog’s cross-posting: designed to start with your blog first and be effortless to maintain. You can enable it and forget about it. Micro.blog will create newsletter drafts from your blog posts automatically. You can edit a newsletter if you want, or ignore it and Micro.blog will queue it to send to your subscribers.

There are a few settings when you enable email subscriptions: have Micro.blog send a new email for every full-length blog post; collect all your blog posts for a week together and send them in a single email; or collect all your blog posts from a category into a monthly email. The weekly and monthly options work great when you have a mix of short and long posts, so your email subscribers can read them together in order.

We think Micro.blog’s email newsletters are a great option for potential readers who are not using RSS. Everyone uses email. You can keep email subscribers in the loop without pulling attention away from your blog. All your content still lives in one place and not fragmented across multiple services.

When you enable email newsletters, Micro.blog also adds a special email address that will be the “from” address for any emails sent for your blog. Your subscribers can reply to your email and Micro.blog will forward the text to you, without having to make your real email address public.

To try out email newsletters, click on Plans to make sure you’re on Micro.blog Premium. This $10 plan also includes podcast hosting, video, and bookmark archiving. You’ll see a new Newsletter link in the sidebar on the web, where you can enable email subscriptions, manage subscribers, and edit email drafts before they’re sent to your readers.

I’ve also posted a video to YouTube showing some more of how it works. Let us know what you think!

This week we improved a few things in Micro.blog for managing drafts and scheduling blog posts to publish at a future date. If you have any drafts or scheduled posts, you’ll see a new set of buttons in the Posts screen on the web to filter your posts:

You can save a post as a draft in the iOS or macOS apps, on the web (click the “…” button), or from apps like Ulysses, iA Writer, and MarsEdit. Some apps can automatically schedule a post just by picking a date in the future. You can now also take any draft post in Micro.blog on the web and schedule it from the editing screen:

As always, Micro.blog is first about quick, easy posting. If you don’t need drafts or scheduling, the UI should stay out of your way. I know how cluttered some other blog systems can get, and we want to keep Micro.blog as streamlined as possible even though it does have advanced features under the hood.

Last week I took an Amtrak train out to Los Angeles. I decided not to blog about the trip until I was back home, so that I could mostly unplug and focus on editing my book Indie Microblogging. Now that I’m back, I’m going to share a quick recap and some photos.

I used Swarm along the way to capture check-ins at train stations, restaurants, and other landmarks. Those are published with map thumbnails over at manton.coffee. I’d like to do more with this site, filling in check-in history and eventually moving it away from Swarm.

It’s unusual for me to be away from home so long. In recent years for conferences I’ve been flying out for only a few days and then back. The solo train ride was like stepping back in time. A much slower pace, no wi-fi, and inconsistent cell coverage.

I arrived in LA very early, just before 5am. Opted to pay a little extra 💰 to check in to my hotel early, had breakfast at a nearby coffee shop, then rented a car. Driving around LA in traffic is its own story, which I talked about on Core Intuition 489.

The trip centered around catching a Spurs game with Jon at Staples Center as we attempt to visit all the NBA arenas. Choosing the train instead of flying ensured the trip was a break from the everyday routine, giving me time to focus on writing. It was also great to explore the city, checking out coffee shops, the library downtown (I had just read The Library Book about the LA library fire), tacos in Santa Monica, the view from Griffith Observatory, a quick drive-by of Disney Animation, Angels Flight Railway, and lunch in Koreatown.

I got used to the little quirks about train travel. Eating in the dining car. Settling into my sleeper car roomette. Watching the landscape roll by, changing so slowly it almost didn’t seem to change at all for hours. Then I’d look up from work and New Mexico had faded into west Texas and I was nearly home. Feeling very lucky that I was able to do a trip like this.

Last week I sent out a survey to ask how people are tracking books they are reading or blogging about. The response was encourage enough that I got to work building a new app for books. It’s called Epilogue.

As I discussed on Core Intuition, we already have a few iOS-only apps, but Micro.blog is before anything else a web-based platform. Vincent is working on an official Android app, and whatever we do next should be available on multiple platforms. So I decided to try something new with Epilogue, designing the UI with HTML to share it across both iOS and Android.

I’m pretty happy with the result. There are a few quirks in the UI — things we can probably smooth over in future versions or if necessary replace with fully-native screens. But I was able to build the whole thing quickly by iterating in Safari on my Mac.

Here are a few screenshots:

Epilogue is now available as a public beta on TestFlight. It will be available on Google Play soon-ish. I have it working, even if Android is still mostly uncharted territory for me. I also feel like I need to get some public feedback before going too much farther down this road.

It’s open source. GitHub says the language breakdown is:

What’s next? This first beta is for people who are already using Micro.blog. It’s for quickly adding a book or blogging about it. The search is new, powered by Google Books. We’ll wrap up 1.0 soon and then consider where to go with the app in future versions.

With a dedicated app, we could add more features than would fit into Micro.blog on the web, but I also don’t want to get too sidetracked. The goal is a lightweight app that can complement other book services, making it easier to blog about books.

This is supposedly the first mural still standing in Austin, Creation painted on the University Baptist Church in 1950. Seems a fitting way to wrap up this series of 30 murals. The artist, Seymour Fogel, also studied under Diego Rivera.

A few of the murals I had hoped to visit have since been painted over. Murals are inherently fleeting. Even the best murals are always at risk of graffiti or new construction. Artists know this, but they put their mark on the city anyway, a gift for us to admire and capture in photos before everything changes.

This might seem like a distraction or procrastination technique, but bear with me here. @patrickrhone’s talk at Micro Camp must’ve been sitting in the back of my mind because I realized I should collect my 30 day series — coffee shops, libraries, parks, and murals — into a book. I’m using it as a trial run for the print layout for Indie Microblogging, experimenting with the size, fonts, footnotes, etc.

After I finish the final week of murals, I’ll send a copy off to IngramSpark for printing. I’m actively editing Indie Microblogging and feel good about wrapping it up this year. If everything turns out well with 30 Days, maybe I’ll include the book as a bonus for Kickstarter backers at higher tiers too. We’ll see.

To pair with my post about downtime, I thought I’d share our current Linode servers. Some people ask us about this kind of thing, and I know I love reading about how other platforms are set up.

My server naming theme for Micro.blog is the Disneyland Railroad. Servers are named after locomotives, people who inspired them, or theme parks. Fort Wilderness in Orlando, which used to have a train back in the 1970s, is the server that failed last night and is still offline.

The only server that doesn’t get a name is Discourse, because I don’t really enjoy hosting it and hope to shuffle it off somewhere else eventually. We also use Linode’s load balancers, object storage, and Amazon S3.

Thanks to everyone who has a Micro.blog paid subscription. Your support allows us to add new servers when we run into problems and make everything more stable and fast in the future.

Election Day is today. I hope that it will be a turning point for the country, so it seems like a good time to also look back.

I try to write every day, whether it’s here on this blog or in my journal using Day One. Posts about family or personal stories usually stay private, because there are plenty of other topics to write about here. Today I want to collect together a few things that have happened this year, events that I might jot down in my journal but which haven’t made it into the blog.

Back in March, when the kids were home for spring break and the seriousness of the coronavirus was just starting to become real, we wrote down some rules on giant sticky notes and stuck them on the fridge. Like the rest of the country, we were trying to figure out what to do, and it helped get everyone mostly on the same page.

There was still a lot of confusion about what was safe. Texas was about to go into lockdown. The NBA was about to postpone games. SXSW was about to be cancelled. It felt like everything was just on the verge of changing. I thought if we could only stay safe for a few weeks, we’d make sure that our family didn’t get sick when hospitals would be overrun.

We made masks. I didn’t do much of the sewing, but our home-made masks turned out great. It was fun to do something a little creative, especially early on.

We ordered more masks later, including my new go-to mask with a Mickey Mouse pattern. We fell into a routine of ordering groceries online. I rarely went inside stores. I wore my mask whenever I was picking up take-out dinner or running other errands. I washed my hands all the time. The few weeks of quarantine had turned into months of isolation.

Later in June we went to the beach for a couple days, to get away. I was worried, because the Houston and Galveston area were getting hit hard by COVID, but we were barely 30 feet from anyone else. It felt great to be near the water, eat outside on the deck with a cool breeze, and escape the normal stress of the quarantine. We had a house on Airbnb to ourselves, cooked most of our meals there, and I picked up pizza one night in town.

A few days later we were up in Dallas. That weekend I wasn’t feeling great. I figured it was a cold or allergies. No fever, no shortness of breath. Because I had been with family, out of caution I decided to get tested for COVID-19. I talked to a nurse for advice and also called a nearby drive-thru clinic that did testing.

While waiting in line to get tested, I convinced myself that I had overreacted. I was wasting everyone’s time, while people with much more serious symptoms needed help. But I got tested anyway, felt better the next day, and went on with my work week, releasing a major upgrade to Micro.blog to support plug-ins that week.

A doctor called me with the results about 4 days after I had gotten tested. It was positive.

My symptoms were extremely mild. I’m still not sure the test wasn’t a fluke. I had planned to follow up with an antibody test to confirm it, but I never did. Even so, going through that process of getting tested had highlighted for me what Texas and other states were going through back in June and July, and now again as winter looms.

This year has been long, and disappointing, but there was hope. We flattened the curve. We were well on our way to putting the coronavirus behind us and looking toward school restarting. But we opened too quickly without the right guidance. We lost control of the virus. We were almost there, and we blew it.

Fast forward several months when I’m writing this. We flattened the curve a little, again, only to see the progress slip away. The setbacks have been frustrating, watching so many people flout the guidelines. 2020 could have gone much differently — much better — but there were good moments too, with family and work, watching the Micro.blog community grow.

We can’t get 2020 back. There’s a lot to catch up on. Let’s make 2021 count.

We are getting ready to roll out a major update to Micro.blog. The web version and all the native apps are being updated at the same time. The new version will launch Tuesday, September 29th.

What’s new? To start with, the web version has been redesigned with a new sidebar, bringing common areas of your microblog like managing posts and uploads to the top-level of Micro.blog so they’re easier to access.

In the iOS and macOS apps, we’ve added new Pages and Uploads section, so you can create or edit standalone pages, and upload podcasts or other files to your blog. There are new icons in the sidebar and the layout in many screens has been improved.

On the Mac, creating a new post has been moved to its own window. This makes it easier to see the timeline while you are typing a new post or reply. You can also drag photos from the Uploads section into a new post.

We are expanding what the current $10/month plan can do, renaming it Micro.blog Premium. In addition to hosting podcasts and video, Micro.blog Premium will archive the contents of bookmarked web pages, with a special reader interface for highlighting text. You can quickly create a new blog post from highlights in Micro.blog.

I’ll be talking more about the new bookmarks and highlights as we get closer to launch. I’m excited to bring something totally new to Micro.blog, but in a way that stays true to Micro.blog’s mission of making it easier to blog.

And there are many other bug fixes and minor improvements, such as (finally!) editing replies. I can’t wait for everyone to check it out next week.

Sunlit 3.0 will ship tomorrow. For the last post in this blog post series to highlight Sunlit features, I want to mention a convenient way to follow Tumblr photoblogs.

Micro.blog is based on blogs and IndieWeb standards so that it can integrate well with the rest of the web, not be walled off like a silo. One aspect of this is that you can follow many blogs in Micro.blog even if the author of the blog hasn’t registered on Micro.blog yet, similar to how you can subscribe to blogs in a feed reader like NetNewsWire or Feedbin.

For Sunlit, there’s special support for searching for Tumblr blogs so that they are easy to follow directly from within Sunlit. Use the search under the Discover tab to enter the domain name to follow, as shown in this series of screenshots:

There is expanded support for following other blogs and even Mastodon users in Micro.blog itself. You can always use Micro.blog to find a blog to follow, then go back to Sunlit and those posts will appear in the Sunlit timeline.

Tomorrow we’ll update the App Store for the Sunlit 3.0 release. I hope you like it!

Sunlit 3.0 will ship in 3 days, on Tuesday. Today I want to highlight another new feature: the redesigned Discover browsing interface.

Both Sunlit and Micro.blog use Discover to help you find people to follow. Because Sunlit is all about photos, Sunlit takes the usual Discover sections from Micro.blog, but shows only the photos from each section instead of all post types.

For example, tapping on 📚 at the top of Discover will show microblog posts that have used the books emoji along with a photo, which will often be a book cover or other photo of the book. Tapping on 🧶 will usually show people’s knitting or crochet projects. Tapping on ☕️ will show coffee-related photos. Tapping on 🍞 will show baking.

It’s a great way to discover people to follow even if they haven’t posted a recent photo that you might see in the main 📷 photos section.

Check back tomorrow for another blog post in this series as we look forward to the Sunlit 3.0 launch. And thanks to everyone who tested the Sunlit beta!

Sunlit 3.0 will ship in 4 days, on Tuesday. Today I wanted to highlight one of the new features in 3.0. We’ve redesigned the new post screen to be faster and more flexible than the previous version. It’s great for posting a quick single photo, but it can scale up to full blog posts with multiple sections of text and photos.

Here’s a screenshot for part of a blog post I wrote last year about a trip to Toronto. Sunlit lets me structure the blog post in sections that can each have one or more photos. It then uploads the photos to my blog along with the HTML layout for the post.

I’ll continue this blog post series about Sunlit 3.0 with a new post tomorrow.

One of the minor hassles that has held me back from blogging about books I’m reading is finding the ISBN and cover art. To improve this workflow, I’m testing out a new book search feature on Micro.blog.

Type in the title of a book, and Micro.blog will search Open Library. It is not as complete as Amazon or Goodreads, so I hope to expand this in the future with more data sources. You can add author or ISBN to the search too.

Micro.blog will also show thumbnail images for any book covers that are found for the various editions. You can click on one of the book covers to select it, leading to this page:

From there, use the Micro.blog or indiebookclub buttons to start a new microblog post with the title, author, and ISBN filled in:

Our app Sunlit has an interesting history. Jonathan Hays and I came up with the original concept for the app way back in 2012. The app changed form a couple times, first building off of App.net, and then adapted for blogging. Along the way, it accumulated a lot of baggage — old code and old designs that made it difficult to keep improving the app.

Today I’d like to give a sneak peek at what’s next for Sunlit: version 3.0, a complete rewrite, sharing essentially no code with previous versions. Jon has been working on this for a while, leading development while I focus most of my time on Micro.blog itself. We are taking what we’ve learned and trying to build an app that can appeal to people looking for an Instagram alternative, as well as people who want more control over publishing blog posts with multiple photos.

Here are a couple screenshots:

The app will also be completely open source. It can publish to Micro.blog, WordPress, or via Micropub to IndieWeb blogs. It’s written in Swift. There’s no release date yet, but there will be a public beta, and we hope to take the time to get it right.

I often hear from people who like the built-in designs on Micro.blog-hosted blogs, but they want to customize just one little thing about the default HTML. No problem! Because the designs are built with Hugo, you’ve been able to create a custom theme to override any template file or add new functionality to your blog. But that flexibility comes with a learning curve: it requires knowledge of HTML, CSS, and sometimes even JavaScript.

Today I’m launching a plug-ins system for Micro.blog that formalizes a lot of the power of Micro.blog themes, but wrapped in a package that is easier to develop and install. Instead of creating a custom theme for your blog and editing the templates yourself, you might be able to find a plug-in that will add the feature. Unlike custom themes, there can also be multiple plug-ins installed for a single blog.

Here are a few of the things plug-ins can do:

• Provide a brand new design. Plug-ins are actually just special Hugo themes, so anything a Hugo theme can do, a plug-in can provide. Now web developers can create custom blog designs that are easy to install.
• Override one or more template files in a theme. For example, changing the header or footer, or adding new CSS or JavaScript includes.
• Add new Hugo parameters that are available in the plug-in or another custom theme. Micro.blog can even show a settings screen so that users can edit parameter values easily.

There is a new plugin.json file that a plug-in can provide to tell Micro.blog what parameters should be configurable for the plug-in. This file also includes the plug-in metadata and any extra CSS or JavaScript references.

Here’s what a plugin.json file would look like for a plug-in I wrote to provide some more control over Micro.blog’s default Photos page. Because the plug-in defines some parameters, those are available in a settings UI inside Micro.blog automatically:

Plug-ins are available under a new “Plug-ins” tab in your blog settings. Click “Find Plug-ins” to see a list of registered plug-ins.

Since this is brand new, it only includes a few plug-ins that I wrote. Web developers who want to contribute a new plug-in to the directory can email me: help@micro.blog. There’s a help page here with more details about developing plug-ins.

And if you have ideas for a plug-in, let me know that too. In the past, when I’ve heard a feature request that requires a custom theme, I’d have to consider either adding that as a built-in Micro.blog feature — which might complicate the UI for everyone, even if few people wanted the feature — or I’d explain how to create a custom theme to solve it. Now, I can implement some of those requests as plug-ins.

There’s a lot more which I’ll be documenting. Having said that, Micro.blog plug-ins can’t do everything. As we learn what people want, I’d like to work with plug-in developers to iterate on this system, as well as clean up some of the built-in themes so that it’s easier to override certain behavior in a blog. Enjoy!

We’ve updated Micro.blog’s muting today to work more consistently everywhere, with a new option to hide replies that mention the username you are muting. Now when you mute a username you’ll see an additional checkbox to enable this option:

Posts that would normally appear in any of the Discover screens or search are now hidden. Replies in the timeline and conversations are also hidden.

The muting interface is on the web under Account → Edit Muted Users. I’ve also updated the API to support muting.

I added a new built-in design to Micro.blog today: Archie, based on the Hugo theme of the same name. It has been lightly modified to work well in Micro.blog, and my changes are on GitHub.

What I liked about this theme is that it was different than most of the built-in designs, and it has a custom dark mode interface:

The link colors can be changed using a custom theme by editing the top of the main.css or dark.css templates.

I’ve redesigned the theme text editor in Micro.blog, adding a preview pane and other improvements. It now features a split view with the template on the left and your web site on the right.

When you update a template, Micro.blog publishes your change and then reloads your web site. Micro.blog knows when the publish has finished, so you no longer need to keep reloading, waiting for the change to show up.

This works best with a test blog, which you can create from Posts → Design → Edit Custom Themes. You can use it with your main blog too, but test blogs are usually faster to update. If your theme is being used by multiple blogs, Micro.blog will always show the test blog in the split view.

I’ve also updated all the built-in designs to include the theme modified time in any CSS references on your blog. This helps web browsers reload your design right away, while still caching the CSS until you edit your theme again. There’s a new Hugo variable for this: .Site.Params.theme_seconds

If you’ve ever worked on a custom theme, I think you’ll find this interface drastically better than the old workflow. It is much easier to iterate on a design. Enjoy!

Here’s a quick tip about iA Writer’s new support for Micro.blog. If you use hashtags in iA Writer to organize your documents, you can configure your hosted microblog to automatically assign Micro.blog categories based on those tags.

When you publish to Micro.blog, the tags from iA Writer will be included in the blog post content. Create filters in Micro.blog to automatically assign categories based on those tags. Filters are run whenever a new blog post is created.

Here’s what a post might look like in iA Writer, using the hashtag #travel:

In Micro.blog, click Posts → Categories → Edit Filters to create a new filter. For the text, enter #travel, because we know it will appear somewhere in the text content. Then pick a category to assign for any matching posts:

Note that the hashtag will still appear in your blog post, although you can edit it out later if you want to.

Exciting news today: the latest version of iA Writer for both iOS and macOS can publish to Micro.blog-hosted blogs. It uses the Micropub API, which is Micro.blog’s native API for posting.

To get started in iA Writer on iOS, go back to the first screen in the app and tap the settings icon → Accounts → Add Account → Micropub. You’ll be prompted to approve iA Writer in Micro.blog. If you’re not signed in yet in mobile Safari, you can sign in first and then try again:

In a text document, tap the share icon → Publish → New Draft on Micro.blog:

When you publish a post, it’s saved on Micro.blog as a draft, and iA Writer opens a preview of the draft on Micro.blog. From there, you can tap to publish it.

Thanks to the iA Writer team for making this happen! And because it’s built on IndieWeb standards, it’s not just tied to Micro.blog. I’d love to see similar support in other popular text editors.

Today we’re launching a new feature on Micro.blog: support for multi-user blogs, so your whole team can write posts on a shared blog. We think it’s going to be great for small companies, families, and schools, with everything from shared photo blogs to podcasts.

When you upgrade a blog to the teams subscription, a new “People” tab will appear in Micro.blog. Here you can give existing Micro.blog accounts access to post to the blog, or you can invite new people. Team members can publish new posts, edit existing posts, upload files, manage categories, and more.

For example, for our Micro Monday podcast, previously Jean and I had to share a Micro.blog account to make changes to the podcast. Now it’s a team podcast where either of us can post with our individual Micro.blog accounts:

When someone is added to a team blog, that blog shows up as an additional blog on the web or in the native iOS and macOS apps. A single Micro.blog account can have access to any number of blogs and podcasts.

The teams plan is a $20/month subscription with unlimited users. It also includes podcasting and video hosting. If you invite someone who doesn’t already have a Micro.blog account, Micro.blog will give them immediate access to the team blog without prompting them to create their own microblog or sign up for a paid subscription.

To upgrade a blog, click on “Plans” and choose “Upgrade to Teams”. If you have any questions, let me know at help@micro.blog.

Here’s a simple tip for using MarsEdit with Micro.blog. By default, formatting options in MarsEdit such as Bold and Italic map to HTML tags: <strong> and <em>. You can customize them to use Markdown instead.

Click on Format → Customize to bring up MarsEdit’s Formatting Macros window. Delete the existing Bold and Italic commands and click the “+” button to create a new one. For Bold, add “**” for the opening and closing markup and set the keyboard shortcut ⌘B. For Italic, use “_” and ⌘I.

Not everything in Markdown can be added to MarsEdit this way, but it’s nice to have a couple of the basics. You can also set the Preview Text Filter in the preferences window to Markdown.

Micro.blog supports primarily 2 APIs for posting to hosted blogs:

• Micropub, the IndieWeb API used in the official Micro.blog apps.
• MetaWeblog, the XML-RPC API used in MarsEdit for macOS.

XML-RPC used to be the standard for blog posting, widely supported in all blogging platforms. It is still used in WordPress today, and I’ve supported it in Micro.blog from the beginning. I’ve always wanted Micro.blog to be compatible with as many apps as possible, especially MarsEdit.

To understand XML-RPC, we have to go way back in blogging history, to 2001 and the original Blogger API by Evan Williams. Micro.blog’s support for XML-RPC still closely matches what the API looked like nearly 20 years ago.

As is obvious from the name, requests and responses in XML-RPC are sent as XML. Common data types such as integers, strings, and structs are encoded with rules outlined in the XML-RPC specification. To create a new post in the original Blogger API with the words “Hello world”, the request to the method blogger.newPost might look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodCall>
  <methodName>blogger.newPost</methodName>
  <params>
    <param>
      <value><int>app ID</int></value>
    </param>
    <param>
      <value><int>blog ID</int></value>
    </param>
    <param>
      <value><string>manton</string></value>
    </param>
    <param>
      <value><string>mypassword</string></value>
    </param>
    <param>
      <value><string>Hello world.</string></value>
    </param>
    <param>
      <value><boolean>1</boolean></value>
    </param>
  </params>
</methodCall>

Subsequent blogging platforms extended the Blogger API with their own features. Instead of blogger.newPost, Movable Type had mt.newPost with similar parameters, adding a title field. WordPress had wordpress.newPost.

To try to unify future improvements under a vendor-neutral standard, Dave Winer proposed the MetaWeblog API. MetaWeblog switched to passing content as structs, which could more easily be extended with additional fields, and added an image upload API, metaWeblog.newMediaObject. Dave patterned the field names after RSS:

The MetaWeblog API uses an XML-RPC struct to represent a weblog post. Rather than invent a new vocabulary for the metadata of a weblog post, we use the vocabulary for an item in RSS 2.0. So you can refer to a post’s title, link and description; or its author, comments, enclosure, guid, etc using the already-familiar names given to those elements in RSS 2.0.

Dave wasn’t the only one who hoped to bring consistency between feed formats and a blogging API. A couple years later, AtomPub was created based on Atom feeds.

Ben Trott of Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, blogged at the time about the benefits to basing an API on the Atom feed format, which back then was called Echo:

Benefits to developers: using the same data model and serialization for syndication, archiving, and editing simplifies the development of tools to work with (produce and consume) these formats, for obvious reasons: code written to produce an item in an Echo feed, for example, can also be used for producing data sent in an API request or packaged up for archiving.

AtomPub was adopted in Blogger but is not supported in any other modern blogging platforms. Earlier this year, MarsEdit developer Daniel Jalkut announced that he would also be phasing out support for posting to Blogger.

Between the early 2000s when there was so much activity around blogging standards, and the growth of the IndieWeb and W3C-recommended standard Micropub API in 2017, there was a notable lack of innovation in blogging. Everyone was pulled away to social networks. Platform-specific APIs became the norm. It is because of this lull that XML-RPC survived so long without a modern replacement.

So that brings us to today. Micro.blog has always worked with MarsEdit, but because it’s based on a standard that was frozen, MarsEdit could not support all of Micro.blog’s features. And while Micropub is clearly the future, there is more we could do now without requiring MarsEdit to be adapted for Micropub.

I’ve been working with Daniel to identity what is missing from MetaWeblog and rolling that into a new Micro.blog-specific flavor of XML-RPC. This is essentially what Movable Type and WordPress had done years ago. I had avoided it until now because Micro.blog should default to supporting standards wherever possible before inventing something new.

We talked through this on Core Intuition 416. Now that there’s an alpha of MarsEdit 4.4 available, I’ve documented the new API parameters here. It is based on MetaWeblog, but cleaned up with more consistent field names and support for new features such as creating and editing pages on your blog, server drafts, and downloading all posts.

Micro.blog now shows up in MarsEdit as one of the supported blog systems, along with Tumblr and WordPress:

I’ve been using the new MarsEdit for the last few days, and it really is a big improvement for Micro.blog. Keep an eye out for the final release.

Podcasting with Micro.blog requires no configuration. Just upload an MP3 with your blog post and Micro.blog handles the rest: creating a podcast feed, using your profile photo as the cover art, and setting other defaults.

If you want full control over the podcast feed, it’s just a Hugo template. You can edit it with a custom Micro.blog theme to add anything you want. Because of this flexibility, I’ve been recommending that anyone starting a podcast on Micro.blog who doesn’t want to create a separate account (which would have its own profile photo) to tweak the podcast feed to override the default cover art.

Now it’s much easier. There’s a new feature on Micro.blog under Posts → Design that lets you change the cover art:

Click the existing cover art to select a new image from your uploads:

Happy microcasting!

Version 1.8 of the Micro.blog iOS app is available. From the release notes:

• Added “Posts” menu for editing your recent posts. Designed for quick updates and typo fixes for Micro.blog-hosted blogs. Can also be used to publish drafts or delete posts.
• Switched to system font and tweaked colors and layout through the app.
• Fixed a few issues including missing push notification text.

Here are a couple screenshots of editing recent posts, similar to what the macOS version has had for a while:

You can download the update on the App Store.

I’ve heard from a few folks recently who would like a better way to control on a per-post basis what appears on their blog and what appears in the Micro.blog timeline. The idea is that they are effectively writing for multiple audiences, and while they might want all posts on their blog, not everything needs to appear in the Micro.blog timeline where it’s more likely to spark a conversation.

One of the main goals with Micro.blog is to make blogging easier, so we very deliberately try to keep the posting screen uncluttered. Even basic fields like the title of a blog post don’t appear until they are needed. I’m not in a hurry to add more options, because more options can lead to confusion, making Micro.blog harder to use and more likely that someone will give up before posting.

However, there is a lot of power underneath Micro.blog, just one step removed from the default interface. We can leverage categories to build this feature of picking which posts should appear in the timeline.

The timeline itself is not magic. It is built from RSS and JSON feeds that tell Micro.blog where your posts are. Usually there is only one feed configured under Account → “Edit Feeds & Cross-posting”, and that feed includes all your posts. To limit what appears in the timeline, we can remove that feed and replace it with a feed that includes a more limited set of posts.

Micro.blog-hosted blogs already have RSS feeds for each category. Today, I improved the feeds to match the default RSS feed, so that they include the full text (and any photos) instead of a truncated version of the post.

You can create a category named something like “Micro.blog” or “Timeline” that will contain posts that you’d like to appear in the Micro.blog timeline. Categories are managed on the web under Posts → Categories. Then, remove the default feed from Account → “Edit Feeds & Cross-posting” and add the RSS feed for that new category. If the category is called “Timeline”, the URL for the RSS would look like this:

https://your-username.micro.blog/categories/timeline/feed.xml

Now when you’re posting, assign the new post to that category and it will appear on Micro.blog:

Your followers will see that post and can reply. All other posts will still appear on your Micro.blog-hosted blog on the web, and other readers can follow those posts in a feed reader.

While we have greatly improved the performance of publishing new posts to your microblog and refreshing feeds, there are still occasional hiccups where posts don’t appear in the timeline as fast they should. Today I’m adding an obvious feature: a refresh button!

This screenshot is from the Account → “Edit Feeds & Cross-posting” screen. The refresh button simply tries to download your feed again as soon as possible, instead of waiting in the backlog of potentially thousands of other feeds Micro.blog is checking.

You should very rarely have to click this. Micro.blog is always checking your feeds for new posts. But if your posts aren’t appearing in the timeline right away after they show up on your microblog, this button will help speed up the process if anything is stuck because of errors.

Behind the scenes, the refresh button is just sending POST /ping with your feed URL. This is automatic for Micro.blog-hosted sites and can be automated from external hosting as well.

During the project day at IndieWebCamp Austin last weekend, I built a new feature for Micro.blog that I’m calling Conversation.js. It’s a JavaScript include that lets you take a conversation on Micro.blog and drop it into your blog.

Like a lot of Micro.blog features, it works either as a simple feature you can enable with a click, or as a more advanced API that can be customized however you’d like. If all you want to do is enable the feature, just click on Posts → Design and look for this checkbox:

Behind the scenes, this checkbox is adding a new Hugo parameter .Params.include_conversation that can be used in a custom theme. All the built-in Micro.blog designs have been updated to check for this parameter and then add the following line of JavaScript:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://micro.blog/conversation.js?url={{ .Permalink }}"></script>

This JavaScript include gathers the replies to the current blog post and adds them to your web page. The HTML elements all have class names so you can style the replies to match your site.

See this page on my blog for how the replies look on one of my blog posts.

If you need even more control, you can request the conversation as JSON from apps or scripts by adding format=jsonfeed to the URL. Or you can add format=jf2 to produce output that matches Webmention.io, so it’s easier to repurpose tools that already work with Webmention.io.

Speaking of Webmention, this is not just about taking Micro.blog-only replies and putting them on your blog. Because all Micro.blog-hosted blogs support Webmention, and Micro.blog can accept mentions even from blogs that have not yet registered on Micro.blog, with Conversation.js it now becomes much more useful for other blogs to send you replies. Those replies can appear on your blog, with Micro.blog mostly acting as glue so that both blogs can talk to each other.

I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a while. It didn’t take long at IndieWebCamp Austin when I finally sat down to code it, but I think it opens up a lot of options for Micro.blog in the future, including acting as an IndieWeb-friendly replacement for Disqus and other commenting systems.

IndieWebCamp Austin is this weekend! Jean MacDonald will be in town for the event, so we’re also going to have a Micro.blog meetup on Friday evening. Anyone interested in Micro.blog is welcome to join us whether you’re attending IndieWebCamp or not.

Easy Tiger on 6th Street, 5-7pm. Jean and I will be there a little early to get a table, probably outside if the weather’s nice. We’ll have Micro.blog stickers.

Hope to see you at the meetup! And you can also still register for IndieWebCamp Austin.

Gluon is the first cross-platform mobile app for Micro.blog. It supports multiple Micro.blog accounts and features like local drafts, muting, and themes. Developer Vincent Ritter has documented the development process on his blog through several iterations of the app.

Congrats Vincent! You can download Gluon on the App Store here.

We’ll never have ads on Micro.blog. It’s really important to me that it’s user-supported and the timeline only includes posts you want to see. But if ads are already on a platform like Twitter, why not use them? I’ve experimented a couple times with Twitter ads. This week I decided to run a very small campaign to help get the word out about IndieWebCamp Austin.

I’m not sure it’s very effective, but I find the results interesting. Here’s a screenshot of the stats after the ad ran over the weekend:

IndieWebCamp can be difficult to explain succinctly. Micro.blog can be too, for that matter. But I’ve found the IndieWeb events I’ve attended extremely valuable, both to be inspired by what people are working on and to have a little time to make Micro.blog even more IndieWeb-friendly. Hope to see y’all there!

When Daniel Jalkut posted about Apple’s email to keep his blog active in Apple News, I commented that Apple no longer even allows RSS for new blogs. I got this mixed up, though, confusing the options for publishers with what feeds users can add to the app themselves. Nick Heer followed up to clarify:

Nevertheless, it seems like it’s still possible — according to that News Publisher site — to create a new channel based on RSS. Existing RSS-based channels also appear to be functional still; this one is, at least. However, it is no longer possible to subscribe to an RSS feed as a user with Apple News.

I’ve now confirmed this. Today I tested using Apple’s News Publisher with a new Apple ID, and it does let you add RSS sources. However, it really discourages it. The default is Apple News format, and when you switch to RSS you get this prompt:

As soon as you start using Apple News format instead of RSS, you can’t go back to RSS. It’s hard to tell if this was a technical limitation with how Apple News manages different feeds on the backend, or a decision to move Apple News away from RSS. Probably a little of both.

Sam Grover has been working on a new iOS app for Micro.blog called Mimi Uploader that is all about batch uploading photos to your blog. I love it because it takes a specific need and provides a really polished workflow just for that. After the upload finishes, you can copy Markdown or HTML to reference all the photos for easy pasting into another app or Micro.blog on the web.

It’s now available as a public beta. There’s a link to the TestFlight beta on Sam’s microblog.

When I was first developing Micro.blog, I made a choice that quick replies in the timeline should be stored separately from regular blog posts. I thought that most people wouldn’t want replies mixed in with their blog posts at their own domain name. I also liked that replies were simple, usually short and without images, because it makes the timeline much more readable.

This has admittedly poked a hole in one of the most important goals of Micro.blog: owning your own content by having it at your own domain name. If someone wanted more control over their replies, they would need to use an external blog like WordPress, even though Micro.blog had great support for Webmention and cross-site replies.

I always thought this limitation would be temporary. As I’ve been finishing up my book Indie Microblogging, this trade-off with replies from the early days of Micro.blog has become untenable for me. Storing replies outside of your Micro.blog-hosted blog, even if you can export them or move to another IndieWeb-friendly platform, is too silo-like for the mission of Micro.blog.

Today I’m rolling out the first of a series of improvements to replies. You can now optionally have your replies on your own blog, with reply permalink URLs at your own domain name.

Here’s a screenshot of the option on the Account screen. The popup menu will include any blog that’s hosted on Micro.blog, so you could even create a separate microblog just for replies:

Replies get a new reply post type in Hugo, which is used under-the-hood for your microblog. This means they won’t show up in your default feeds or home page, although you can create a custom theme to change that.

Micro.blog adds a few Hugo parameters that can be used for reply HTML templates:

• .Params.reply_to_url: The URL for the post you are replying to.
• .Params.reply_to_hostname: Just the hostname part of the reply-to URL.
• .Params.reply_to_username: The username for the Micro.blog user you’re replying to.
• .Params.reply_to_avatar: The URL for the Micro.blog user’s profile photo.

I’ve added a new template in the Marfa theme to use these:

There’s also a new page at yourblog.com/replies with the most recent replies. If you enable pagination under your blog’s settings, that page will expand to show all your replies.

It’s still early for this feature, and for now I’ve made some of these customizations only in the Marfa theme. Consider this new plumbing that you can take advantage of in your custom themes, with more improvements to follow later so this works as consistently as possible across all the built-in designs. But it is a major step to strengthen the IndieWeb principles in Micro.blog.

I’ve finished adding the special pin for anyone who participated in the Microblogvember challenge. Jean MacDonald also has an emoji recap of all the challenge prompt words.

There’s a link at the top of your Account page in Micro.blog, or click here to view your pins. If you don’t see the pin yet, it should appear whenever you post to your microblog next, which tells Micro.blog to check for new pins again.

Because some people started late or posted twice in one day, the “algorithm” for calculating the pin isn’t very strict. If you were blogging regularly in November and used 30 of the prompt words from the challenge, you’ll get the pin. This was a lot of fun and I hope we can do more challenges like this in the new year.

Now is also the perfect time to unlock the “Happy Holidays” pin by posting to your microblog with something about the winter holidays. It’ll match on a bunch of keywords including Christmas, Hanukkah, Santa, snow, reindeer, and a few others. Enjoy! ❄️

There’s a powerful filter mechanism inside Micro.blog for automatically assigning categories based on criteria in the post. For example, if the post includes an img tag, assign it to a Photos category. Or if the post includes the 📚 emoji, assign it to a Books category. I blogged about this in September.

Today I’ve expanded this feature to also allow matching on whether the post is a short microblog post or whether it’s a longer post with a title. Like other parts of Micro.blog, it uses the title to determine how to categorize the post. Posts without titles are always considered short microblog posts.

To create new filters, go to Posts → Categories → Edit Filters.

You can use this in combination with matching the title or text in a post, or leave those fields blank when creating a filter to match all posts. This makes it easy to move all full-length posts into a category, which can also have its own RSS feed.

There’s a new built-in theme available on Micro.blog called Lanyon, based on the open source Hugo theme of the same name. It’s a clean, readable design with a slide-out menu for page links.

I’ve been working on getting several new themes ready for Micro.blog. Some Hugo themes work with only a couple tweaks, and some take more time. My fork of Lanyon with Micro.blog-specific changes is on GitHub.

Two new versions of the third-party Micro.blog app Icro have been released. The iOS version now supports push notifications, and a new version is available for macOS for the first time.

Because the official Mac app is distributed as a direct download, this is actually the first Micro.blog app available in the Mac App Store. It was ported to macOS using Catalyst, so it requires Catalina, which I just upgraded to. It’s great to have another microblogging option on the Mac!

Since the very beginning of Micro.blog we’ve encouraged you to use your own domain name with your microblog. It’s the best way to control your content and an important principle of the IndieWeb. Now it’s even easier.

If you don’t have a domain name yet — or need a new one! — Micro.blog can handle registration for you. We are using the Name.com API to purchase and configure the domain name for you. Payment is handled on your existing Micro.blog subscription and everything is automatic. No messing with DNS records.

Here’s a screenshot of finding a domain name, which is linked under the domain name section on Posts → Design:

I’m very excited about this feature. We’ll be expanding it based on feedback but it is already quite powerful, even including email forwarding. And of course, you can always register a domain name elsewhere on the web and point it to Micro.blog.

Following my experiment with importing Foursquare data, I’ve officially updated Micro.blog to support storing location information. The Micropub API now accepts checkin and location properties for sending venue name, URL, latitude, and longitude to Micro.blog. This works with the JSON format in OwnYourSwarm, which connects Foursquare/Swarm to your microblog.

Micro.blog on the web and the native apps do not send any location information. Right now this is purely an opt-in feature for third-party apps like OwnYourSwarm and custom solutions using the API. We consider location information very private and will never enable it automatically.

When a post has location information, you can see the coordinates in the posts list on your account:

The default Micro.blog themes do not currently do anything with this information. You can create a custom theme to access the coordinates as custom parameters, like this:

{{ if .Params.location_latitude }}
  <img src="https://example-mapping-service.com/?center={{ .Params.location_latitude }},{{ .Params.location_longitude}}" />
{{ end }}

The 4 available parameters are location_name, location_url, location_latitude, and location_longitude. The venue name is automatically prepended to post content so that no theme changes are necessary. I’d like to explore offering maps as a built-in feature in the future. Enjoy!

Years ago my wife and I were in Vegas and had a chance to see Elton John… and missed it. This year, when I realized he was playing in Toronto on the night of our 20th anniversary, I bought tickets as a surprise birthday gift and we planned a short trip around the concert.

We arrived in the late afternoon earlier this week, took the airport train to Union Station and the subway to our hotel, then went down to Polson Pier to catch the sunset. We had dinner and explored the Distillery District before checking out Jurassic Park for the Raptors game — too late, they had already closed it off — and settling for beers at the sports bar next door to watch the end of the game.

The next day we did a bike tour of the city. On the way to meet the guide, we wandered down a street to look at the trees and a woman said hi as she walked by. Realizing we were tourists, she stopped and told us that she had been friends with Jane Jacobs, who lived just a block away. There’s a sign outside her old house.

The bike tour was a great way to see a bunch of Toronto. Murals, CN Tower, trains at Roundhouse Park, sculptures at Ireland Park, the university, and several neighborhoods. We stopped for hot chocolate and then back on our own visited a couple libraries including the Sherlock Holmes room at the Toronto Reference Library.

Dinner in Little India and then the streetcar back for the concert. We loved it. Even with just a couple days we really got a lot out of visiting the city. Looking forward to coming back one day.

As more Micro.blog bloggers use categories to organize their posts, I want to keep making categories more useful while retaining the simplicity of microblogging by default. Today we’ve added an option on the web (under the new “…” button when starting a new post) to choose categories right as the post is being created, as well as a new interface that can filter blog posts into categories based on the text in those posts.

For a while we’ve had a feature to automatically filter photo posts into a category. If you create a category called Photos or Photography, Micro.blog gives you this simple checkbox on the categories screen:

This is powered by filters that look for a match in the title or text of a post and then set a category for you automatically. These filters can now be managed from a new “Edit Filters” button on the categories screen on the web:

By default, filters are applied to new posts only. To also apply the filter to all posts, there’s a new “Run Filter” button. For blogs with thousands of posts, make sure to give Micro.blog a little time to update all your posts and publish them to your blog.

When we released Micro.blog 1.7 for iOS last week with Sign in with Apple support, Micro.blog could not actually send email to Apple’s private relay server. This is an issue that has popped up on the Apple developer forums and likely affects many developers. I was so excited for Sign in with Apple that I thought it was worth shipping anyway, crossing my fingers that we could resolve it shortly after iOS 13 was out.

Apple’s private email relay server is almost completely undocumented. In this blog post I’ll describe how I got it working.

The key issue is that the “return path” of your emails must be using a subdomain that can be verified by Apple. This blog post from SendGrid describes the solution in detail. I was happy to discover that I could customize this in the settings in Mandrill as well under Settings → Sending Defaults:

Here are the steps I took:

• Create a new subdomain. I decided to use mail.micro.blog. Set the TTL to just 1 minute, because you will need to change the DNS record multiple times during this process.
• Initially the subdomain should be a CNAME to your email provider. Mine was set to mandrill.com.
• Make sure you have SPF records for this new subdomain. Mandrill will walk you through this when you add a new subdomain under Settings → Domains → Tracking & Return Path Domains.
• Start registering the new subdomain in Apple’s developer portal. Apple will check the SPF records at this point. After you click Register, download the verification file.
• Create a new web site somewhere for your subdomain and update your DNS record to now point to that web host instead of Mandrill. The web site must support the latest encryption settings for HTTPS or it will mysteriously fail verification from Apple.
• I put the subdomain on GitHub Pages so I didn’t need to spin up a new server somewhere for it. If you use GitHub Pages, make sure to create .nojekyll file so that the .well-known folder that Apple needs isn’t skipped.
• Upload the apple-developer-domain-association.txt file from Apple to the new subdomain web site. Wait a few extra minutes to make sure the DNS has changed before clicking Verify at Apple.
• Also verify your root domain name and add the from email address you will be using to send email. Here’s what my settings look like when everything is working:

And finally:

• Change the DNS record for your new subdomain to point it back to mandrill.com.
• If any previous emails had already bounced, remove those from Mandrill’s blacklist under Settings → Rejection Lists so they will try to send again in the future.

As I type all of this out, I still can’t believe it’s so complicated. Apple should both document this and remove as much friction as possible, for example by allowing domain names to be verified by DNS records alone and providing much more detailed error messages when things go wrong.

We added Sign in with Apple to the next version of Micro.blog for iOS 13. It can be used to sign in to an existing Micro.blog account, or to create a brand new Micro.blog account right from iOS. It is the fastest way to start blogging.

Because Micro.blog doesn’t have passwords, in previous versions we had to send you an email to confirm signing in. With Sign in with Apple, we can skip this email verification and quickly sign you in with Touch ID or Face ID.

If you have an existing Micro.blog account and use Sign in with Apple with the same email address, you’ll be signed in to your current account. If you pick an email address that doesn’t match the email address used in Micro.blog, or if you choose Apple’s private email relay, Micro.blog will create a new account and start a hosted blog trial for you.

A few things to be aware of:

• You can have multiple email addresses associated with your Apple ID. When signing in, make sure to pick the one that is used by Micro.blog.
• If you accidentally create a new Micro.blog account, you’ll want to delete it so that you can sign in to your real account.
• Micro.blog cannot currently send email through Apple’s private relay service. I hope this will be resolved soon.

This update to Micro.blog ships on Thursday with iOS 13. If you’re already running iOS 13, you can try this update early by joining the TestFlight beta.

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.

I’ve decided to add Tumblr as a cross-posting service in Micro.blog. This means Micro.blog can take your blog posts and automatically copy them to a Tumblr blog.

I usually avoid adding blog hosting services to Micro.blog’s available cross-posting destinations. After all, if it’s a good blog host that I could recommend as your primary blog, why not just post everything there instead of using Micro.blog’s own blog hosting? But the more I’ve used Tumblr in the last couple of weeks, the more I think about Tumblr as a community first and a blog host second.

To add a Tumblr blog in Micro.blog, on the web click Account → “Edit Feeds & Cross-posting” → “Add Tumblr”.

In related news, I’ve removed the upload file size limit when importing a Tumblr blog archive to use Micro.blog hosting. If you have a Tumblr, Medium, or WordPress blog that you’d like to migrate to Micro.blog, click Posts → Import.

In all the Mac and iOS software I’ve worked on over the years, I don’t think I’ve ever had a new release ready as soon as Apple shipped their major updates to macOS or iOS. The timing just never works out, so I update a couple of weeks or months later. For iOS 13, I’m finally ahead of the game.

I just updated the beta of Micro.blog for iOS with a couple fixes, especially for dark mode on iOS 13. There’s more to do, but I feel really good about being able to have this ready.

If you’re running the beta of iOS 13, you can sign up for the Micro.blog beta here. Thanks for testing!

I’m excited to see where Automattic takes Tumblr, but even today there are already several Tumblr-related features built in to Micro.blog. Here are a few ways that Micro.blog can integrate with Tumblr.

Follow Tumblr users on Micro.blog: Micro.blog tries to play nicely with the rest of the web, so you aren’t limited to just following Micro.blog users. To follow someone’s Tumblr blog, on Micro.blog click Discover, then click the search icon, and enter their Tumblr domain name:

Click on the Tumblr user to preview their posts and follow them. Now when they post to their blog, those posts from Tumblr will appear in the Micro.blog timeline. Short posts, photo posts, and art from Tumblr look great in Micro.blog.

Add your Tumblr feed to Micro.blog: If you actively post to Tumblr and also have a Micro.blog account, you can add your Tumblr RSS feed to Micro.blog so that when someone follows you on Micro.blog, they see posts from both your main microblog and your Tumblr blog.

Click Account → Edit Feeds & Cross-posting, then paste in your Tumblr RSS feed:

Import your Tumblr blog to Micro.blog: Maybe you no longer maintain your Tumblr blog and want to move your old posts over to Micro.blog. First, export your posts from the Tumblr dashboard. That will give you a .zip file you can import into Micro.blog under Posts → Import.

Micro.blog is not a popularity contest. We don’t have follower counts or public likes because we think those numbers have overshadowed more important aspects of blogging, like the quality of writing and engagement within the community. But we do hear from podcasters using Micro.blog who hope to one day have sponsors for their podcast, and so they do need to know approximately how many listeners they have.

Today we’ve added a setting to enable basic MP3 download counts if you’re hosting your podcast on Micro.blog. It is off by default. It’s likely that most podcasts — especially podcasts that are just getting started — do not have many listeners, and that’s fine! If you don’t plan to have sponsors for your podcast, you can ignore this setting.

It takes time to build an audience. Don’t get discouraged. There’s value in telling your story whether it reaches 5 people or 500. I love recording my microcast Timetable because it helps me think through things I’m working on and share that process with anyone who is interested in Micro.blog.

There aren’t any fancy graphs for this feature. Just a download number for each episode under Posts on the web, next to the “Edit” and “Delete” buttons. You can enable it with a checkbox from Posts → Design. Micro.blog is not tracking the downloads until you enable it, and it doesn’t count you viewing your own podcast, so initially there won’t be anything to see until your podcast feed is refreshed and your MP3s are downloaded again.

With this setting enabled, Micro.blog modifies your podcast feed to use different MP3 download URLs. It may take some time before the new URLs make it to all your listeners.

Micro.blog’s download tracking does not closely follow the IAB guidelines yet. It is intended as a rough estimate. I’ll be working toward IAB compliance in the future.

Happy podcasting! Let me know if you have any feedback.

I love photo blogs. Last year, Jonathan LaCour wrote Microgram to allow anyone on Micro.blog to paste in a little JavaScript on their blog to show a grid of photo thumbnails. This has been a really popular add-on for Micro.blog — thanks Jonathan! — but we knew we’d eventually need this as a built-in feature.

Today I’ve added a new page for photos so that new blogs hosted on Micro.blog get something that works out of the box without JavaScript. We’re starting with a simple grid of photo thumbnails similar to Microgram, each linking to the microblog post, and I’d like to expand it with more options in the future.

It uses CSS Grid Layout, so you can also customize a bunch of things without changing the template. For example, to change it to 5 equally-spaced columns, click Posts → Design → Edit CSS and paste in:

.photos-grid-container {
  	grid-template-columns: 20% 20% 20% 20% 20% !important;
}

This new photos page is created automatically for any new blogs on Micro.blog going forward. If you already have a page called “Photos” and want to switch to using the new page, you can delete the page you created manually. Micro.blog will then show a “New Photos Page” button to create one of these new pages for you. (You can also rename or re-order the page.)

Apple this week rolled out an updated list of categories for their podcast directory. Some old categories were removed and new categories added. It’s a better fit for what the podcasting world looks like now.

If you have a podcast hosted on Micro.blog, I’ve updated Micro.blog today with the new categories. On the web, click Posts → Design to see the new list. (Your current category will continue to be used until you update your podcast settings.)

Thinking about starting a podcast? Micro.blog podcasting is $10/month and also includes a full blog and video hosting.

Micro.blog makes it really easy to post some text and a photo to your blog, but sometimes you want a longer post that includes multiple photos. Because Micro.blog puts all the photos at the end of your post by default, I’ve noticed some people looking for an easier way to draft longer posts.

I’ve added a new “Copy HTML” button next to photos on the Uploads screen in Micro.blog. Using this button, you can first upload multiple photos, then copy and paste the right HTML reference into your blog post draft wherever you want. Happy photo-blogging!

On road trips lately, I’ve been fascinated by out-of-business donut shops. If it’s late in the afternoon, sometimes a donut shop is just closed for the day. But it seems like many are closed for good, the old fryers and cooling racks gathering dust.

Why is this? My guess is that the startup costs for opening a donut shop are less expensive than many types of restaurants. There’s nothing special about a donut shop except that it’s fairly easy to get started, but no guarantee of success, especially in a small town. Most businesses fail.

Finally getting around to posting this. The last couple of weeks since WWDC have been busy. But as I usually do, I still want to capture a little of the week in San Jose. (Looking back on my old posts about WWDC from the 2000s is a great reminder of what the earlier conferences were like, and I wish I had more of those posts.)

Arriving Saturday evening in San Jose, I rented a car and checked into my Airbnb. This is the first time I’ve tried Airbnb for WWDC. Hotel prices are out of control and I thought it would be a good way to see a different part of the city. Daniel and I caught up over dinner.

Sunday morning I drove up to San Francisco. I’ve made it a tradition to visit the Walt Disney Family Museum every year, and moving the conference to San Jose hasn’t deterred that. I stopped at Blue Bottle Coffee in San Mateo on the way.

The special exhibit at the museum was Mickey Mouse drawings. It was an incredible collection. Afterward I had a bite to eat at the Presidio Picnic. Fog covered the Golden Gate Bridge.

I picked up Jon Hays from SFO on the way back, and we stopped at the new visitor center for Apple’s spaceship campus, then got coffee and lunch down the road at Chromatic Coffee. Also detoured slightly for a quick look at Winchester Mystery House. (Skipped the $39 tour. Ouch.)

I didn’t need the rental car anymore, so we dropped it back at the airport and took an Uber downtown, planning to go to sfMacIndie and watch game 2 of the NBA finals. That’s when the evening went completely off the rails. We were cruising down the highway and someone rear-ended our Uber so hard it felt like the car was standing still. Everyone was shaken up but okay.

The keynote was packed with new stuff. I knew this was going to be a big year, but I was expecting most of the news to be around Marzipan (Catalyst). That ended up being a small part of the morning. I watched the keynote from AltConf and worked on highlighting WWDC-related posts in our new Discover section for the conference.

I was feeling a little out of it most of the morning. As the day progressed and I saw friends or met new folks, I started to feel better. Brent Simmons held a NetNewsWire meetup in the afternoon.

Tuesday at lunch was our Micro.blog WWDC meetup. This is the 3rd year in a row we’ve held the meetup. It was great catching up with everyone. If you made it to the meetup, thank you! I sent an email to everyone who had RSVP-ed.

That night was The Talk Show Live with John Gruber and his guests Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak. Great show.

Wednesday morning I stopped for coffee on 2nd street for a little work before walking over to AltConf. My flight was in a few hours so I had just enough time for one session: Leah Culver’s talk on making the podcast app Breaker as crash-free as possible. (Leah also co-founded Pownce back in 2006. I’m hoping to interview her for my book, Indie Microblogging.)

This was a bit of a strange year for me. While I’m sorry I missed some people and some events, I think it was good that I was back home early. I’m not going to make any other conferences this year. If you’re looking for places to go, I highly recommend IndieWeb Summit in Portland later this month, and Release Notes in Mexico in the fall.

Apple’s new stuff didn’t disappoint. I’m most excited for Catalyst and Sign In With Apple, which I blogged about here. These are both very practical solutions to real problems. The new iPadOS improvements are also welcome, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with SwiftUI. Overall, a great WWDC.

It was a good week at WWDC. Micro.blog helped sponsor last night’s LIVE near WWDC concert, and we held our 3rd annual meetup on Tuesday afternoon. I just sent the following email to everyone who RSVP-ed to the meetup.

Thanks to everyone who was at our WWDC meetup! If you couldn’t make it, or I missed talking to you in person, you can always send me an email if you have any questions or feedback.

Throughout the week at WWDC, I was asked how Micro.blog is going. New people join the platform every day, thanks to word of mouth, blog posts, and even mainstream stories like the article in The New Yorker. I’m an optimist. I believe if more people blog and use open tools, the web will be better, and platforms like Micro.blog will thrive.

But it doesn’t happen by accident. Facebook and Twitter are massive platforms. Our team at Micro.blog is tiny. Every time you tell someone about Micro.blog it makes a difference. Every paid subscription gets us a little further.

I hope everyone has enjoyed their time in San Jose! Your support of Micro.blog means a lot.

The 3rd annual WWDC Micro.blog meetup will be today at 12pm outside Grace Deli & Cafe. If you’re attending WWDC this week, grab a to-go box lunch and meet us there, or you can get a sandwich or wrap first from the cafe. Jean, Jon, and I will be there until 2pm.

It’s less than a block from the convention center: 303 Almaden Blvd. View the location in Google Maps or Apple Maps.

We’ll have some more Micro.blog stickers and we’ll also be giving away a VIP ticket to the LIVE near WWDC benefit concert for App Camp for Girls. We’d love to talk to anyone who is currently using Micro.blog or interested in learning more about indie microblogging.

Hope to see you there! Thanks for all your support.

At the beginning of the month, I started a new blog post series: visiting a city park each day for 30 days. I’m now 23 days in, wrapping up the final week before I leave for WWDC in San Jose. For some parks, we’ve brought a picnic lunch, and for others I’ve sat with my iPad and worked on blog posts or the upcoming book. A few days there wasn’t time for anything but a short walk around and photo.

Unlike my previous 30-day series for libraries and coffee shops back in 2016, I’ve been consistent about taking a photo every day, which I’ve collected together as thumbnails on the main page:

Watching that grid of photos grow from a single photo to dozens is a daily reminder of how progress works on anything. It’s slow, but there’s confidence in seeing a project go from possible to inevitable.

This is really what blogging is all about. It’s not just the individual posts that matter. It’s also the collection, built over time with a system designed to encourage regular posting. I love that at the end of this 30-day series I’ll have a web page with photos of parks all over Austin, and bits of text that capture a small part of what each park was like.

After launching support for Mastodon on Micro.blog, I blogged about how Micro.blog is evolving to support 3 types of usernames: normal Micro.blog users, Mastodon users, and IndieWeb-friendly domain names. This last type of username is where I think we can bring more social network-like interactions to the full web.

Here’s an example. In a post on Micro.blog, you can @-mention someone’s blog by including @domain.com in the post, using their domain name. If that blogger’s site supports Webmention, Micro.blog will send your mention to their blog, where it could be included as a comment.

I’ve been testing a new feature for this type of username in Micro.blog. You can now follow blogs in the Micro.blog timeline, even if the blogger hasn’t yet registered on Micro.blog. On the web, click Discover, then click the search icon, and enter their domain name. Micro.blog will auto-discover their JSON or RSS feed, letting you follow their blog just as you would follow any Micro.blog user.

This feature is designed for blogs with a custom domain name. It assumes one blog, one user, one domain name, so it doesn’t work to follow specific feed URLs yet. You’ll still want a traditional RSS reader for sites that have multiple feeds.

I’ll continue to improve this based on feedback, and start adding it to the native apps. Micro.blog is already one of the most open platforms of its kind, and I think this has a lot of potential to take it a step further.

We’ve launched a redesigned home page for new users on Micro.blog today. The old design was a little too sparse and didn’t do a very good job of explaining what Micro.blog is. The challenge is that Micro.blog is really 2 things — a blog hosting platform and a social network for microblogs — so the new design reflects that with a 2-column layout.

To give an example of what posts on Micro.blog look like, we include recent posts from the Discover section directly on the home page. There are also profile photos of the team members at the bottom so that new users have a better idea of who is behind the platform.

In 2016, I tried working from a new coffee shop every day for 30 days, then later followed that with 30 days working from libraries. Each day I would post a microblog post and sometimes a photo. You can find links to all these posts on my 30 days page.

When it was all done, I wrote:

After wrapping up libraries, I thought I’d make it a trilogy of 30-day endeavors, with a final 30 days of working from city parks. This was a suggestion from Daniel Hedrick, who had worked from parks before, tethering to his iPhone since there’s usually no wi-fi. I loved the idea right away because it fit so well with the goal of getting out of the house and discovering something new in my own city. I even spent a couple hours earlier in the month researching parks and planning out whether I could do it.

But I quickly realized that I was burned out on commuting all over town, so I tabled the idea. Fast-forward a few years. This week, I’ve been struggling to stay productive as my attention is pulled in a few directions with tasks for Micro.blog.

I’ve also been working more on my book Indie Microblogging, which I can write from anywhere on my Mac or iPad. I think restarting the “30 days” idea will force me to carve out some uninterrupted time to write, and get me out of a bit of a rut from working at home. It will also be a great use of Micro.blog.

For day 1 of 30, I went to Walnut Creek Metropolitan Park in Austin. It’s a large park with hiking and biking trails. I actually did more walking than writing, but it’s a start. As with coffee shops and libraries, I’ll collect links to all the posts on a new page here.

Sunlit 2.5.1 is now available in the App Store. This update fixes an issue with videos not appearing in the timeline after the major new version we released yesterday to add video upload to the app and Micro.blog hosting.

Here are a couple screenshots of the update with the video preview and new full-screen player:

We are getting close to releasing the next version of Sunlit. The app has gone through a bunch of iterations over the years while we searched for the right features and design. This version is my favorite. We’ve simplified posting so that it’s easier and more consistent with Micro.blog, improved profile screens, and fixed even more bugs.

If you’re looking for an alternate to Facebook-owned Instagram that priorities community and content ownership, I hope you check out Sunlit when it’s ready.

We just sent a Sunlit beta to testers. This new version of our photo-blogging app includes an updated UI, easier posting, and fixes a number of issues. It also simplifies and removes several features, such as the filter and photo editing interface. (We may bring some features back later, but it was important to get back to basics and improve the core user experience.)

If you’d like to try it, you can join the TestFlight beta here.

There was a session at IndieWebCamp Austin about broken links and archiving web sites. As part of the discussion, Tantek mentioned how he saves all his blog posts and tweets to the Internet Archive as part of his posting workflow. I’ve just added a setting like that to Micro.blog under Posts → Design:

This is off by default for now, but if you enable it, any new posts will be saved to the Internet Archive automatically. It waits about 5 minutes before saving them just in case you have any last-minute edits.

I still want to do more with archiving. As amazing as the Internet Archive is, I don’t think we should count on it to have a complete archive of the web. But this is a simple feature you can enable in your blog if it’s hosted on Micro.blog, and we can expand it based on feedback. (For example, maybe archiving pages you link to as well.)

We released version 1.5 of the Micro.blog app for iOS today. In addition to a couple bug fixes, it lets you pick a category for new posts. You can create categories on the web under Posts → Categories for blogs hosted on Micro.blog.

Tap the gear icon when composing a new post to view your categories:

We are launching several major new features for blog hosting on Micro.blog today. Any one of these features alone is a big change, and together I hope they will serve as a great foundation for years to come. The goal was to make blog hosting faster and more flexible for new features.

Custom templates: All the themes have been rewritten with extensibility in mind. As some of you may know, Micro.blog-hosted blogs were originally built on Jekyll. They now use Hugo. There’s an interface in Micro.blog for editing any of the built-in templates, or adding new ones for your own HTML or CSS. Click Posts → Design → Edit Themes.

Categories: You can create a new category for your blog under Posts → Categories, and those categories will appear when editing a post or when creating a longer post with a title. We hide the category options be default when you are composing a short post, but in the new macOS app you can show the categories by choosing View → Categories. A list of your categories will appear at the top of Archive on your blog for readers to browse.

Auto-filter photos into a category: If you create a category like “Photos” or “Photography”, Micro.blog will offer to automatically assign this category when posting a new photo. Behind the scenes this is based on a new filtering system that will enable more features for other types of content in the future.

API for categories: I’ve added categories support to both the MetaWeblog XML-RPC API and the Micropub API. This means that categories work great with MarsEdit. Categories are also included in your default JSON Feed in the “tags” field.

Sharing themes: When creating a new custom theme, you can choose to clone it from an existing GitHub repository. This will allow someone to create a completely custom theme and share it with other members of the community. There’s a “Blank” design if you are starting from scratch with your own templates.

New theme: I used the open source theme Arabica when testing these new features, and it’s now an option under Posts → Design. It’s a clean, simple design ported from Ghost.

Open source changes: All our themes for Micro.blog are available on GitHub. I have decided to keep the forked Jekyll repositories and completely replace the files with the Hugo version. I have mixed feelings about this, since the themes have diverged so much that they are no longer useful to the original authors, but I felt this was the best way to give credit to them for the designs, in addition to our credits page on Micro.blog.

Moving special pages: Micro.blog has some special pages like “About” and “Archive”. You can now re-order or even delete these under Posts → Pages. Combined with custom themes, this gives much more flexibility in customizing the navigation for your site.

We’ll be writing more about these new features in blog posts and the help site. If you notice any problems, please let me know. Thank you!

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.

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!

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.

Micro.blog doesn’t have hashtags, trending topics, or retweets because I think the focus on those features in other social networks has led to people being exposed to harassment, hateful posts, and even fake news. For Micro.blog, it’s more difficult to accidentally stumble on a random post unless it’s part of a conversation you’re in or from a section that is actively curated.

This was an important design decision and we’re not walking away from it, but the downside is that it is more difficult to find older posts without a global search. As the first step in improving this, today we’re rolling out a new search screen. You can now search for users and across any post that has been featured in the Discover section.

Click on Discover from the web version of Micro.blog. I’ll continue to improve this throughout the rest of the year, expanding it to more posts, including in the native apps. Looking forward to hearing your feedback!

We rebooted the Homebrew Website Club meetup in Austin this summer after a break, and last week we met again at Mozart’s Coffee to talk about the IndieWeb. It was raining when I arrived at the coffee shop. Despite the weather we found some tables on the bottom deck and had a good turnout.

The meeting was informal. After introductions, we talked about the state of social media and silos, with some detours into Mastodon, Micro.blog, and the value of having your own site. The discussion inspired me to finish writing a post about the way out of this mess we’ve found ourselves in with massive social networks.

We’re going to keep the meetup at Mozart’s for now. The next meetup will be October 3rd, 6:30pm. I think it will start to become a little more structured: introductions, demos, discussion, and time for writing or working on projects. Thanks to everyone who made it!

Today we added a new screen to the web interface for hosted blogs on Micro.blog. Click “Posts” and then choose the “Uploads” tab to view your uploaded photos and microcast episodes. You can also upload new photos here to later include in a blog post.

Expect this part of Micro.blog to continue to improve. If you have any feedback, let us know. Thanks for your support!

Of everything you put into social networks, photos are one of the easiest and most rewarding parts to reclaim for your own site. Because we shipped Sunlit 2.2 this week, I want to share a guide for starting a new photo blog that you will actually consistently post to.

The first step isn’t technical. It’s a commitment to posting regularly on your own blog instead of first reaching for Instagram or Snapchat. A commitment to posting to a place you control, to a place you can look back to years from now as an archive of your best photos at your own domain name, regardless of what social networks come and go over the years.

If you already have a hosted blog on Micro.blog or WordPress, you can use that. If you want to start with a new space just for photos, use Micro.blog and click Plans → New Microblog. In the Micro.blog settings, you can map a custom domain to your new photo blog such as photos.yourdomain.com.

Instagram will let you download an archive of all your Instagram photos. If you use macOS, install Micro.blog for Mac. Choose File → “Import from Instagram”. Select the media.json file in the archive you received from Instagram, and Micro.blog will let you select some or all of your photos to import, preserving the dates and captions on your new photo blog. See this help page for more details on importing from Instagram.

To post a new photo, use the official Micro.blog iOS app or our new companion app Sunlit. There are also great third-party apps such as Icro for iPhone and MarsEdit for macOS.

When you post a photo with some text but no title, that photo will show up directly in the Micro.blog timeline.

Another option is to connect OwnYourGram with Micro.blog. OwnYourGram can watch your Instagram account for new photos, then copy them automatically to Micro.blog. Before setting up OwnYouGram, make sure to add your Instagram username in Micro.blog under Account → “Edit Apps”.

For an overview video of the new version of Sunlit, see my post from yesterday. Happy photo blogging!

As I mentioned in my IndieWeb Summit wrap-up, I added support for IndieBookClub while in Portland. IndieBookClub is a little like Goodreads, but built on standards like Microformats and Micropub so that you can post what you’re reading to your own blog.

Now that I’m back in Austin, I’ve tweaked the behavior to be smarter about recognizing the ISBN that IndieBookClub sends to Micro.blog. Posts from IndieBookClub also get the 📚 emoji added automatically so that they show up in the books Discover section on Micro.blog. Here’s a screenshot of what posts look like on your Micro.blog-hosted site:

If the ISBN is specified, Micro.blog will redirect the link to Amazon, although we may change that in the future. And it’s just a regular blog post, so you can always edit it using Markdown in Micro.blog.

Last week I was in Portland for IndieWeb Summit. This was only my second IndieWeb conference (the first was IndieWebCamp in Austin). I had a great time in Portland and got even more than I expected out of IndieWeb Summit.

The first day was short keynotes and sessions led by attendees on a range of topics. Jean and I talked about our experience and goals with Micro.blog in reaching even more mainstream users. I went to sessions on Microformats, timeline algorithms, code libraries for common IndieWeb building blocks, and Microsub. Some of this carried over to the beginning of the next day, including Aaron Parecki leading a discussion about IndieAuth.

We held a Micro.blog meetup at Von Ebert Brewing after the first day wrapped up. Thanks everyone for joining us!

Most of the second day was a hack day to work on our own projects, and at the end of the day everyone could present what they had worked on. I was so impressed with what people had come up with, whether that was improvements to their own site or prototypes for new tools.

It turned out that having this dedicated time was exactly what I needed to turn Micro.blog into an IndieAuth provider. This means that Micro.blog no longer needs to delegate to Twitter or GitHub for authorization when someone is using an IndieWeb posting tool like OwnYourGram or Quill. Users can instead authorize directly with their Micro.blog account. I also added support for the summary fallback parameter in Micropub, which makes Micro.blog compatible with IndieBookClub.

In the morning before I left Portland, I interviewed Tantek and Aaron for my upcoming book Indie Microblogging. We had a great conversation on the founding of IndieWebCamp, the accomplishments and changes in the community, and where everything is going from here.

Portland was great. For this trip I opted for an Airbnb close to the IndieWeb Summit venue. It was also just a block from Coava Coffee, where I spent a couple mornings catching up on work. I hope to be back in Portland for IndieWeb Summit next year.

Last month I gave a talk about microblogging at Peers Conference in Austin. In it I covered Twitter’s changing attitude toward developers, from the early days when everyone wanted to build a Twitter app — as John Gruber wrote in 2009, Twitter apps were a playground for new UIs — to when Twitter started actively discouraging traditional third-party Twitter clients.

For Micro.blog, I always want to encourage third-party apps. We support existing blogging apps like MarsEdit, and we have an API for more Micro.blog-focused apps to be built. I’m excited to say that a big one just shipped in the App Store: Icro.

Icro is well-designed, fast, and takes a different approach to some features compared to the official Micro.blog app. In a few ways, it’s better than the app I built. This is exactly what I hoped for. We wanted an official app so that there’s a default to get started, but there should be other great options for Micro.blog users to choose from.

Here are a few screenshots from Icro:

Thanks to developer Martin Hartl for building Icro and being part of the Micro.blog community. You can download it for free from the App Store here.

We have something really big to announce today. Micro.blog now supports hosting short-form podcasts, also known as microcasts, with a companion iPhone app called Wavelength for recording, editing, and publishing episodes.

Before the Kickstarter campaign last year, I started my Timetable microcast to talk about the things I was working on, with a focus on planning what would become Micro.blog. Creating a short podcast is really fun. It’s much easier to record and edit than the longer podcasts we’re all used to. But it’s still not easy enough, and even after nearly 100 episodes of Timetable my workflow was cobbled together with too many apps: Ferrite, Logic, Auphonic, WordPress, a shell script, and sometimes Transmit.

Micro.blog is about making short-form content you own as simple to post as a tweet because we believe blogging should be easier. Podcasting should be easier too.

We’re rolling out a new hosted plan on Micro.blog to accommodate microcasts. When you upload an audio file to your site — either from the web, Wavelength, or a third-party app — Micro.blog will automatically create a podcast feed for your microblog. Listeners can subscribe directly, or you can add the feed to the Apple Podcast Directory and it will show up in popular apps like Overcast and Castro. Everything can be served from your own domain name, just like a normal microblog. We’ve been using this infrastructure for all the episodes of our weekly Micro Monday microcast.

New hosted microblogs with microcasting support will be $10/month. Microcast audio files will be limited to 20 MB. Existing microblogs hosted on Micro.blog can be upgraded to support microcasting for an additional $5/month.

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. If you haven’t checked out Micro.blog lately or are learning about it for the first time, now is a great time to join the community. Thanks!

Naturally because of the goals of Micro.blog, I see a lot of discussion about “owning your content”. It’s an important part of the mission for Micro.blog to take control back from closed, ad-supported social networks and instead embrace posting on our own blogs again.

But what does it mean to own our content? Do we have to install WordPress or some home-grown blogging system for it to be considered true content ownership, where we have the source code and direct SFTP access to the server? No. If that’s our definition, then content ownership will be permanently reserved for programmers and technical folks who have hours to spend on server configuration.

IndieWebCamp has a generations chart to illustrate the path from early adopters to mainstream users. Eli Mellen highlighted it in a recent post about the need to bridge the gap between the technical aspects of IndieWeb tools and more approachable platforms. With Micro.blog specifically, the goal is “generation 4”, and I think we’re on track to get there.

I want blogging to be as easy as tweeting. Anything short of that isn’t good enough for Micro.blog. You’ll notice when you use Twitter that they never ask you to SFTP into twitter.com to configure your account. They don’t ask you to install anything.

More powerful software that you can endlessly customize will always have its place. It’s good to have a range of options, including open source to tinker with. That’s often where some of the best ideas start. But too often I see people get lost in the weeds of plugins and themes, lured in by the myth that you have to self-host with WordPress to be part of the IndieWeb.

Owning your content isn’t about portable software. It’s about portable URLs and data. It’s about domain names.

When you write and post photos at your own domain name, your content can outlive any one blogging platform. This month marked the 16th anniversary of blogging at manton.org, and in that time I’ve switched blogging platforms and hosting providers a few times. The posts and URLs can all be preserved through those changes because it’s my own domain name.

I was disappointed when Medium announced they were discontinuing support for custom domain names. I’m linking to the Internet Archive copy because Medium’s help page about this is no longer available. If “no custom domains” is still their policy, it’s a setback for the open web, and dooms Medium to the same dead-end as twitter.com/username URLs.

If you can’t use your own domain name, you can’t own it. Your content will be forever stuck at those silo URLs, beholden to the whims of the algorithmic timeline and shifting priorities of the executive team.

For hosted blogs on Micro.blog, we encourage everyone to map a custom domain to their content, and we throw in free SSL and preserve redirects for old posts on imported WordPress content. There’s more we can do.

I’m working on the next version of the macOS app for Micro.blog now, which features multiple accounts and even multiple blogs under the same account. Here’s a screenshot of the settings screen:

The goal with Micro.blog is not to be a stop-gap hosting provider, with truly “serious” users eventually moving on to something else (although we make that easy). We want Micro.blog hosting to be the best platform for owning your content and participating in the Micro.blog and IndieWeb communities.

We released an update to Sunlit today. Lots of little bug fixes and improvements. (The App Store has been slow this week, but it should show up in your Updates tab soon if it’s not already there.)

I also updated the Micro.blog timeline to add tiny photo thumbnails for Sunlit stories that have a title. Here’s a screenshot:

Because Micro.blog is focused on microblogging, short posts without a title still show directly in the timeline, but longer posts with many photos and a title just link back to your web site. Adding this little preview gives a hint for what is behind those links.

Thanks everyone for your support of Micro.blog this year! We’ve come a long way since I launched the Kickstarter campaign for Indie Microblogging back on January 2nd. We really appreciate all the feedback and new users who are embracing Micro.blog.

Yesterday we added another “secret pin” to Micro.blog for the holidays. You can unlock it by posting to your own blog and mentioning Christmas, Hanukkah, or one of a bunch of different winter themes and celebrations for this time of year. (It also works for posts from last week, so you may already have unlocked the pin.)

We love adding pins because it encourages people to blog more, and we hope to do more in 2018. This is also a great time of year to earn the Daily Blogger, Photo Challenge, or Night Owl pins!

Wishing you and your family and friends the best this week. Thanks again for being part of the Micro.blog community.

Micro.blog is now available to anyone. There’s a limit of 100 new sign-ups each day, so that we can better respond to feedback as the community grows. Thanks so much to the thousands of Kickstarter backers and new users who have helped us improve the platform this year.

We’re also rolling out the following improvements across the web, iOS, and Mac versions of Micro.blog:

• New app icons on iOS and Mac! We love this redesign by Brad Ellis. Micro.blog now feels much more at home on macOS.
• Added photo upload to the web version of Micro.blog.
• Added a "Show More" button to load more posts in the timeline on iOS and Mac.
• Fixed Discover section in iOS and Mac to allow selecting posts.
• Improved iOS sharing from Safari to include the page title in addition to URL and selected text.
• Experiment with following domain name user accounts. The first is @nytimes.com, letting you see headlines from The New York Times home page in your timeline. (This is not affiliated with the New York Times. It's possible because Micro.blog works with RSS feeds.)

Plus a bunch of minor improvements and bug fixes. You can download the latest versions of Micro.blog from the iOS App Store or directly for your Mac.

Over the weekend we hosted the first IndieWebCamp in Austin. I’m really happy with the way the event came together. I learned a lot in helping plan it, made a few mistakes that we can improve next time, but overall came away as inspired as ever to keep improving Micro.blog so that it’s a standout platform of the IndieWeb movement.

There’s nothing like meeting in person with other members of the community. I know this from attending Apple developer conferences, but the weekend in Austin only underscored that I should be more active in the larger web community as well.

The first day of IndieWebCamp started with introductions, a chance for attendees to demo their web sites, an overview of IndieWeb building blocks by Aaron Parecki, and then brainstorming what topics the afternoon sessions should cover. After lunch, we held sessions on WordPress, static sites, Micropub posts, Webmentions, payment APIs, audio, decentralized aggregation, and post kinds.

The second day was a hack day, with a chance to work on our own web sites. This was a very valuable day for me — being able to bounce ideas or questions off other attendees. I chose to make an improvement to Micro.blog’s Micropub API endpoint to accept “bookmark-of” POSTs, mapping them to favorites. This evolved into opening up Micro.blog to allow favoriting any URL, even if the post doesn’t exist in any feed that Micro.blog knows about yet.

At the end of the day I was happy enough with the feature that I deployed my code and database changes. I demoed it using Indigenous for iPhone and Micro.blog for Mac, favoriting an indiewebcat.com post on the web and watching it show up in the app under the post’s domain name. Micro.blog got better support for Microformats with this change, pulling the author info, post text, and photo when you favorite a post via Micropub.

For the last few years I’ve attended WWDC and Release Notes each year, and I’d usually give a talk at CocoaConf. This year I added WordCamp and IndieWebCamp, and gave a talk about indie microblogging at Refresh Austin. I hope that it works out to attend another IndieWebCamp or IndieWebSummit in 2018.

Special thanks again to Tom Brown for helping out with planning IndieWebCamp Austin, EFF-Austin for hosting their holiday party after our event, and our sponsors DreamHost, Polycot Associates, and SuperBorrowNet. We should do this again next year.

Daniel Jalkut shipped MarsEdit 4 today. This version includes many improvements, from brand new icons to support for WordPress “Post Formats” which are convenient for microblog posts.

Micro.blog-hosted blogs also have full support for posting from MarsEdit 4. You can post short microblog posts, or you can add a title, upload photos, and write longer posts. Blogs on Micro.blog are really fast, have custom domain names, and support importing from WordPress.

Congrats Daniel! I’m sure we’ll be talking about this milestone on Core Intuition.

I rarely change my home screen, but I updated it after having more time with the iPhone X. Seeing Shawn Blanc’s home screen reminded me that I should post an updated screenshot of my own screen.

The notable icons are Micro.blog and Ulysses in the dock, where I do most of my writing and blog post drafts. I also stopped using Instagram since there are so many great photos being posted to Micro.blog, so I have Halide there instead. Great app for quickly adjusting the exposure before taking a photo.

New for the X, I’ve added an empty row to the top of the screen using David Smith’s blank icon tip. Much easier to reach all the icons with one hand.

Doug Lane is writing a series of blog posts about what real-world use cases for Micro.blog could help attract more mainstream users to the platform. It starts with this:

One of the biggest challenges that Micro.blog faces with its upcoming public launch is how to make the jump beyond its early adopter base of blog enthusiasts to “regular people”. It’s tempting to daydream about everyone from teenagers to grandmothers abandoning their social media silos en masse and simultaneously raising “Indie Blogger” flags, but that’s probably not realistic.

He then follows up with a few ideas. I think this approach is exactly right: carve out several niches that are perfect for Micro.blog and focus on those in marketing, providing as much value as possible for those users, then expand to more mainstream users from there.

Squarespace actually does a great job at this. The first thing you see when you click sign up — before being prompted to create an account — is to choose a template for your web site. At the very top of the list: a wedding blog and a product catalog.

Photoblogging and linkblogging are still some of the most common ways people use Micro.blog. From a business perspective, I also like it for product news. Earlier this year I posted some ideas for how to use a microblog.

I sent an update to Kickstarter backers today. I wanted to point people to the new Mac app for Micro.blog, and also show off some of the great photos that Micro.blog users have been uploading this week as part of the photo challenge. Here’s the email.

Hello Kickstarter backers! Today we’re wrapping up the 7-day photo challenge on Micro.blog. The challenge was a suggestion from the community: @douglane posted to his microblog with themes to inspire more people to take and post photos.

I’ve loved seeing all the new photos. Here are just a handful of the many photos that have been posted over the last week.

We also recently released version 1.0 of the Micro.blog app for macOS Sierra and High Sierra. This is the best Micro.blog user experience yet, with a timeline, posting to your blog, photo upload, and a new Discover section for finding posts and users to follow.

You can download the Mac app here.

I’m also continuing work on the Indie Microblogging book. I’ll be sharing more about the book as soon as I can. Thanks for your support!

For the initial rollout of Micro.blog, we had a bunch of pins you can unlock, to encourage people to blog more. For example, pins that get unlocked after a certain number of blog posts, or when you upload a photo. We also added a couple of new time-based pins for special events, like mentioning “iPhone X” during the Apple event last month.

Today I added a Halloween pin. You can see some of the pins for my account in this screenshot:

I also talked about this on today’s Timetable. Happy blogging! 🎃

Micro.blog users have wanted the ability to edit microblog posts for a while. We planned to add it, but first I thought we needed an edit history and probably a window of time during which edits are allowed, to prevent people from abusing edits by changing the meaning of a post in an earlier conversation.

While I still want those things, I realized that they were just excuses to put off implementing the feature. And with full pages and longer posts, editing was increasingly a big omission.

This week I rolled out a complete overhaul to the posts interface under your Micro.blog account. The layout is better, it’s more prominently linked in the UI, there’s an easy way to switch between posts and pages, and you can finally edit posts.

There are a couple quirks of the UI still to improve. For example, if you’d like post edits to be reflected in the timeline, you should click the Remove link in the timeline so that Micro.blog pulls the latest version from your microblog. I’ll be working on polishing those areas over the coming weeks. But already it is much better. Enjoy!

I pre-ordered the book Ink & Paint a few months ago to add to my collection of books on animation. I love these untold stories, and the women working at Disney in the early days of the studio were notoriously uncredited.

It arrived today and now I see that it’s a massive achievement. Large format, 380 pages, full of old photos and details about the artists.

Mickey Mouse coffee mug for scale. Really looking forward to reading this.

As I mentioned in this morning’s post about Medium, it’s important that Micro.blog-hosted sites can have their own domain name. Some people use their microblog to supplement an existing web site. Others use Micro.blog itself for hosting their full web site, because the focus on short posts makes the site easy to update.

Today we’re introducing a new feature for hosted microblogs: custom web pages. These can be used for expanded “about” pages, contact information, lists of current projects, essays, or whatever you want to write about on your web site. Micro.blog pages use Markdown and are automatically included in the navigation for your site.

Here’s a screenshot of an example page being edited:

If you have a Micro.blog-hosted site, check out the pages list under Account → “Edit Domains & Design”. Enjoy!

I don’t use Apple News very often. I much prefer reading blogs in Reeder and Micro.blog, with a daily check on the other news sites I pay for. But last night I noticed a headline in the iOS today screen and tapped over to a few stories in Apple News.

Scrolling down in the “For You” tab about politics I was surprised by a couple news stories about a plan by Democrats to “silence non-liberal media” (People’s Pundit Daily), and another on the Trump-Russia “collusion fantasy” (The Daily Caller). These were right-wing opinion pieces sprinkled with conspiracy theories, yet placed next to reputable news organizations like The New York Times, CBS News, and Politico.

I thought Apple News was highly curated and better than this. Personal essays are fine in Apple News, because that’s part of blogging, but they shouldn’t be suggested to a mainstream audience looking for real news.

A few years ago, Jon Hays and I built an app for photos called Sunlit, powered by the App.net API. We evolved it to work with other services, like Flickr and Instagram, but as App.net faded away we could never justify the investment to rewrite significant parts of the app to bring it forward and keep it relevant. It also wasn’t clear what the app should do if we were to modernize it. So we let the app sit in the App Store, kind of neglected, and even discussed removing it from sale.

As I rolled out Micro.blog to Kickstarter backers, Jon dusted off the Sunlit project and experimented with something that should’ve been obvious to us earlier: Sunlit should post to blogs. And more than that, it should work well with microblogs and IndieWeb standards. It should become a great app for photoblogging. The new version of Sunlit can post photos to Micro.blog, WordPress, or any site that supports the Micropub API.

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. There’s also a brand new editing interface with filters and advanced adjustments:

Jon has put a bunch of work into this while I focus on Micro.blog. Sunlit 2.0 is already feature complete and in beta testing now. We expect to ship it sometime this summer.

As I expected would happen, using iOS 11 on my iPad Pro after WWDC has inspired me to revisit the universal version of Micro.blog for iOS. Here’s a screenshot of my current build:

I plan to include this in 1.0. I’m in the process of moving the app from TestFlight to its final home in the App Store. As we prepare for the public launch, this’ll make it much easier for everyone to download it, and it shouldn’t be limited or scaled up on the iPad.

This week we added a selection of photos to the Discover page on Micro.blog, and today I uploaded a new TestFlight beta with the same feature inside the app. It’s another way to find users to follow, or just see what the Micro.blog community is up to.

Here’s what the iPhone screen looks like:

I think photoblogging is a really important part of indie microblogging. When I share photos online, I want them to be at my own web site in addition to cross-posted to Twitter and other social networks. Photos always capture something — a moment with family or friends, visiting a new place, or just the everyday routine as it changes — and I want Micro.blog to provide a great user experience for photos, from filters to hosting.

From last week’s flight through Los Angeles and up to Portland.

At St. Edward’s Park.

Tomorrow I’m launching a Kickstarter campaign for Micro.blog and a short book about blogging called Indie Microblogging. I’ve had fun working on the video for this project, trying to tell the story of why independent publishing matters.

Of course the video has me talking at the camera, but it also incorporates some animation and screencasts. Here are 4 stills from the video:

I can’t wait to share the full thing. I’d love your support when it launches.

One reason I like microblogging on my own web site is that I can control the links and simple formatting. I’ve noticed lately that Twitter can’t consistently auto-link even certain domain names, for example.

This difference is illustrated well in a post I made this morning, which included timetable.fm and micro.blog. Twitter auto-linked the .blog but not the .fm. The cross-post to App.net auto-linked the .fm but not the .blog.

Here are the 3 versions:

In the final screenshot — the original from my own site, from which the others were pushed out automatically — you can see how I’ve specifically linked the domain and phrases I wanted to. It’s a minor thing, but it just looks better when the author has a little control over the formatting. (And while I don’t use it here, my own short posts can contain text in bold or italics via Markdown, too.)

At the Elgin Christmas tree farm.

University of Texas at Austin.

Shutting down a web site correctly isn’t easy. When Talkshow announced they were closing, I was surprised. Six months is a limited time to launch, get traction, and then wind down. But I was glad that they’d let any show be exported as an archive.

The archives aren’t available for very long. If you hosted a show on Talkshow, you have until December 1st to download it.

I downloaded a couple to see how Talkshow handled it. Just in case no one else grabs them, I’m copying them here: Pop Life episode 5 with Anil Dash and guest John Gruber, and the Six Colors live coverage for Apple’s September 7th event. I had Instapaper-ed both of these to read later anyway.

The archive itself is a simple .zip file with HTML, CSS, and user profile images. In the Finder it looks like this:

This self-contained structure makes it very easy to re-share somewhere else. Credit to Talkshow for keeping this simple. But it also strikes me as so easy to keep hosting as static files, I wonder why Talkshow doesn’t keep the archives available indefinitely, which would preserve any existing links to these shows from the web.

Frog Fountain.

From the Texas State Capitol.

At the Pearl.

From the weekend in San Antonio.

Lake Livingston.

At Balmorhea State Park.

From dinner at Lucy’s Fried Chicken on the Lake.

Spending the day in downtown Austin for a Rubik’s Cube competition.

Because episodes of Timetable are short (usually just 5 minutes) and because they aren’t published on a consistent schedule (sometimes once a week, sometimes 3 times a week), I’ve wondered if it may be difficult for some people to fit the podcast into their routine of listening to longer, hour-long podcasts. If you only listen to podcasts while in the car, for example, a 5-minute show isn’t going to fill your commute.

Luckily there are easy solutions to this. The first is: they are so short, just listen whenever you want, while you’re at your desk or walking somewhere or having lunch. Another option: gather up a few episodes and listen altogether, as if it’s 3 parts of a 15-minute podcast.

If you’re an Overcast user, you can create a playlist that will play multiple Timetable episodes in sequence without requiring any tapping in the app to queue up the next one. Here are some screenshots showing one way to set this up after subscribing to Timetable in Overcast.

First, tap the new playlist button in Overcast. Then tap Add Podcasts and select Timetable.

The playlist should automatically show any unplayed episodes. Finally, tap the Playback button while an episode is playing and make sure to highlight Play Next for the When Episode Ends option. This will make sure that you have continuous playback from one episode to the next.

I’ve recorded 23 episodes of Timetable so far, equal to about 2 hours of audio. While consistency is the most important thing for my other podcasts, Core Intuition and Technical Foul, for Timetable I’ve liked the flexibility to experiment with different styles and show formats. Enjoy!

When my family was visiting New York City a couple of years ago, we took a train out of Pennsylvania Station on the way up to Montreal for the second half of our vacation. It was raining a little as we walked from the hotel, but I thought we’d still have no trouble finding the station. After a few minutes we gave up and had to ask someone where the entrance was.

We couldn’t find it because it looked like every other street corner in Manhattan. But it wasn’t always like that. It used to look like this:

In the 1960s, facing declining train usage and financial problems, the Pennsylvania Railroad sold the rights to everything above ground and the incredible station pictured above was demolished. It was only afterwards, when it actually happened, that everyone fully realized what they had lost. Determined to not let other beautiful architectural landmarks get destroyed, the city passed a law to restrict similar demolition. Grand Central Terminal was preserved because of the lesson learned from letting Pennsylvania Station go.

I was thinking about this story — failing to do the right thing, but applying that knowledge to the next thing — while re-reading Marco’s excellent post on the future of podcasting. In it, he lays out the technical details for how podcasting works today, and makes the case for leaving it alone. I especially like this part, on his determination to keep Overcast a sort of pure MP3 client:

By the way, while I often get pitched on garbage podcast-listening-behavioral-data integrations, I’m never adding such tracking to Overcast. Never. The biggest reason I made a free, mass-market podcast app was so I could take stands like this.

I should have realized it earlier, but I don’t think I really connected all of Marco’s goals with Overcast until Daniel Jalkut and I had him on Core Intuition episode 200. We talked about many of these same themes as Marco was finishing up Overcast 2.0.

There’s also a great discussion on Upgrade about this. It starts about halfway through.

In a response to Marco on MacStories, Federico Viticci writes about the parallel trend in the web industry toward centralized services like Facebook and Medium that allow “content professionals” to monetize their writing. In doing so, those writers give up many of the benefits of the open web:

But the great thing about the free and decentralized web is that the aforementioned web platforms are optional and they're alternatives to an existing open field where independent makers can do whatever they want. I can own my content, offer my RSS feed to anyone, and resist the temptation of slowing down my website with 10 different JavaScript plugins to monitor what my users do. No one is forcing me to agree to the terms of a platform.

While the open web still exists, we really dropped the ball protecting and strengthening it. Fewer people’s first choice for publishing is to start a web site hosted at their own domain. Like the destruction of Pennsylvania Station, sometimes you only know in hindsight that you’ve made a mistake. We were so caught up in Twitter and Facebook that we let the open web crumble. I’m not giving up — I think we can get people excited about blogging and owning their own content again — but it would have been easier if we had realized what we lost earlier.

Reading posts like Marco’s and Federico’s, and listening to Jason and Myke on Upgrade, I’m convinced that podcasting will remain open because we know better now. As a community we can learn from the mistakes with the web and the threats of closed platforms, making sure that podcasting is preserved as a simple technology that no one controls.

For the 3rd Sunday in a row, I’ve taken a break from visiting a normal library and instead found a Little Free Library to exchange a book at. They’re all very unique, often made by hand. This one was made from a doll house, which opens both from the bottom front and roof for two floors of books.

At the Howson Branch.

Outside the Cedar Park Public Library.

In my posts about defining what makes a microblog post and guidelines for RSS, I talked a little about links but didn’t explore linkblogging. While many blog authors post primarily long essays, shorter link blogs are a common approach for bloggers who want to post new content several times a day.

Essentially two types of link blogs have evolved since the early days of blogging. The most traditional link blog can be seen in Dave Winer’s posts (click on the Links tab). These are links with a very short commentary. Many tweets are like this. In a way, this format is the purest form of microblogging.

The second type of link blog starts to fall outside the limits of microblogging. 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.

Daring Fireball has become so successful that Gruber’s approach to linkblogging has been copied by many other sites. MacStories, Six Colors, One Foot Tsunami, John Moltz’s Very Nice Web Site, and Marco Arment’s blog are just a handful that follow this pattern. All of these sites post the occasional essay, but most blog posts link away to an external site in the RSS item, not back to their own site.

At a technical level, this difference can best be seen in the RSS feed’s <link> and <guid> elements. These elements will contain URLs that either link back to the main site, or link away to an external site.

Here is where this evolving approach to link blogs starts to break down. Let’s take an example from Six Colors, one of my favorite sites. (I recommend subscribing. The members-only secret podcast with Jason and Dan Moren is really fun, and the email magazine is great too.)

In a link post about Hulu’s pricing, Jason Snell actually writes 4 paragraphs of commentary (plus a footnote). This is more like an essay than a short link post that points to the external site.

Another example is when MacStories linked to Twitter’s launch of Moments. A few paragraphs of quoted text, 5 paragraphs of MacStories commentary. The commentary is as important or even more important to read than whatever Federico is linking to.

Sometimes we read sites like MacStories, Six Colors, or Daring Fireball more for the commentary than for what is being linked to. But when using an RSS reader, there is too much confusion about where an item’s link goes when clicked if the site’s feed isn’t consistent about linking everything back to its own site.

And in fact Jason Snell acknowledges this problem by offering two separate RSS feeds: the default one, with a mix of links back to Six Colors for essays and pointed elsewhere for link posts; and another feed with everything linking back to Six Colors, where the commentary lives. He also attempts to minimize confusion on his own site by giving each type of post its own icon in the site design.

The less clear-cut the distinction between essays and link posts, the more confusion we introduce to readers. In some ways, this mixed approach really only works for Daring Fireball, because his feature essays are so long, and so obviously different in format to the rest of the link posts.

Good conventions for blogging have been at a standstill for years. While part of the appeal of indie blogging is there’s no one “right” way to do it, and authors can have a strong voice and design that isn’t controlled by a platform vendor, we must accept that Twitter has taken off because it has a great user experience compared to blogs. It’s effortless to tweet and the timeline is consistent. For blogging to improve and thrive, it should have just as straightforward a user experience as social networks wherever possible.

Luckily, RSS already has everything we need for clients to visually distinguish between link posts and regular ones. If the <link> element points to a domain other than the one for the site, it’s probably a link post. If the <link> and site domain match, it’s a full post.

I’ve adopted this in my new microblogging platform by exposing the domain in the UI itself, at the end of the title or microblog post whenever it’s a link post. If it’s a full post, the link isn’t added. And for either type of post, the timestamp links back to whatever was in the <link>.

Here’s a screenshot from one of Dave’s posts. Note that the link was not in the RSS text. It was added by my app automatically:

This has been a long post, but it boils down to two simple recommendations:

• If you’re a blog author and you’re adding any significant commentary, the RSS feed should point back to your site.
• If you’re an RSS client developer, the difference between link posts and full posts should be exposed in the UI.

I believe that adopting these will bring more consistency to blogging. Users won’t need to hover over links, or guess what will happen on a click or tap. It’s a small change that will make reading blogs a little better.

A few weeks ago I started a new short-form podcast called Timetable. Each episode is 3-5 minutes. It has been really fun to record the show because I can try new things without investing too much time.

One goal from the very beginning was to record from iOS so that I could easily record outside the house. I wanted not just the flexibility to be away from my computer, but a stereo microphone that could capture some of the surrounding environment, to give it a more informal feel. (I’m actually cheating in some cases and using multiple tracks, to make editing easier, but I think the effect works. All the episodes have been exported to mono so far, though.)

I ordered this cheap iPhone microphone for testing — only $10 when I ordered it! — and figured after some experiments with my iPhone 4S, I would invest in something new. I liked it enough that I’m still using the mic with my 5S via a Lightning cable adapter. I’m also using a foam pop filter that I already had from a previous old mic.

This may be the single best value in a tech gadget I’ve ever purchased. Total cost for producing the podcast:

• Microphone: $10
• Ferrite: $20
• Workflow: $3 (for MP3 conversion)
• Domain name: $120 (.fm domains are expensive)

I certainly didn’t invent the idea of a “microcast”. There are other good short podcasts, such as Bite Size Tech. But I’m happy to see even more people trying out the idea. Michael even started a new podcast called Driftwood to chronicle the development of his Jekyll template for microcasts.

Ferrite also continues to impress. It’s a very high quality iOS app and is competitive with Mac multi-track audio editors. For a good introduction, check out Jason Snell’s review.

There’s a lot of great stuff in Panic’s 2015 report, but I’m especially struck with how well they executed on updates. This is something that successful companies get right, and which I still struggle with: continuing to make each app just a little better, with bug fixes throughout the year, instead of getting completely sidetracked with new projects. Cabel writes:

“Not only did we release great things, but I feel we demonstrated dramatic dedication to our apps — we released the most high-quality, bug-free updates in our history.”

The product update grid that accompanies the report really underscores this:

Congratulations, Panic. I’ve been using the new Coda for iOS on my iPad Pro and it’s excellent.

When I was first trying to figure out how my microblog posts should look, I was thinking more like tweets and less like HTML. Eventually I settled on HTML for publishing and display, with Markdown for writing.

Here’s what a microblog post looks like in the timeline for my new web app:

You can compare that to how it looks when cross-posted to Twitter. It’s not exactly a fair comparison since the tweet was truncated, but it’s still incredible to me how much better these posts look if you allow inline links and some more characters.

I like what ESPN is doing in the sidebar on their NBA scores page. It’s a timeline of both tweets and short ESPN posts, integrated together with a clean design that fits the rest of the site.

This timeline is a great use of microblogging. The short posts aren’t limited to tweet-length — they’re often around 200 characters instead — so they can feel complete and informative while still being concise. I’ve suggested 280 characters as a guideline for microblogs, and having the extra characters to work with really makes a nice difference.

I took an example screenshot from ESPN and included it to the right of this post. The first two posts are these special ESPN microblog posts, and the third is a tweet. I don’t know what CMS-like system is driving this, but you can imagine using WordPress post formats, custom fields, or categories to achieve something similar.