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.

My good friend and Core Intuition co-host Daniel Jalkut isn’t convinced. After we recorded last week’s podcast, we talked privately about the direction I’m headed in. He’s seen the projects I have in development, but he thinks working on Mac apps is a safer bet than web services. And he works on a blogging app, so if I can’t convince him that the goals I have around microblogging-related tools can be a real business, how am I going to convince the rest of the world?

Earlier this year I gave a talk at CocoaConf about tips I’ve learned to be productive while juggling multiple projects. But as I worked on the talk, it turned out to be about something else. It was about Walt Disney moving from Kansas City to Hollywood. It was about crazy side projects that no one else believed in. It was about Texas Hold ‘Em poker and risking everything for an idea.

The new microblogging app and service I’ve been working on, off and on for the last year, is the most ambitious project I’ve ever attempted. It is difficult to explain and market, it might only resonate with a niche audience, and it is going to increase my hosting costs. So part of me knows that Daniel is right — that the smart business decision is to put it on hold and focus on my Mac apps, which will probably have more predictable revenue.

And yet, this project is also the most meaningful. In the words of Peter Thiel, it could take independent microblogging from zero to one. A new push forward for weblogs, maybe the first in a while. Therefore, I must do it, and I must accept some risk in the process.

Lately I’ve been working on the iPhone version. When you look at these screenshots, it might be tempting to compare it to Twitter. Don’t. Instead, think about how the plumbing fits together: RSS, microblogs, and the open web.

I can’t wait to officially announce and ship this. If you’d like to get an email when the beta is ready, sign up on the announcement list.

“Am I always starting over
In a brand new story?
Am I always back at one
After all I’ve done?”
— Always Starting Over, from the broadway show If/Then

Daniel said on the latest Core Intuition that it’s important to celebrate major work milestones, like shipping a new app or quitting a job. I didn’t think I’d be celebrating right away, but as it turned out, my wife met me for lunch on Friday and we had a beer to mark the occasion. She snapped this photo:

Some things just work out. I couldn’t have picked a better t-shirt to wear if I had planned it.

When 5pm came around I made a final comment on Confluence, replied to a couple emails, and then signed out of HipChat. But I didn’t have time for much reflection. My son and I were busy packing up to head to a campout with Boy Scouts. Then as soon as we arrived back the next day, I turned around again to take my daughter to see Idina Menzel.

The concert was incredible, somehow including both Wicked’s “Defying Gratify” and Radiohead’s “Creep” — and yes, of course Frozen — to make a show with both the occasional explicit lyric and little kids pulled up from the audience to sing. It was only while driving home from the concert that I had a moment to think what I need to do next. Idina’s lines from If/Then at the beginning of this post kept coming back to me.

I’ve worked a long time on a few things, and they were pretty good, but now it’s time to start over. I turn 40 in a few months. It’s time to figure out what the next 10 years of my life should be about.

WWDC 2015 now feels like it took place in the distant past, not a month ago. For the last few years I’ve attended the NeXT-themed fundraiser for the Cartoon Art Museum, and this year there’s video from the event. Check it out for a view into the museum and some of the talks.

It’s always a highlight of the week for me to visit both the Cartoon Art Museum and the Walt Disney Family Museum. This year Cartoon Art had pre-production drawings and paintings from the hand-drawn film Song of the Sea, one of my favorite films of the year. Really beautiful stuff.

Here’s a screenshot of the new microblogging project I’m working on. It’s almost ready for more beta testers. If you’re a fan of RSS and the open web, sign up for the announce list.

Throughout the week I posted about WWDC to my microblog, but I thought I’d write a longer post with the week’s narrative. It’s useful to have these to refer to in the future when all the WWDCs blur together and I’ve forgotten which event was which. Where it adds any details I’ll link to a few of the shorter posts.

So let’s go back to Sunday morning a week ago when I arrived in San Francisco, ticketless but ready to learn and meet up with friends. What a great day. First burritos and coffee in the Mission, then to Oakland for the NBA finals, game 2. I had signed up on the Golden State Warriors mailing list a couple weeks earlier to get in on the pre-sale tickets. Excepting the nearby San Antonio Spurs, I’m almost never going to just coincidentally be in the same city as an NBA finals game. I couldn’t let that chance slip by.

And it was an amazing game. Outwardly I was rooting for the Warriors — high fives to fans when the team came back to force overtime, wearing my new yellow shirt they gave everyone at the game. But inwardly I was also marveling at LeBron’s dominance and happy to see the series tied up. I want to see this thing go to 7 games.

Monday was the keynote and later the Cartoon Art Museum / NeXT fundraiser, with beautiful art on the wall from one of my favorite films this year, Song of the Sea. Tuesday I tried to catch up on some code at Sightglass Coffee, watch sessions at WeWork, and installed the iOS 9 beta on my retina iPad Mini. In the evening on this day and others there were parties, though I only attended a few.

The Talk Show live with guest Phil Schiller was a great surprise. I’m so happy for John and his success. Developers who have only known Daring Fireball after it was already fairly popular may need this important reminder: John Gruber started a dozen years ago with a blog that no one read, just like the rest of us, and this week he conducted the best interview of a senior Apple executive I’ve ever seen. If you think it’s enough to just throw random quips to Twitter, it’s not enough. Blogging is still the best way to build an audience. (Don’t miss Marco’s post about the event and what it means for the new Apple.)

I have very little to complain to Apple about this year. Maybe the keynote was a little long, but the topics they hit and the new user features and APIs were exactly right. I’ve got Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan installed and will require it for my next Mac app.

Toward the middle of the week I wasn’t feeling particularly great — not sick, but not really upbeat enough to get excited about new APIs. I escaped the city for the afternoon on Wednesday, visiting the Walt Disney Family Museum and then walking down to Crissy Field toward the Golden Gate Bridge. I stretched my arms out wide to catch the wind and felt refreshed in a way that the stagnant weather back in Austin this time of year can’t hope to provide. I remember this tweet from 2012 and it’s always true again, year after year.

Thursday morning I caught a session at AltConf before heading to the airport. Flights were delayed out of SFO because of fog, so it was 3 hours waiting in San Francisco, and another 3 hours waiting in Phoenix after a missed connection. But it’s all good. WWDC was a little weird for me — not because of anything Apple did, just because I was a little wistful, and distracted by email and non-WWDC happenings too.

Nevertheless I’m inspired by the week. The success of both AltConf and now Layers, not to mention all the other smaller events and keynote watch parties, point to a very strong WWDC for years to come.

I think it has finally stopped raining in Austin. Starting to look like summer again:

Contrast with this video we took on our street last week. We get our fair share of thunderstorms, but I had never seen anything quite like the rain we got last month.

I updated the Tweet Marker Safari extension to version 1.2 today. This version fixes the extension to accommodate recent design changes on twitter.com. Existing Tweet Marker paid subscribers can grab the new extension here.

Here’s a screenshot of the “Set Marker” link that the extension adds to twitter.com. Then when you launch a compatible iOS or Mac Twitter app, it will scroll the timeline to that position.

If you’d like to support Tweet Marker or use the Safari extension, you can subscribe for $1/month.

I was talking to friends this week about app advertising, and it inspired me to try Twitter ads. Otherwise known as “promoted tweets”, these ads are actual tweets that show up in search results and timelines, even if the user isn’t following your account. Tweet Library 2.5 seemed like the perfect time to try this.

I set a max of $5 a day and included several related Twitter accounts to help the ads find a more narrow audience of people who might want to buy Tweet Library. Here are the results after 24 hours:

Unfortunately I don’t have an easy way to track this all the way to actual App Store sales. Assuming a 5% conversion on App Store visits, I likely lost a little money. The extra 1800 impressions is nice though, to raise awareness about the app. I’m going to let it run for a week.

It has been nearly a year since the first iOS 7 beta, and something about tint color still bugs me. In fact it bothered me enough at the time of the early betas that a filed a bug on it with Apple, something I very rarely do. The problem isn’t so much in the concept of tint color, which I like; having a consistent color for buttons and links, especially now that buttons are so understated, makes a lot of sense. The problem is the implementation in apps that use tint color anytime they want to highlight something, whether it is tappable or not.

Here’s an example in Apple’s calendar app. It uses a red tint color for buttons, but it also highlights the current day with a round circle using the tint color. It looks tappable, but it’s not.

And here’s an even worse example, from the App Store app. “Categories” in this screenshot is a button, but “Paid” directly underneath it — same blue, same font and style — is just highlighted to show that you are viewing paid apps. It’s actually “Top Grossing” that is the button.

These kind of usability mistakes turn the great potential of tint color into a disadvantage. It’s like underlined text on the web that can’t be clicked. Apps should use tint color to improve usability, not to become even more difficult to use than if everyone rolled their own button styles.

Here’s what Apple’s iOS 7 UI Transition Guide says:

“In iOS 7, tint color is a property of UIView. iOS 7 apps often use a tint to define a key color that indicates interactivity and selection state for UI elements throughout the app.”

But that’s not specific enough. The app screenshots above are following this rule, and it still looks wrong. Bold text or a gray background for highlights are much more effective to show selection state than tint color. I would completely avoid tint color for selection state except for controls that have 3 or more segments, such as a tab bar, and even then sparingly. Highlighting a 1- or 2-segment control with tint color is always going to be confusing, because the selected segment looks like it can be tapped.

With this in mind, fixing the App Store app is a simple change:

(You could make the “Top Grossing” button blue or not. I don’t think it’s necessary in this case.)

The best iOS 7 apps I’ve seen follow the spirit of Apple’s guidelines, but they know when to push beyond Apple’s built-in apps and when to pull back and do less. Tint color seems like an obvious case of where we should be more consistent and strict than Apple intended.

Today we shipped version 1.1 of Sunlit, our app for collecting photos and text together to make and publish stories. Some of the bigger changes include:

• Instagram and Flickr import. You can now add any of your own Instagram or Flickr photos into a story. With Flickr, you can even browse from your Flickr sets.

• Improved Dropbox support. The first version of Sunlit assumed most of your photos on Dropbox were in the Camera Uploads or Photos folder. For 1.1, we’ve added a full Dropbox browser so you can pick any folder you want.

• Multi-user text syncing. Now anyone subscribed to a story can add both photos and text descriptions, and the text will sync to all users. This is a really powerful feature for collaborating on stories. We think it puts Sunlit in a class above any other app like this.

• Confirm deleted photos. What happens if you let other people add photos to your story, but they accidentally delete one of your photos? Sunlit now tracks this and shows a special confirmation alert so that you can either allow the photo to be deleted or keep it.

There are other fixes and improvements too, which you can see in the release notes. Here are a few screenshots of the new Dropbox and Flickr screens:

Sunlit is available in the App store as a free download. If you like it, pay just $4.99 to unlock the full app, and leave a review in the App Store to help others discover the app. Thanks!

iOS already ships with a mapping framework from Apple that all apps can use, so why did we ignore it in Sunlit and use Mapbox instead? Two main reasons:

Custom map colors. I was interested in creating beautiful new maps that would give Sunlit a unique design. Maps in every other iOS app look exactly the same. Sunlit is automatically more distinctive just by choosing something different, and we barely scratched the surface of the customization that is possible on Mapbox.

Direct web API. Mapbox gives you access to your maps not just in a native iOS map view, but also over the web. For the story backgrounds in Sunlit, we grab rendered maps directly with an HTTP call. This is a lot simpler and faster than having to build an interactive map view and snapshot it.

It also helped that I’ve been following the cool stuff Mapbox has been doing ever since Justin Miller joined their team a few years ago. I could tell this was a company that wanted to push the technology of maps forward. Apple needs to spend all their time building a viable alternative to Google Maps — driving directions, business locations, better search. But I don’t care about any of those things in my app. For Sunlit I want to use a framework from people who clearly love maps, and I think that’s Mapbox.

You have that feeling when hanging out with friends — everyone snapping pictures of their surroundings, of people, events, food, anything — that photo sharing should be better. That years later, you should be able to go back to that time, to see the best photos collected together from several people. And not just photos, but maps of where you were, and text to describe its significance.

One afternoon before Çingleton in 2012, this subject came up as Jonathan Hays and I were taking photos around Montreal. It seemed remarkable and disappointing to us that there was no easy way to put those photos together. And I liked the idea of buildling a new app around photos, with the same themes of curation and preserving past events that are so important to my other Riverfold products.

So we let the idea sit in the back of our minds, and later we wrote a little code as time allowed. At the App.net hackathon before WWDC 2013 we dove into the project in earnest, figuring out how it would sync, then over the summer took some more time to think through the user experience.

Sharing a single photo has been done a hundred times on iOS. Instagram was an important app to nail the timeline UI, and Favd is currently my favorite way to post and browse new photos (it’s really great). But hardly anyone has even attempted to tackle photo curation, group sharing, and publishing, let alone gotten it right. Sunlit 1.0 is our first pass at this and we couldn’t be more excited about trying to solve a new problem with photos.

They say you should spend money on experiences — on memories, not things. Sunlit helps you put those memories together, share them as a group, and rediscover them when it matters. The first version will ship tomorrow. I hope you like it.

Found via Shawn Blanc, CJ Chilvers writes about the reputation of photographers:

“I look at their blogs and the consideration given to advertisers over readers. I look at their Twitter feeds that have become broadcasts, rather than conversations. I look at their Instagram feeds and see a stream of consciousness, instead of considered examples of the work that makes them proud.”

It reminds me of one of my favorite parts of Christina Warren’s talk at this year’s Çingleton, where she told the story of turning down work she wouldn’t be proud of, even though she was still struggling as a professional writer. That your reputation will outlast your current job or project:

“If I give up my name — which I’m starting to build and people are starting to respect — by doing stuff like this, what does that mean? I can’t ever live this down. All I have is my name.”

Daniel Jalkut and I talked more about the general themes of Çingleton a couple months ago, on Core Intuition episode 110.

Lots of new people are joining App.net. If you’re one of them, welcome! In this post I’m going to briefly review 3 of the most popular iPhone clients: Netbot, Felix, and Riposte. You can’t really go wrong with any of these three apps. And if you’re looking for a Mac client, my current favorite is Kiwi.

Netbot is nearly identical to Tweetbot. It shares most of the same source and all of the same UI design. That common heritage is great because it’s familiar to fans of Tweetbot, and it allowed Tapbots to launch onto App.net in a big way, leapfrogging all other clients that were under development at that time.

But the familiar design is a double-edged sword. Not just because the App.net API will evolve and diverge from the Twitter API, but because if you switch between both Tweetbot and Netbot often, you may need to be careful that you remember which app you’re posting from. This was a problem for me since I no longer post to Twitter, and the last thing I wanted to do was accidentally leave a new post there after a 5-month absence.

All the usual features you’d expect are present in Netbot: timeline, mentions, private messages, multiple accounts, and sync with Stream Marker. It even has an iPad version, which you may want to pick up even if you chose a different primary app on the iPhone.

Netbot also has one big feature that most App.net clients don’t have: post search. This is not part of the core App.net API. Tapbots rolled their own search server so that they could offer this feature inside the app.

Sidenote plug: if you want search for all the posts from anyone you’re following, and your own posts, consider my web app Watermark. You can subscribe on the web or in the iPhone version.

Felix is possibly the most mature and actively maintained of the App.net-exclusive apps. You can tell from his App.net posts that the developer is passionate about App.net and determined to keep making his app better.

The current version supports all the basic features as well as push notifications, narrow inline image previews that take the full width of the screen, iCloud sync for drafts, starred conversations, and a brand new feature in version 1.5: collapsing posts you don’t want to see, similar to Twitterrific 5’s muffling. The only omission is that it does not yet support multiple accounts.

Felix is also unique in that it is the only one of these 3 apps that is not free. The other apps are counting on the Developer Incentive Program to send them a check each month instead of relying on traditional sales. Felix is a good value at $5, though, and the price shouldn’t stop you from trying it out, especially as it is a very small amount compared to the paid App.net subscription itself.

There are a number of gestures in Felix. One interesting shortcut — which may also be familiar to users of Twitterrific 5 — is swipe right to quickly start a reply. I personally found that this breaks the illusion of gestures as direct manipulation, though. Since swiping to the left pulls forward the conversation, doing the reverse swipe should go back to the timeline. (Update: There’s actually a setting in Felix to switch this behavior.)

Felix also added a clever trick in its post composition window. You can swipe the text view to move the selection cursor one character over, or use two fingers to swipe across an entire word at a time. This saves a lot of time tapping-and-holding and fiddling with the magnifying glass. Felix is packed with little details and shortcuts like this.

Riposte is beautifully done, with a clear design and a simple left/right gesture system to navigate through anything in the app. By default, there is no toolbar or tabs; everything is full-screen. Following Netbot’s lead, the developers of Riposte have decided to make their app free, and they have written up some thoughts on why.

Multiple accounts are handled well and it’s easy to switch between them. Like Felix and Netbot, push notifications are supported. Riposte uses large square inline images. It’s got a great interactions view that shows users who have recently followed you or starred your posts.

Riposte mirrors Felix’s compose text view gestures, and Riposte was the first to introduce 2-finger swipes in that text view. I love that both apps now support these gestures about equally, and hope to see many more apps steal this feature soon.

Since it doesn’t have tabs, switching between timeline, mentions, global stream, and other views is done through a slide-out panel, popularized in early apps like Facebook, Path, and Sparrow, and now very common everywhere, including my own Twitter app Tweet Library. It’s a swipe and a tap instead of the single tap of Netbot or Felix, but it is space-efficient and fits the flow of gestures in Riposte.

While Riposte holds its own against the competition, I think it will be chosen most not for its features but for its design. The striking full-screen look and consistent, discoverable gestures make this app feel great. It also has probably the most readable conversation view of any app I’ve used, where the focused post appears immediately and then is surrounded with the full conversation using smaller text. That design is even maintained in HTML email when sending a conversation from the app.

Every once in a while, I’ll think about this xkcd comic strip. It’s a reminder to me that great things can start small, unambitious. I never would’ve guessed that a web comic artist starting so plainly would later produce a single strip that’s so incredible.

Maybe we should all find our app’s version of stick figures, good jokes, and consistency. Then work long enough and hard enough and suddenly a couple years later, it feels within reach to build something amazing, something beautiful. Something big.

It’s great to see more people get access to their full archive of tweets from Twitter. In addition to just having a copy of your own tweets, it can be useful to go back and browse them by date, or search for something specific. I’d suggest putting the HTML version online as-is (mine’s here), and also checking out other apps that add a variety of different features on top of the basic archive.

Both of my apps — Tweet Library for iOS and Watermark for the web — can now import the .zip file you receive from Twitter. This file contains your full archive of tweets and retweets. Both apps can load the file directly from Dropbox, making it as simple as possible to get the tweets imported. And both apps are smart about only importing tweets that haven’t been stored yet, so you don’t have to worry about duplicates.

To import into Tweet Library, first download the archive from your settings page on twitter.com. Inside Tweet Library click on the blue arrow icon next to “Archives” and walk through the steps to authorize your account with Dropbox. Then copy the .zip file from Twitter to Dropbox → Apps → Tweet Library. It will show up in Tweet Library and can be selected.

Tweet Library is good if you want easy access to your tweets on the iPhone or iPad. You can search your tweets, create filters for them, and add tweets to special collections to share with others. It also doubles as a full Twitter client, with a timeline, posting, Instapaper support, and plenty more. Check it out in the iOS App Store.

To import into Watermark, also download the archive from Twitter and put it on Dropbox. You can put it anywhere, either in Apps → Watermark if you’ve already authorized Watermark to use Dropbox (for export), or in Documents or anywhere else. Then sign in to Watermark and click Account → “Upload all your tweets” to select the file.

Watermark is good if you want to expand your archive beyond just your own tweets. It indexes tweets from everyone you are following, creating a huge searchable archive over time. My own account in Watermark now has about 400,000 tweets indexed. Sign up or learn more at watermark.io.

The original goal for Tweet Marker Plus was to help cover the hosting costs for Tweet Marker. It succeeded for a little while, but it also ended up evolving into a larger independent service: Watermark, with much higher hosting costs for archiving and search, and a bunch of new features like App.net support, Dropbox sync, saved collections, and more. I’m really excited about the future of Watermark.

I also hear from Tweet Marker users who don’t need Watermark. They still want to support Tweet Marker, though, to make sure it continues running and that it’s as fast as possible.

So today I’m introducing a separate, inexpensive subscription option for Tweet Marker. Just $1/month! You can subscribe from the new Tweet Marker home page. And as a bonus you’ll get the first official Safari extension for Tweet Marker, shown in this screenshot:

Watermark now has App.net posting, replying, and an improved UI for tweeting. You could always tweet from Watermark, but it used Twitter’s “web intents” system, which opens a new browser window. The new interface is integrated directly into the Watermark sidebar, and it works with both App.net and Twitter.

Here’s what it looks like when it’s visible:

Watermark had some downtime early last week. While I was able to bring back the server faster and hopefully more robust than ever, I also wanted to quickly act to improve the service in visible ways. So I wrapped up a few features for Watermark over the Thanksgiving break, including two specific new features for Twitter and App.net.

For Twitter: Copying tweets to custom collections was cumbersome before, involving lots of clicks if you are copying multiple tweets in a row. Now there’s a faster way. After you copy a tweet to a collection, Watermark remembers that recent collection for a couple minutes and offers a “quick copy” link directly next to the tweet.

For App.net: You can now repost or star a post directly from the Watermark interface. I’ll continue to fill out Watermark with more features like this, whether you’re living in Watermark as your default client, or just searching your archive and want access to more functionality.

Search and performance should also be better across the board.

Last month I tried an experiment, lowering the price of Tweet Library for the first time in 2 years. It wasn’t selling well and I wanted to do something to determine if I was just stubbornly pricing it too high or if there was a deeper issue with the quality or marketing of the app. So let’s follow up on whether this was a success or not.

Here’s the graph of revenue for a 2-month period: one month before the price cut and one month after. There was also a new version released about a week after the price cut, but it didn’t appear to have a significant impact on sales.

Downloads were up 175%. Profit was up 40%. My gut feeling is that I should have dropped the price to $7.99 instead of $4.99, but I’m wary of changing anything again right now. We’ll see what next month looks like.

Watermark now supports App.net’s Stream Marker. You can click a post in Watermark to set its marker, the current marker will be retrieved when refreshing posts from the server, and the “Scroll to marker” link scrolls to the marker or loads more posts trying to find it.

Here’s what a marked post looks like:

I don’t know if any other clients support Stream Marker yet, but I expect many will in their next updates. I thought it was appropriate that I should be one of the first to support it.

I launched Tweet Marker in June of 2011. It wasn’t exactly a new idea — Echofon had a private sync before, and developers had long been asking Twitter for an official timeline position sync API — but Tweet Marker was the first to support sync between different apps. And it was the first to bring this idea to many more users, to make it a must-have feature that customers asked for.

In a way, I think of Stream Marker as a next-generation Tweet Marker, even though it’s not mine. The API and name are different, but it feels familiar, like an evolution from what we learned from Twitter apps. It’s a no-brainer to support it in Watermark.

Following just a week after the Dropbox support in Watermark, I’ve added two new smaller features that improve the user experience. The first is that photos hosted by Twitter are now included as inline thumbnails next to a tweet, as shown here:

The second improvement is a much faster Favorites view, which also now includes the new “stars” feature from App.net. Watermark doesn’t yet download all your existing stars (that will be rolled out to more users soon), but when it does encounter a star in your App.net timeline, that starred post will be included it this view right alongside Twitter favorites.

Steve Corona on keeping a journal:

“And for the past 1091 days, I’ve been journaling every single day — that’s about 3 years or 12% of my entire life. My only regret? I wish I started sooner.”

When I was younger, I had tried off and on to keep a sketchbook or journal, but it never quite stuck. Like blogging, or writing, or drawing, or anything you aren’t paid to do, it takes setting a routine. There’s always something more important to do.

Then in 1998, I started a journal again with a renewed commitment. I filled a book from that day up until I got married. Then another book through when my daughters were born. Another for the first 10 years of their life, and my son’s. The travel, the big life moments, the election, the work. It’s not everything — sometimes the entries are every day and sometimes months go by with nothing — but it’s the stuff that matters, and the snapshots in time of little everyday things too.

I would be devastated to lose these books. Open the pages and it rolls back the years like a time machine, to a previous life full of small details that are priceless today. I’m writing the books half for my terrible fading memory, and half for my children, who will only care what these years have been like when it’s too late to ask me.

So I’ve recently started transcribing the handwritten entries into digital form. One page at a time, into Day One, then exported as plain text. It’s a long and tedious process, but multiple copies are the only sure way to make something last.

I’ve written about saved filters in Tweet Marker Plus, and now I’m happy to announce the latest new feature: favorites. Tweet Marker Plus now grabs your favorites from Twitter so that they’re included in the searchable archive. The UI is better too, so you can tell at a glance what tweets have been favorited, and a new sidebar link can show just your recent favorites.

A few days ago was the 3-month anniversary of Tweet Marker Plus’s launch. This is a significant milestone for me because all the early subscriptions were only billed once every 3 months. For most subscribers, this week is the first time recurring billing will have kicked in. (New subscribers are on monthly billing, which is a lot simpler for customers to understand and for me to predict.)

I also rolled out some other fixes tonight, and improved performance for how background tasks run. Enjoy.

A few things have changed since I last talked about hosting. Tweet Marker passed 200,000 total users to the API. There are more apps and more platforms. And of course Plus launched with new requirements for database and search indexing of tweets.

Here’s a graph showing monthly hosting costs for the last year, stopping just short of $600/month for April:

The first dip was when I moved away from Heroku’s dedicated PostgreSQL database, to Redis on EC2. The more recent increase is when I updated capacity for Tweet Marker Plus.

Tweet Marker currently runs on both Heroku and Amazon EC2. On Heroku, there are 6 dynos: 5 web dynos with 3 Unicorn processes each, and 1 background worker. I also run hourly scheduled tasks that add a small number of extra dyno-hours, and sometimes I’ll fire up additional temporary workers.

For Amazon, I run with 3 medium server instances: 1 for Redis master, 1 for Redis slave, and 1 for search with MySQL and Sphinx. The search server is partitioned across multiple EBS volumes, each one mounted as a separate MySQL database and Sphinx index. It is possible for me to move a database or search index shard to a different EC2 instance if I need to, as well as move customers between shards.

The volumes look like this in Amazon’s admin UI:

I picked 20 GB shards because it seemed like about the point where the database would be too big to be fast, given the modest hardware. It’s enough to hold several months of tweets for all the users in a shard. I estimate how many users should be in each shard, and when it reaches that number I roll new accounts to the next shard, and so on.

Backup dumps for the Redis database and MySQL get sent to S3 every hour and every day, where I keep the last 24 hourly backups and the last 31 daily backups. I also do occasional EBS snapshots.

I don’t currently need a MySQL slave for backups. If I lose a drive, when I restore the last hourly backup, Tweet Marker Plus will automatically add any missing tweets lost during the downtime to bring things back to a current state.

Overall I’m happy with this setup. It’s as simple as I could design it. Hosting is not cheap, but I think I can run for the rest of the year with very few changes and mostly fixed costs. I also plan to switch to reserved instance pricing at Amazon, which should be a significant discount.

If you’ve made it this far, you probably care enough about servers and Twitter that you should consider signing up for Tweet Marker Plus yourself. Check out the details here.

When I created “Tweet Marker Plus”:tweetmarker.net/plus, I thought I was creating a new way to search Twitter. Limit the search to just people you follow and you can store more tweets, and more relevant ones. But as I’ve been adding new features to it, I’m realizing that Tweet Marker Plus is really a new kind of Twitter client — a client that has search and filters at its core.

Here’s what the sidebar looks like in my Tweet Marker Plus account:

Seems simple enough. But quickly switching between saved filters is very powerful. Because Tweet Marker is routinely fetching new tweets in the background, even when you haven’t opened your web browser in days or weeks, there are no gaps in the timeline. When I use a filter, it’s showing me everything that any of the people I follow have said since I first started using Tweet Marker Plus.

I’m excited about this. I’ll keep adding features and growing the storage, to make Tweet Marker Plus the best value $2/month could possibly get you.

Don Draper, from the season 1 finale of Mad Men (YouTube, skip if you plan to watch the whole series):

This device isn't a spaceship; it's a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel; it's called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels — around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we were loved.

When I first saw this a couple years ago I thought of Steve Jobs, the master pitchman in our industry. The delivery is different, more personal here, but it was stunning as part of the full episode. Who doesn’t want to build products that resonate so well, that go from nice utilities or productivity apps to something our customers fall in love with?

First you build a product that changes things, that is truly useful. Something ambitious. Then find a way to sell it that connects, and underscore why it matters.

I don’t really know how to do this yet. But I do know that part of it is telling stories. Why did I create Tweet Library? To tell stories, to remember events that matter before they’re lost in the fleeting stream of old tweets. It’s the kind of nostalgia at the heart of the Mad Men clip.

I like this post from Kyle Neath of GitHub, that it’s about ideas, not products (via Duncan Davidson):

People want to be part of ideas. Being part of a company who builds a successful product is cool... but being part of an idea is a lot more attractive. If you can build a business where both your employees and your customers think they're part of an idea, you've created something special.

If you can extract the core idea from a great product, everything that comes next can be matched to the idea, so the product has a clear path for new features. Building a story around it — something that sticks, and having the resources to tell that story properly — takes a lot of work. I’m inspired when I see others do it well, and it’s an art I hope to make time for.

I’m still working on a longer post about SXSW 2011 — yes, a month late — but until that’s ready, here’s a drawing I made after the conference.

Although I had worked a little on iOS apps before, updating an existing app for the iPad and tinkering with unfinished apps, the first 1.0 for iOS that I played a significant role in just shipped last week: a “mobile version of Bookshelf”:itunes.apple.com/us/app/vi… for VitalSource. The iPhone version has been in development off and on for a while, but I took over the project fairly late in development, with a coding frenzy through the summer as we switched file formats and scrambled to finish in time for fall students.

Today the app broke into the App Store’s top 25 for free Education apps.

It’s designed for existing VitalSource customers, supporting both our file formats (for XML-based reflowable content or PDF-like fixed layout), with synced highlights, figure search, and offline access. At its core the app is 3 parts: a large C++ codebase, brand new Objective-C UI code, and a bunch of clever WebKit and JavaScript work. In many ways it’s a more difficult project than my other iPad app (still in development), but some great coders contributed to different parts of the architecture, before and after I joined the project.

Nearly 10 years ago, when I was hired at VitalSource to build the Mac version of our e-book reader, we delivered textbooks on DVD-ROMs and our technology was years ahead of everyone else. Today, and especially post-iPad, the market is a lot different, with some beautiful competition like “Inkling”:itunes.apple.com/us/app/in… Bookshelf for iPhone wasn’t first to the App Store, but it inherits an existing user base, strong platform, and large book inventory. I like VitalSource’s chances.

As I “wrote in January”:www.manton.org/2010/01/m… I decided to go to Macworld to show off Clipstart and Wii Transfer, and to experience the conference again and hang out with friends. I ended up doing less of the latter, because I lost my voice and was feeling terrible for a couple days, but nevertheless the trip was great and I’m very glad I went. Worth it.

Here’s my summary of the show, what it took for me to be there and what I got out of it for “Riverfold”:www.riverfold.com/. This is supposed to be in the spirit of “Rogue Amoeba’s excellent series on Macworld”:www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/2007/… but more from a super-tiny company perspective, and just where my experience differs.

I do want to quickly mention costs, since that’s the primary consideration when planning these things. I took advantage of the Indie Developer Spotlight shared kiosk to keep investment low. In fact, I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. I kept the whole trip to about $2700, with a rough breakdown like:

$1250 - space on the show floor

$900 - hotel for 4 nights

$250 - flights to and from San Francisco

$100 - printed “2000 flyers”:www.flickr.com/photos/ma…

$200 - other misc costs, cabs, and food

I could have saved some money in there on the hotel, but in general I think I did pretty well. For a lot indies it’s probably not that much different than a WWDC trip.

I worked 8 hours each day on my feet at Moscone North, in my little booth space in the very corner of the expo. I was lucky for two things: Guy English was awesome and covered for me a couple times so I could take a real break; and the restrooms and water fountain were so close I could slip away when traffic was slow and be back without missing much.

The less expensive booth option was supposed to be for a table shared between 3 developers, with presumably a dozen or more small companies filling the area. But unlike the iPhone pavilion in the center of the tradeshow, which was packed with exhibitors, hardly any Mac developers took advantage of this offer. It was just me and one other company.

This was disappointing at first, since a less dense area doesn’t convey the same excitement and means less foot traffic. But there were other aspects of the deal that turned out better than expected, such as included wired internet even though none was originally promised. Compared to a traditional booth, it was a bargain.

Before leaving Austin for San Francisco I jotted down a few notes on how I could measure success, since I didn’t want to pin whether it was worth it just to direct sales.

See friends and meet new people. Check, but there were a lot of people that I ran into very briefly and didn’t get to really talk to. See aforementioned lost voice.

Get ideas from customers. Check, got plenty of great ideas. I loved talking to random Mac people, not limited to just the ones who bother to send email.

Figure out how to sell the product. There’s nothing like explaining your application over and over again all day to refine your pitch. I feel like I have a much better handle on this, but there’s still work to do, and web sites to update.

Actually sell some copies. I used a coupon code to track sales. During the conference my sales were flat, but in the weeks since I’ve had the best sales days of Clipstart ever.

Get exposure in the press. Check, was interviewed by Ryan Ritchey for “The Digital Lifestyle”:thedigitallifestyle.tv/home/2010… Merlin Mann for “MacBreak Video”:www.pixelcorps.tv/macbreak3… and talked with other members of the press on the show floor. I should have done more but lacked the energy.

Win best of show award. Nope, but wasn’t expecting it. I think it’s a shame that only one Mac application won, but on the flip side it’s great that it was “Inklet”:tenonedesign.com/inklet.ph… Really cool app.

Everyone’s expectations coming into the event were low — the previous exhibitors who backed out, the attendees who wrote Macworld off, and the press who questioned the show’s relevance. But clearly Macworld 2010 was a success. The second day of the expo I was late to the show floor, arriving just a few minutes before they opened the hall. There was a huge mass of people waiting to get in.

There will be a Macworld 2011. I’m really excited to see how it works to move the whole expo and conference to Moscone West. I’m not sure if I’ll be there yet, since as demonstrated this year I can’t plan nearly that far in advance. Throwing all of this together 2 weeks before the show only worked because of everyone who made things a little easier during the week.

Thanks to Jason Snell, Merlin Mann, Adam Lisagor, and everyone else who stopped by and waited patiently through my demos; also Guy English, Paul Kafasis, David Barnard, John Fox, John Chaffee, the RogueSheep guys, my booth buddies from “Hello Chair”:hellochair.com/appsaurus… and the other indie developers I’m forgetting; and especially Albert McMurry, Dan Moren, and John Gruber for telling people about Clipstart. It succeeds only because of word of mouth.

In closing… Maybe it’s because James Cameron is still in the news, but I’ve always loved this line from the character Rose in Titanic: “It doesn’t make any sense. That’s why I trust it.”

That’s mostly how I felt about exhibiting at Macworld. Even though it was “cheap” by tradeshow standards, for me it was real money and a risk. I booked my flight the day I realized that the only reason not to go was because I could fail.

I first met Dan Benjamin in 2005, at an off-site meeting for VitalSource in Telluride, Colorado. I don’t remember much of what we talked about over the course of those few days, but what I do remember, as the team was riding in the back of a jeep heading up the mountains, is that he kept talking about radio and podcasting.

In the five years since then he’s started a couple successful podcasts, and now he’s launched something bigger: a podcast network called 5 by 5 with a strong lineup of new shows.

"I started planning. I didn't want to do it part time or half way — I wanted to do this for real, meaning full-time. I wanted to create an Internet-based broadcast network, a place where I could create and host shows for myself and with my friends."

I love seeing someone’s passion, only loosely related to how they earn a living, go from something in the back of their head to a full core business. Good luck, Dan. It’s off to a great start.

It was “just last week”:www.coreint.org/2010/01/e… that we mentioned “Today 2.0”:www.secondgearsoftware.com/today/ from Second Gear on the Core Intuition podcast, and now Justin Williams at Second Gear is making news again by organizing Mac developers to donate to charity in the wake of the Haiti earthquake.

I’m happy to announce that Riverfold is participating. Since my wife and I already gave to the Red Cross, I decided to donate my sales to “Save the Children”:www.savethechildren.net/, an international organization working in Haiti now. It’s amazing how many Mac and iPhone developers have come together for Indie Relief, and great that we are able to do something that reaches more charities and has a bigger impact than if we were all just making individual contributions.

So if you’ve been on the fence about whether you need Wii Transfer or Clipstart, “buy a copy today”:www.riverfold.com/. Thanks!

I was chatting with some developers the other night about giving away software to Apple employees. If you’re not familiar with the practice, it’s fairly common to give free or discounted licenses to Apple employees as a gesture of goodwill to the people responsible for making our platform, and in the hope that they will spread the word to friends and customers in the Apple Stores. (If you’re a developer and want to set this up, “check out Dan Wood’s overview”:www.karelia.com/mac_indie…)

I’ve given away over 1000 licenses for “Wii Transfer”:www.riverfold.com/software/… and “Clipstart”:www.riverfold.com/software/… to Apple employees since I started doing it a few months ago. I didn’t expect this number to be so high, but I guess it makes sense. Apple folks are getting a link from their internal site directly to my special registration page, and many of them probably request a serial number just in case they need it later.

The question I have isn’t whether it’s worth it; it only took a few hours to set up, and even if it just makes a handful of Apple employees happy then that’s a success. But I was curious about the greater impact of giving away my software. Is the $0 investment in a pile of other free licenses enough to engage someone to, for example, take the time to set up Clipstart and move a collection of videos into it, let alone recommend it to others? (See also: “Worthless apps”:www.manton.org/2009/12/w…)

To find out more, I sent a special newsletter to all the @apple.com addresses in my registration database, asking if they used the software, how they liked it, and whether they’d recommend it to others or not. And I included in “the short survey”:riverfold.wufoo.com/forms/riv… a place for general feedback, and a choice about upcoming features.

Some developers I talked with were concerned about a potential backlash. Although I send a newsletter to my customers once or twice a year, it’s debatable whether some of the people I was including had implicitly signed up by purchasing (with a 100% discount!) or whether I had crossed a line. The last thing I want to do is upset any of my customers, and I provide the same level of support to everyone whether they’ve paid full price, received a free license, or just tried the demo.

In the end I decided it was harmless. The email was short, plain text, and had an obvious one-click unsubscribe link. One of the things I like about using “Campaign Monitor”:www.campaignmonitor.com is that once someone unsubscribes, any new mailings are automatically scrubbed against the unsubscribers list. Even if I accidentally add the customer again in the future they won’t receive an email. So far, 2.2% of recipients have unsubscribed.

As for the survey results, here are a few graphs. Not many people filled out the survey (like unsubscribes, just a couple percent, though they’re still trickling in after 2 days), but the other feedback I received in the comments and feature questions was very helpful. 100% of users said they had mentioned the product to someone else.

Would I do this again? No, not such a narrowly-focused newsletter as this. The quick survey served its purpose, but I am always nervous about wearing out my welcome. I plan to add an explicit newsletter opt-in checkbox to my free license page, and I should do a better job of differentiating free licenses and paying customers in the future. I’ll send another general newsletter out to all customers (and opt-ins from contests) when I have something major to announce later in the year.

Clipstart 1.0 tried to be smart about not importing videos that were already in your library, but it stopped short of actually giving you much control over whether to import duplicates or ignore them. I also felt like the window showing duplicates could be improved to provide more information about each file. At a glance you should be able to tell if Clipstart is doing the right thing.

So I put a lot of effort into this for the soon-to-be-released Clipstart 1.2.4, and the result is this window:

It generates a few frames of the timeline for each video (both old and new file side by side), which turns out to be an excellent way to confirm that they are indeed the same file, and also shows the original filename even after Clipstart (or the user) has renamed it. Now I can scan through the window in about 2 seconds and I’m done. Contrast with iPhoto which prompts after each video is imported, instead of at the end of the batch, and if you blindly trust it by checking “Apply to all duplicates” then you have no feedback on whether you made the right choice.

The new duplicates window works with both volume-based cameras like the Flip and SD cards, as well as USB devices such as the iPhone 3GS and iPod Nano. I hope to ship version 1.2.4 soon, and there’s a “beta in the forums”:www.riverfold.com/forums/to…

Update: As pointed out by a customer, Ignore and Keep are actually pretty confusing verbs here. I’ve changed it to “Skip Duplicates” and “Import Duplicates” for the final release.

My son is seriously into LEGO Star Wars right now. He’ll spend hours every day building ships, and it’s the most incredible thing watching how good he’s gotten at it over the last couple of months. For his birthday we ordered him the X-wing set, which is “all kinds of awesome”:www.flickr.com/photos/ma…

One of my favorite posts to this blog was partially about LEGOs. “In 2006 I wrote”:www.manton.org/2006/01/l…

"If the toy is made to do a few specific amazing things, with a bunch of bullet points and exclamation marks on the side of the box, be weary of it. For example, modern LEGOs come in all sorts of pre-molded shapes. If you buy the pirate set, it will be great fun for the first few days until you realize that it can only be a pirate ship. But if you buy a bucket of LEGOs (yes, they still sell these), you can build a pirate ship one day and a barn the next."

There’s a lot more to the post, and I still believe what I wrote. But it turns out that LEGO Star Wars sets are surprisingly well designed. There are very few custom pieces, and almost all the sets (we must have about 10) share the same shapes, just with different colors and for different purposes. I’m a big fan now.

Tonight we sat in bed together and looked at LEGO catalogs. I’m in those awesome years where being a dad is just like being a kid again, and this post is to capture a little part of that moment, before it’s gone.

Yesterday I sent out a newsletter to all my “Wii Transfer”:www.riverfold.com/software/… customers. You can see the “text of the newsletter here”:www.riverfold.com/newslette… I wasn’t sure how effective this would be, but I immediately got a bunch of responses to the survey, and hopefully more interest in Clipstart too.

I decided against doing any specific tracking for number of views and links clicked, but there was an obvious spike in traffic for a couple hours as people clicked on the links in the email.

The survey results are about what I expected. Most people are buying Wii Transfer to watch movies and listen to music on their TV. I’ll use this feedback to simplify the user interface around these features, and prune back a feature set that had grown a little too fast for its own good.

Here’s a chart of the results so far:

I used “Campaign Monitor”:www.campaignmonitor.com for sending the newsletter, and as usual I’m very pleased with how simple they make this. I did a full customer export from my registration database and Campaign Monitor merged it with the existing list from my newsletter last year, weeding out duplicates and removing anyone who had already unsubscribed.

I’m extremely impressed by this UI from MobileMe. All web-based, of course.

Excellent progress feedback, great attention to detail… But then they nearly ruin it with “item(s)”.

It’s often true that the further away you get from an event, like the release day for the Safari 4 beta, the closer you get to a fair analysis. Initial Twitter reaction was gut level and some not even based on anything but screen shots. “My own post”:www.manton.org/2009/02/d… was admittedly slightly half baked, but I think it stands up fine.

Now we are seeing some more thoughtful analysis, including from “Dan Frakes of Macworld”:www.macworld.com/article/1… and “Lukas Mathis”:ignorethecode.net/blog/2009… and of course the thorough “John Gruber of Daring Fireball”:daringfireball.net/2009/03/s…

I wanted to revisit one thing with click-through. If you eliminate the mouse rollovers and click-through for inactive tabs, you end up with surprisingly few places to accidentally click. Here are two screenshots illustrating the difference between Safari 4 and BBEdit.

It’s true that the file icon needs a hold-and-drag, so it’s harder to click, and the hide toolbar button is off to the side and less dangerous than closing a tab. Nevertheless, viewed by pixels alone there isn’t a significant difference between the safely clickable area of these two window title bars if Apple makes this small change.

Update: If I left too much to the imagination, here are examples of the real Safari 4 clickable areas, not the way I wish it would be above.

And the extreme example with even more tabs:

The important point is that if you disable click-through for inactive tabs, the safe area does not change even with dozens of tabs, and in my opinion it is only marginally worse than other standard Mac applications, as shown in the first two screenshots. The current Safari 4 behavior, on the other hand, continues to degrade until the window title bar is nearly useless.

I don’t have an expensive camera and I don’t know that much about photography, but you’ll just have to trust me that the sky looked amazing this morning. Especially a few minutes before this picture was taken.

We should have another 80-degree day today before it gets cold again. As much as I complain that it doesn’t snow in Austin — that wouldn’t it be great if the kids could live a real winter at least every couple of years, the kind they read about in books and newspaper comics — I have to admit that it’s pretty nice to be outside with a t-shirt in the middle of winter.

Funny thing about mornings. I could sleep until noon every day if kids and work didn’t prevent me, but I seem to be most productive early anyway. Stepping into my home office still dreary eyed and without breakfast, catching up on tweets and email from Europeans and other night owls, then settling into source code or design or testing with some amount of quiet before the rest of the world sends another batch of distractions my way.

Forget the realities of slipping release schedules and buggy software. Morning is that special time when everything still seems possible.

Every year my New Year’s resolutions look about the same: draw more, journal more. (Blogging more is never one of my resolutions, but I’m nevertheless off to a good start this year with a goal of about one new post a day.)

This year I knew I needed some inspiration to keep drawing more. I ordered a calendar of drawings from the in-progress short film Leonardo and pinned it to the wall above my desk. My idea was pretty simple: every day I will see this calendar, and I will mark off the days that I actually draw.

The calendar is still blank. Guess I’ve failed, so far.

In better news, animator Jim Capobianco is nearing completion of the film. He’s been posting some excellent tips on his blog about what he’s learned during production. I saw a rough cut of his film at the 2D Expo. Even in storyboard form you could tell it would be great. I blogged briefly about the trip to California for the expo and WWDC back in 2004.

His day job is at Pixar, where he’s been responsible for other hand-drawn efforts such as Your Friend the Rat (on the Ratatouille DVD) and the WALL-E closing credits.

Last month “I asked on Twitter”:twitter.com/manton/st… for opinions on comma-delimited vs. space-delimited tagging. I didn’t get very many responses, but what I did get was pretty interesting.

Consensus: most people like commas and everyone likes Flickr. (The second takeaway here is that the service or app is more important, since Flickr uses spaces and everyone seems to cope just fine, even that 66% who prefer commas.)

You can see the “full report stats on Wufoo”:riverfold.wufoo.com/reports/t…

In October I “blogged about”:www.manton.org/2008/10/f… and then launched a “family pack” purchase option for Wii Transfer. $39 for 5 licenses vs. $19 for 1.

The results are in, and they are unspectacular.

2.6% of orders were family pack purchases. At an extra $20 per order, that essentially comes out to the equivalent of one extra sale for every 40.

To all my customers who were honest enough to choose the more expensive option, thank you. I don’t think most people need the flexibility of running 5 copies of Wii Transfer simultaneously, but I’m glad that it’s helpful for a few of you out there.

Now that I’ve written this down and crunched the numbers, it calls to mind something that “Joel Spolsky”:www.joelonsoftware.com said in an interview. All the coupons or referral fees or discount prices or other gimmicks they tried are ultimately just a diversion from the best way to increase sales: make the software better.

I’ll leave you with this chart for 2008 sales. August was shiny-new-version month.

I mentioned on “Core Intuition”:www.coreint.org episode 11 that I’ve been having fun making small icons for my new app. Here are a few partial screenshots:

Some of these are just pixel-by-pixel drawings, with slight gradients in places. For other parts of the user interface I used vectors in Photoshop, which gives a nice anti-aliased look that is important for some types of shapes, but for really small icons and widgets it’s pretty satisfying to just poke at things “fat bits”:www.google.com/search style.

“Gus Mueller”:gusmueller.com/blog/ pointed out that I should be using PDFs or drawing them in code to be ready for resolution independence. He’s right of course. Maybe Apple will announce a device at Macworld that will make that task seem more practical.

The other night I was digging around in other people’s old blog posts, catching up on things I never read but should, and I found this gem on “Seth Godin’s blog”:sethgodin.typepad.com/.

“Watch it on YouTube”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA and then come back here.

Maybe the video and show is old news to everyone else, but I was stunned. A seemingly unremarkable man, by his own admission lacking confidence, the judges and audience clearly expecting the worst, expecting humiliation.

And then he is transformed. He nails it.

I consider myself reasonably competent, but not great, at what I do. My weakness is that I have my hands in too many unrelated projects to ever master one thing. The areas I am most passionate about receive a cruel pittance of attention. Not so with Paul Potts.

It’s inspiring to see someone who is just freakin’ good, rising above expectation out of a bland job to surprise and overwhelm everyone around him.

Oh, and the nice thing about discovering this video late? I can fast-forward to the finish. “Here’s the winning performance”:www.youtube.com/watch with some additional backstory.

As I mention on the next “Core Intuition”:www.coreint.org/, which I’m currently finishing editing and should be out tomorrow, “Wii Transfer 2.6”:www.riverfold.com/software/… was very well received. I put out a 2.6.1 tonight to address Mii problems for some customers, and with new encoding settings that improve movie streaming quality significantly.

The following chart shows the spike in sales for August along with every month of 2008 and 2007. This isn’t revenue but total units sold for the month.

While I don’t expect nearly this level for September, I am nevertheless interested in how far it will drop. Maybe I’ll post an updated chart at the end of the year.

For the extra curious, the jumps in September and October of last year were when I released version 2.5 and when I did the MacZOT promotion. December was MacSanta, and somewhere in the middle of there I did the Nintendo Wii giveaway.

One of worst-kept secrets of “Wii Transfer”:www.riverfold.com/software/… is that the movie playback is not as good as what you might see on an Apple TV, Xbox 360, or PS3. I do my best to improve the quality with every release, but let’s face it: while the Wii is perfectly capable of playing fullscreen video, it stumbles when put to that task inside the Opera web browser through Flash.

In the upcoming version 2.6, I’ve added the ability to skip directly to any part of a playing movie by clicking on the timeline with the Wii remote. It was frustrating not to be able to do that in previous versions and made it difficult to watch or fast-forward through long movies.

The way many Flash movie players handle skipping is by inserting metadata into the FLV file that contains a map between seconds in the timeline and file positions for the keyframes, and that’s the way Wii Transfer works as well. Unfortunately this requires rewriting the entire FLV file when post-processing movies. (“Ian Baird”:blog.skorpiostech.com suggested a future optimization would be to store the metadata separately and redo the player to send seconds instead of file offsets to the server.) I was initially using the open source flvtool2.rb to achieve this, but it was extremely slow, so I rewrote it in Objective-C. (Not a port. The Objective-C version was written from scratch and is significantly shorter than the Ruby version in terms of lines of code. It does a little bit less, but it’s optimized for exactly what Wii Transfer needs.)

This chart shows the performance improvements when processing a couple large movie files. Measured in seconds, so shorter bars are better.

The other good thing that came out of all this work is that I can now look at a FLV file in a hex editor and not be totally confused. “Hex Fiend”:ridiculousfish.com/hexfiend/ was one of the best ways to debug what my code was doing when it failed.

Wii Transfer has a full-page mini-tutorial in the May edition of “MacLife magazine”:www.maclife.com/, as part of a section on connecting your Mac to video game consoles. I finally “picked up a copy”:twitter.com/manton/st… last night. It was certainly a nice surprise and seems to have brought a small increase in sales.

I’ve also been wrapping up the next version of Wii Transfer, which hopefully smoothes over most of the rough spots in the current release. After sending beta copies to a few customers, I’m opening up a “new forums section”:www.riverfold.com/forums/ as an experiment in getting early builds out without a more formal public beta. (It’s not linked from the main site yet, but will be soon.) Every developer handles betas in a different way, but I like the balance Jesse at “Hog Bay Software”:www.hogbaysoftware.com has achieved between his released software page and the early builds and developer notes in the forums section, for those customers willing to dig a little bit below the surface.

Wii Transfer’s featured day for “MacSanta”:www.macsantadeals.com starts at midnight tonight, but I’ve already rolled out the coupon code. Because I’m still using simple PayPal “Buy Now” buttons, I hacked together a little custom coupon field just for MacSanta (based on a simple JavaScript trick posted to the MacSB list). I tried to come up with a clear interface even though there isn’t a traditional online store, because it just doesn’t make sense to spend time on a full store for only one product. (Plus, look at that cute MacSanta logo! Aww.)

Here’s a screenshot “from the web site”:www.riverfold.com/software/… after you’ve redeemed a code:

On Friday the discount drops to a respectable 10% off for the rest of the month. Happy holidays!

After sitting on a shelf in my office for 2 months, unopened and unloved, I finally shipped off the Nintendo Wii today to the lucky winner. I was initially worried because he didn’t respond until well into the second day after I notified him, but he was pretty excited (“You’ve made my holiday”) and I’m glad it could ship out before Christmas. The picture here is in the car before I went into the UPS store to fill the box with peanuts.

The promotion took a surprising amount of effort, but it was fun and definitely worthwhile. There were a total of 2447 unique submissions (1925 for the email form, and 522 from Twitter). Of those, over 1/3 agreed to sign up for my annual Riverfold Software newsletter. I consider that alone a success, although until I look at the stats more closely it’s not clear what percentage of potential-customers are actually using Macs. My “Wii Twitter account”:twitter.com/wii also doubled to about 300 followers.

Although sales were initially flat, both “TUAW”:www.tuaw.com/2007/12/0… and “Ars Technica”:arstechnica.com/journals/… ran nice stories on the promotion. I also “wrote a press release”:riverfold.com/software/… with the idea of hitting some of the bigger gaming sites for the second week of the contest. In the end I decided not to, because I wanted to focus on Mac users, and because frankly there were plenty of submissions and I was burned out on the process.

The contest easily paid for itself, but the extra sales really weren’t that significant. I have a database that tracks referrers through to the actual purchase, so I noticed an increase of only about 10-20 copies out of the 100 sales for the month so far. Part of that is no doubt the catch-22 of giving away hardware that is required for your software product, but I know that long-term there will be a benefit to the wider exposure.

Mistakes? I should have made the whole promotion last just a day or two, and hyped it before launching instead. I also should have required that Twitter users follow Wii before entering, which would have boosted those followers and also greatly simplified tracking submissions (replies were spread over 3 RSS feeds and 33 iChat log transcripts). Relatively minor complaints, though, overall.

To everyone who provided feedback on the idea, thanks. Maybe next year I’ll implement some of the more interesting promotion ideas I heard.

From time to time on the “MacSB list”:tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mac… people ask about the value of localization and what percentage of sales come from foreign customers. Since day 1 of “Wii Transfer”:www.riverfold.com I’ve always been surprised at how many sales are from Europe. At times it felt as if over half of sales were outside the United States, so I finally ran the numbers to know for sure.

My homegrown customer database doesn’t actually include the physical address, so I grabbed the last 500 sales from PayPal and wrote a quick script to group the countries. Here’s the chart:

The United States represents just over half. If you add up the other English-speaking countries, it hits 70%. Still, this is a purely English-only piece of software. I’ve resisted the push to localize until I feel the codebase is better prepared for it, and the UI more stable.

At “VitalSource”:www.vitalsource.com last year I wrote a custom Rails web app to manage localization resources for both the Mac and Windows products and deal with the outsource translators, and the takeaway from that experience was definitely to go slowly. It’s easy to end up with a foreign language version that makes compromises and is potentially less useful to customers than the English version. Depending on the size of the product, localization could take weeks or months, time that might be better spent adding features.

Back to the real stats. Why are the foreign numbers so high? I think the weak dollar combined with an already relatively inexpensive price makes Wii Transfer even more of an impulse buy in Europe.

That’s the way I described the iPhone to anyone I showed it off to over the weekend. The thing is amazing. Easily the most advanced and beautiful UI that we have ever seen on a portable device.

I waited outside the Apple Store most of Friday to get an iPhone, and it contrasted very favorable with my experience camping out for the Wii. The 6pm sale time decision was a smart one. It turns out waiting in line all day wasn’t necessary, but for anyone who had to have one on day 1 it was the safest choice, and it makes for a fun community. I ran into a bunch of people I knew and met new folks as well. Enjoyed catching up with Donna Kidwell and had a chance to chat at length with Jeremy Derr of Barton Springs Software.

Damon YouTubed the line in the early afternoon and by 6pm the line was roughly 250 people. We were in the low 40s and were in and out of the Apple Store in 15 minutes. They ran a great launch. Also a nice assortment of free water, tea, pizza, and coffee from both Apple and surrounding businesses. Here’s a shot of me from Damon’s Flickr stream.

Here are my posts to Twitter throughout the day, which also show part of the story:

6:34am: Good morning iPhone Day! Weather forecast in Austin for today: 40% chance of showers and storms.

10:15am: It’s only 10am but already realized I need to go to Plan B. Bribe friends already in line to use their 2nd iPhone purchase.

11:09am: Change of plans. Heading to the Apple Store now to join in the line-waiting fun. Will it be too late?”

12:26pm: I expected rain, but that seems unlikely. It’s hot like a real Austin summer here in the iPhone line.

2:32pm: Hanging out in The Line with Jeremy of Barton Springs Software and @damon. Apple Store is closed. Had some lunch and a Starbucks soy latte.

4:03pm: 2 hours left. We can redeem our free Starbucks coffee coupons now. Excited! (About the iPhone. Not the coffee.)

6:30pm: Got my iPhone.

7:35pm: Activation will have to wait. Ratatouille.

8:18pm: Movies all sold out. Pre-activation dinner at Kerby Lane instead.

9:53pm: Activation took less than a minute. Also, no plan choice. Just $20 added on to what I already pay, I guess.

Other reviews around the web:

Matt Haughey: “So in conclusion, the iPhone is nice from start to finish, but Safari is really the thing that turns it from a phone into a mini-laptop. Once I get more used to two-thumb typing, the last limitations that keep it from feeling like a real computer will be gone.”

Scott Stevenson: “I usually don’t get too into pop culture events, but this is different. The Mac is going mainstream in a big way.”

Ryan Irelan: “I probably tried out the emergency call slider three dozen times. I wonder if anyone actually called 911 because their phone wasn’t activating quickly enough.”

Steven Frank: “Best phone ever. And given the rest of the industry’s generally pervasive cluelessness about pretty much everything, I don’t expect it to be surpassed by anything until the iPhone 2.”

John Gruber: “Overall day one impression: the iPhone is 95 percent amazing, 5 percent maddening. I’m just blown away by how nice it is - very thoughtful UI design and outstanding engineering.”

Along with most of our house, my office is packed up and ready to move this week. The photo to the right is of one of the handful of items in a box labeled “Manton’s desk,” or, if someone else had her way, “Random junk Manton saves to remember the past but which should really be in the trash can.”

It’s unopened Moof beer from WWDC 1996, my first WWDC. At 20 I was too young to drink, but I probably would have saved it anyway. That was back when Apple gave you cool stuff and not just another cheap laptop bag.

This year’s WWDC will probably go down as one of my favorites. The keynote was a bit dull, but it was offset by the reality that Leopard is a mature and usable system. I have been running all my primary apps off of it since last week, including Mail.app, NetNewsWire 3.0, and Xcode.

I couldn’t place the feeling at the time, but now I realize that last week’s sessions were, in a way, relaxing. There was no sense of urgency. Most of the sessions I attended were practical, full of hands-on advice for preparing for Leopard and many applicable to Tiger development as well. I got a lot out of the week, and when I decided to skip out on Friday it didn’t feel like the world would come crashing down because of it.

Other highlights of WWDC 2007 were away from the sessions: walking Chinatown with Willie on Sunday in search of the illusive bakery item; hitting the SF Mac Indie party that night and hanging out with fellow developers afterwards; Buzz Andersen’s party Monday, catching up with Lane and the host; the Dan Benjamin annual breakfast; Apple Design Awards on Tuesday, which had a record number of wins for apps I’ve actually used; accidentally walking into a James Morrison concert at the Apple Store (left photo); being interviewed by Scott McNulty of TUAW, though I secretly hope they will decide not to air it; enjoying great Italian with the VitalSource team on Wednesday before catching the tail end of CocoaHeads; plus the Apple Bash and more drinks and discussion Thursday night.

Like at SXSW earlier this year, Twitter proves both cool and useful. I was lucky enough to meet many of the people on my Twitter friends list for the first time last week.

Of course it wasn’t all fun and games. I sifted through more legitimate Bookshelf bug reports than usual; I was exhausted pretty much every day; and there were a couple developers I had hoped to seek out that I just never made the time to.

All in all, though, a good week and now I’m ready to get back to coding.

In the tradition of other independent Mac developers such as “Mike Zornek”:clickablebliss.com/blog/2007… “Daniel Jalkut”:www.red-sweater.com/blog/191/… and “Gus Mueller”:www.gusmueller.com/blog/arch… I’m going to share some sales information from the first 75 days of Wii Transfer.

The following chart shows daily sales (in units sold) for each day. I’ve also highlighted important milestones so you can see what affect they had on sales, such as shipping 2.0 (which brought many links) and increasing the price (from $9 to $14, which brought my first 2.0 day of no sales at all). Finally, there are a few spots where I show the average number of visitors.

(As an aside, I created this chart in Keynote. I love software that is simple and flexible enough to be used for purposes outside its original developer’s intentions. I wrote “more on this subject back in early 2006”:www.manton.org/2006/01/l…)

It’s difficult to tell, but the numbers on the right side are on average a little bit higher than the left. Not by much though. Sales just trickle in again right now (a few a day).

So what does it all mean? Here is the basic take-away: Sales are much better than I thought they would be, but not nearly enough to live off of. That’s okay, because I happen to love “my day job”:www.vitalsource.com (also writing Mac software). However, I can definitely see how it would be possible to do this full time, with some real marketing and a collection of several additional applications. I have done zero marketing for Wii Transfer except listing it on MacUpdate, VersionTracker, and Apple’s download site (where it was featured in the video section).

As you can see, there was a big spike in sales when 2.0 was released. This is a direct result of links from Mac sites like The Unofficial Apple Weblog and Daring Fireball, and gaming sites like Jostiq and others. When traffic goes up, sales go up. This opened my eyes because it really is all about getting your app in front of other users. “As I blogged about previously”:www.manton.org/2007/01/w… I think I also missed some sales opportunities during this period because 2.0 was not very stable.

Other interesting stats: The conversion rate is between 2% and 5%. For every 100 downloads, a few people decide to purchase it. I think many active users probably end up paying for it. Instead of a trial demo period, some features are just crippled, and it isn’t very usable day-to-day without unlocking the full feature set (for example, with music sharing to the Wii, you can only play one song at a time – no iTunes playlists or shuffle).

There are at least a few pirates too. I’m not too worried about them because “you can’t stop pirating”:wilshipley.com/blog/2007… and most people are honest. One customer was even nice enough to tell me about a pirated serial number he found.

To everyone who purchased Wii Transfer, thanks! When I built 1.0, I wasn’t sure if I would work on it again. Now, several versions later at 2.2, I have a clear roadmap of features (and bugs!) to keep me busy.

If you’ve talked to me recently about video games or read my post about trying for a Wii pre-order, you know I have become obsessed with getting a Nintendo Wii at launch. The high scores that the new Zelda was receiving last week pretty much sealed the deal for me: I had to have one.

Thursday and Friday if I was out doing errands and passed a store I would inquire about their launch plans. It wasn’t looking good, with mixed messages from employees about how many units they would be receiving. Saturday afternoon I stopped by Wal-mart at around 2pm and already there were 22 people in line for the midnight launch of only 29 systems for that store. They urged me to stay, but I couldn’t. I had a whole day planned already, and it didn’t include video games.

Saturday evening I made a list of a half dozen possible stores and called each one. It was clear right away that if I wanted a Wii on the launch weekend, there was only one choice.

   

I arrived at Target at about 9:30pm Saturday evening with a chair, blanket, Nintendo DS, and book. They would open ten and a half hours later at 8am the next day, but tickets would be passed at around 7am. Early line campers who had arrived at 3pm in the afternoon had a sign-in list to ensure there was no confusion. I was number 33 out of 60 confirmed Wii systems. By midnight, all the consoles were accounted for, and everyone who arrived afterwards was turned away.

I had a great time talking with other line waiters. It was an interesting mix of people, from John next to me who worked at Apple here in Austin, to a set of young gamers who pulled up with a truck and unloaded two couches, a rug, and a coffee table.

Around 4 in the morning I realized how unprepared I was. It was in the 40s that night and my blanket was completely insufficient. If I ever do something crazy like this again, I’m packing several blankets, a sleeping bag, and pillows. By 6am I considered the few hours of uncomfortable sleep I got a success and took a jog around the parking lot to get my blood flowing and stop from shivering.

The sun rose and tickets were passed out. The excitement of the night before was back as a Target manager confirmed that they would indeed have a full 60 copies of Zelda, and almost as many for other games. Not everyone is going to get a Wii the first week, but from where I’m standing Nintendo has done a great job of shipping out as many systems as possible and making sure the games and controllers are there to go along with it.

I’ll post again next week about my impressions on Wii Sports and Zelda, but so far I am not disappointed. I make no apologies for being a Nintendo fan, but the Wii is neither over-hyped nor a gimmick, and I think the system will live up to its original codename.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I voted today. Here’s the scene for my precinct today. Not too crowded, but a steady flow of people.

Yesterday Traci and I called voters as part of “MoveOn.org’s Call for Change”:www.moveon.org/. I’m always nervous about calling complete strangers. I did this for the first time for Howard Dean’s campaign and it’s easy to get disillusioned with answering machines and hang-ups. But almost everyone we talked to was planning to vote today, and I think there’s definitely a sense that this election matters. Sometimes a simple reminder is the difference between voting or skipping it, so if you only reach a handful of people it can make the difference in a close race if thousands of other people are doing the same.

I’ll be up late tonight watching the returns. Polls close early in some places and may get crowded, so don’t wait any longer if you haven’t voted yet. For location info call 1-866-MY-VOTE-1.

Bill Plympton was in town tonight for the Texas premiere of Hair High at Alamo Drafthouse downtown. I’ve been lucky enough to see each of his films in the theater, and this is definitely his best yet. It has actually been finished for a while. I posted about it back in 2002 when he started production. Before the showing I asked him about making an appearance at STAPLE! this coming March but it doesn’t look like his schedule will allow it. He’s one of about 4 animators I hoped to approach about showing their films at STAPLE!, in addition to some great local talent we’ll have speaking and showing their work.

Two weeks ago I casually showed up to EB Games 5 minutes before they opened, hoping to luck out with a “Nintendo Wii”:us.wii.com pre-order. Unfortunately the last slot was taken by someone who was there over two hours earlier, and at least a couple dozen people (including me) were turned away before the store even opened.

I’m determined to get one of these consoles, and there’s something interesting about trying to get one at launch. Every day new reviews flow in to gaming blogs. I don’t see myself as a hardcore gamer, but the Wii looks like an innovative system with several fun games available at launch or shortly after.

So I called Toys R Us last night to inquire about pre-orders opening up today at 10am. He said they had 10 Wii and only 3 PS3s. Furthermore, mall security wouldn’t let anyone on the property until 4am. This would seem to limit the opportunity for all-night campers, so I was pretty hopeful as I left for the store shortly after 4am this morning.

Yes, you read that right. I have become so obsessed with this that I was willing to spend 6 hours in line. Luckily, the weather is beautiful this weekend. I packed a book, iPod, and sketchpad into my bag and left feeling pretty good, that at the least I would have some time alone to read or write or listen to music.

There were already at least 20 people there when I arrived. Several in line were hoping to reserve both Wii and PS3. One made the comment that they would be selling the PS3 on Ebay, but keep the Wii for themselves. There was even someone waiting for the new Elmo doll, which made the whole scene even more bizarre.

Apparently some of the folks had been there well before 4am, probably closer to midnight or earlier. The details are sketchy, but the story I heard involves a bewildered security officer, two police cars, threat of jail time, and a mad dash at 4am to the front door. By the time I got there, the last Wii pre-order slots were being decided by a foot race across the parking lot. Seriously. Meanwhile, a second line at the exit door was setup in a futile effort by those too stubborn to admit defeat.

I finished the banana I had brought for breakfast, played a little multiplayer Nintendo DS, and left before 5am with a “good luck” and a wave to those crazy enough to get there before me. I guess I’ll try again at Best Buy or Target next month. Rumor points to “as much as 120 units available”:gonintendo.com at some stores.

I picked up the board game “Carcasonne”:www.amazon.com/gp/produc… a few weeks ago and have been enjoying it. It’s great to see some innovation in board games again, and it’s a relaxing change of pace from video games. Target and the other big box stores are still mostly packed with remakes of classic board games, which are fine, but if you seek out the more speciality shops there’s a range of good stuff available. I bought my copy at “Dragon’s Lair”:www.dlair.net/, a local Austin comics and games shop that I’ve been frequenting for about 15 years, but I’ve seen it featured prominently at other quality toy stores.

I originally sought out Carcasonne for play between adults, but I’ve found the game also works great for kids even younger than the 8 years recommended on the box. Just follow a few rule simplifications. First, no farmers. Next, as recommended by someone in an Amazon review, use the word “traveler” instead of thief. And finally, just score a single point for any completed castle, road, or cloister. Part of the charm of the game is in constructing the map anyway, so these simplified rules make for fast and enjoyable games for younger children.

Last year I started some extra work to help bring DigiCel FlipBook to the Mac. FlipBook is software for traditional, hand-drawn animators, and it is actually somewhat unique in the industry. Whereas Flash and Toon Boom are vector-based, FlipBook started life as pencil test software for paper-based workflows. It supports scanning with peg hole auto-registration, camera capture, or drawing with a Wacom tablet.

Customers had been asking for a Mac version for a while, but the initial port from Windows to the Mac was not quite ready. It was missing QuickTime support for import, export, and video capture, and the Win32 compatibility layer was somewhat of a roadblock to a polished Mac product.

I entered the project and ended up re-architecting the application to have a more Mac-like appearance. Instead of using the Win32 library, I wrote a lightweight MFC implementation entirely in Cocoa. MFC is Microsoft’s C++ framework, still widely used even with .NET and C# pushed for new applications. This approach allowed the application to be driven almost purely from Win32 and MFC, but it uses NIBs for all windows and controls because the compatibility framework sits at a much higher level. In several places the Windows code peeks through, but it provides enough flexibility that more and more of the application could be upgraded to a modern Mac look and feel while still sharing a common Windows codebase.

The idea is that by working at the MFC level instead of Win32, you can get by with implementing only a very small subset of the full Microsoft frameworks. If the app only uses a few basic control types, for example, you only need to wrap those onto their Cocoa counterparts and can ignore everything else. (Otherwise you end up rewriting all of Win32 just to load and run the unmodified MFC sources.) Even with that simplification, though, the truth is that I seriously underestimated how much work this would be.

The stack for this ends up looking something like this:

It has been an interesting project, both for the technical challenges and because animation is near to my heart. I plan to use the software in my own personal film projects. Here’s a screenshot of the latest version.

In 1997 I walked into Half Priced Books to browse and left with a copy of Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic Panorama of San Francisco, 1850-1880 for $5. I had been familiar with Muybridge through his series of photographs of humans and animals in motion, which have been a classic reference for animators for nearly a century.

Now, I’m coming back to his San Francisco photos as I prepare a podcast about that city. I am very excited about this one, and hope to have it finished soon after I return from WWDC. The video games podcast was a lot of fun, but it had some problems that I hope to correct this time around.

I’ve tweaked this weblog design again, adding one of Muybridge’s panoramas to the header and experimenting with some different fonts and colors. I’ll switch the image out from time to time.

I just rolled out some design tweaks and “realignment”:alistapart.com/articles/… to this site. The original design (if you could call it that) was whipped together several years ago and hasn’t really changed much since then. It even used HTML tables, a fact I was oddly proud of. The new site uses hack-free CSS, although there is a layout bug for some content sizes.

I also added a podcast feed link to all pages, links to my Flickr, 43 Things, and Del.icio.us accounts, and each individual post archive page also now includes excerpts from other posts in that category. You can see this in action by visiting “this post from 2 years ago”:www.manton.org/2004/07/c… I’ve been clicking through my old archives tonight, and that one stood out because WWDC is fast approaching again.

Here are two before and after thumbnails of the same post. Not too exciting, but it’s nice to make even these small improvements. Next up are some planned design-y things for the header.

Enjoy!

I attended “RailsConf”:www.railsconf.org in Chicago last month. There’s a lot of excitement in the Rails community right now, and it was nice to be there for the first year before it explodes to the even bigger event that the conference will be next year when O’Reilly takes over.

The talks were a mix of great to just okay. “Damon Clinkscales”:www.damonclinkscales.com provided a solid introduction to migrations, and even though he had previewed the talk for me the night before I still picked up some useful tips. I was finally able to hear first hand what a fantastic speaker “Mike Clark”:www.clarkware.com/cgi/blosx… is. James Duncan Davidson rounded out the weekend with a high-level “vision for deployments”:duncandavidson.com/essay/200… I also enjoyed presentations by “Paul Graham”:www.paulgraham.com/marginal…. the music and brilliance of “Why”:redhanded.hobix.com/, the closing Rails core team panel, and of course “DHH on REST and embracing CRUD”:www.loudthinking.com/arc/00059… One of the nice things about open source is that soon after announcing the new ActiveResource framework, David checked in his code so you can immediately see “what he has been working on”:dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails… and play along.

As I look back on the schedule, there were many talks I missed completely, so I’m looking forward to catching the audio or video of some of those. Still, you could get a lot out of the conference just by talking to people between or during sessions.

While at the Austin airport, I filled a sketchbook page with random people waiting for the delayed flight. This man on the right was leaning against an abandoned ticket counter.

I don’t blog much about “VitalSource”:www.vitalsource.com in this space, but I should. When I joined the company, it was to return to designing and building Mac software, with the potential for working on something meaningful (education tools) as a refreshing bonus.

Over 5 years later, we have built up a great team and a mature set of products. Yesterday VitalSource announced it is being “acquired by Ingram Digital Ventures”:www.vitalsource.comindex/news-app/story.35, which should be a good complement to the work we are doing. Ingram is the largest book wholesaler in the country, but I don’t think that fact really hit me until three days ago.

We were downtown with some time to kill before a performance. We stopped at the Farmers Market for some fresh peaches, flowers, and breakfast tacos. When we detoured to see if the library was open, I noticed these boxes outside and snapped a mobile phone picture.

Last month I tore down the rotting privacy fence in our backyard and built a new low spaced-picket fence. In addition to just being ugly to look at and nearly collapsed in a few places, the old fence was tall and prevented us from enjoying the space behind our house: essentially a private park owned by a local church but also accessible to the neighborhood.

It took me a week of part-time work and numerous Home Depot trips to build the new fence, which is about 60 feet across. I was able to salvage the strongest of the existing posts, cutting them off to match the new fence height. The ones that were rotten I removed and replaced by laying several new posts in concrete. I measured and cut each post so that the top of the fence line was level even though the ground slopped up slightly on one side of the yard.

I’m very happy with the way it turned out. It opened the yard up even more than I was hoping for, and the better gate makes it easy to take a walk in the back. Another side effect I had not expected was encountering new people who routinely take their dogs for walks. Having a shorter fence is similar to parking your car in the driveway instead of your garage: you’ll see your neighbors more if you do.

Anyway, a very rewarding experience. After so much crafting code and pushing pixels, it’s nice to build something real and see the results. The “image on Flickr”:www.flickr.com/photos/ma… is one I took a few evenings ago and shows about half the full fence length.

I was wired when I got back at midnight last Thursday from the late Mission Impossible 3 show with “Damon”:www.damonclinkscales.com/. A storm had passed over while we were in the theater. Tree branches were down in the neighborhood, and rain continued.

I sat at the dining room table with a sheet of typing paper and a fat red kids crayon and did some characters. It’s hard to draw small with something so big. These were at least twice the diameter of your standard crayon. I shrunk the result slightly and included a few below because I liked some of the line, despite the otherwise clunkiness.

I snapped this photo of a banner last week. It sums up quite nicely one of the big problems in American public education.

Easter is a time of rebirth and starting over. So today I’m flipping over two new things.

The first, to fulfill a new year’s resolution that died before February. I rearranged my office and drawing desk yesterday to make everything more accessible, and I was doodling last night when this silly little bunny sketch came out. I have a few more drawings and pieces of animation in various states of completion that I’d like to post too, but I’m not going to let the backlog of “finishing” anything stop me from posting now on a weekly basis. Really.

Secondly, I made a long-overdue server change this weekend. About a year ago I gave up self-hosting on an old Linux box and moved this site and email to TextDrive. I had high hopes. It was run by smart people with good ideas, and it was officially endorsed by the Ruby on Rails project.

Unfortunately the server I was hosted on (Bidwell) was down much too frequently. I couldn’t help comparing it to the near-flawless uptime I had running my own box on a static DSL address. Lots of little problems and broken promises added to the overall frustration. And running underneath the whole mess was an undercurrent of unprofessionalism. I gave them a year to sort it out and it never got better.

Which is too bad, because there was a lot of potential there. I still wish them good luck, and especially to the Joyent team as well.

Today my site is live on DreamHost. I’ve had mostly good experiences using DreamHost to manage the STAPLE! web site in the last two years. Here’s hoping I won’t have to switch again anytime soon.

(Want to try DreamHost? Use coupon code MANTON40 to get $40 off.)

About 20 people met at the Frog Design building downtown a few months ago for the first Austin Ruby on Rails user group meeting, and by the third meeting that number had doubled. Founders Damon, Robert Rasmussen, and Rob Jones have done a great job getting the group off the ground and lining up interesting topics.

Last night was our fourth meeting. Bruce Tate gave a talk on his experience ramping up a Rails team and comparisons to the Java world. As a new experiment on the agenda, afterwards some of us stuck around to hack together a member directory for the web site. I didn’t actively participate in the coding efforts, but I had a good time meeting new people. As usual, it was all followed by drinks at Hickory Street Bar & Grill, where topics of discussion ranged from refactoring to Perl to C++ windowing toolkits to AppleGuide. You know there’s some real substance to Rails when it brings together such a diverse group.

Also just announced: the Rails Happy Hour at SXSW. Should be fun.

Bruce Tate answers questions after his presentation

Everyone complains about software bloat. And it’s easy to see why — applications are bigger and slower than they’ve ever been, and users think the dozen features they will never use are to blame.

On the Mac we are lucky to have a large number of great, small, focused tools that solve a few problems well. The best of these become successful, but what then? You have to keep adding features. How do you control the software so that it becomes even more useful without feeling too packed?

One way is to differenciate between visible and hidden bloat. For example, Microsoft products used to have a tendency to take every major bullet point on the side of the box and make a toolbar icon for it. Even if the user only uses 5% of those features, they have easy access to far too many of them, and they needlessly have access to them all at once.

Instead, adding features in context allows the application to grow without feeling too busy, and without distracting the user from the core set of features they are familiar with. The new user interface is discovered by using a new feature, and otherwise remains out of sight.

This point was really emphasized for me while using Keynote 3 the other day. I love the contextual floating slider when editing a shape (see image). They could have put this slider in the inspector window, but it is so infrequently used it would have remained disabled most of the time, and cluttered those panes with little benefit.

There is something about Ta-da List that works really well. Simple things like hitting return to save one to-do item and start a new one, tidying up of completed lists, and automatic ordering of recent lists. And above all else, speed. It is without question the fastest web app I use. Because the application is so focused, even full page reloads are faster in Ta-da than AJAX requests in some other web apps.

These are seemingly simple things, but they add up to an app that rivals any native (Mac or Windows) to-do list software. It makes me wonder how great a native app could be if someone put the same thought into user interface and simple workflow that Ta-da has. The advantage so-called Web 2.0 apps have over native apps is that they are inherently client/server based, but a native application could embrace the network in the same way and (maybe) provide a superior user experience. I’ve yet to see any apps that do this effectively, but it will have to happen if the desktop hopes to stay relevant for anything except tasks that benefit from large local storage (e.g. Photoshop and Final Cut Pro).

I use Ta-da List for everything now. Here’s a sample of recent lists:

Ryan described his hardware setup for podcasting a while back. With at least a few dozen podcasts under his belt, he’s got his system down.

I wanted to write a little about the process I used to create the Trains podcast. Not because I think it will be particularly helpful to newcomers, but just because I think it’s interesting. (Actually, I’m just now getting around to posting this. Months have past since I wrote it, and now Ryan spends his time writing about why none of this matters, and he’s right: tools should be accessible to non-technical beginners.)

I started by borrowing a good mic from a friend. Eventually he will want it back, but luckily for me he’s a great musician and has a bunch of microphones that he uses regularly. It’s from audio-technica.

I had a few choices for recording audio. I own a Griffin iMic, but decided not to record directly into the computer this time, so it went unused. Some of the recordings I planned to do would be away from a computer, so I needed something mobile.

A great choice for this might have been a Rio, or a MiniDisc. I was a MiniDisc fan back during the first-generation of the devices, but sold it years ago. And I’m a happy iPod owner, so buying yet another MP3 player didn’t make sense. My concern is that the moment I do that, Apple will release a software update to uncripple the voice recording in the iPod.

For the train conductor recording near the beginning of the podcast, I used a Griffin iTalk connected to an iPod. This is all the electronics I took with me on the train to Chicago. I ended up recording a lot with it, without an external mic at all, but not much of the audio was really usable.

The opening train sounds I recorded just a short distance from my house. I biked down to the crossing with my nice microphone and recorded directly into a digital video camera, on to MiniDV tape. This turned out to work so well that I recorded all my voice this way.

Since it was DV, I used iMovie to import clips of all the voice work. I could have exported to AIFF from there (and did try to), but because I was sampling lots of other material, I decided to be consistent and use Audio Hijack to grab the audio directly as it played from iMovie. I also used Audio Hijack to rip from a RealAudio source, iTunes music, and from DVD Player.

Once I had all the AIFF files, I simply dragged them onto the timeline in GarageBand to create new tracks. I had planned to use Audacity, but it turns out GarageBand does everything I needed. I was raised on SoundEdit Pro, and the clunkiness of Audacity by comparison is hard to deal with. Controlling the fade in and out of audio for different clips was super easy in Garage Band.

And then I exported to iTunes, converted to MP3, and posted to the site. Power to the people!

As I posted about a few weeks ago, I decided to write a novel this month (National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo). I posted some of my progress on 43 Things, and I’m going to repost those entries here.

Actually using 43 Things more fully, I am even more impressed. They have done an amazing job of allowing communities to form around goals. The site looks simple on the surface but there is depth to it. There is something about random encouragement from total strangers that works.

Another useful resource was the NaNoWriMo forums. I never posted there but people were always quick to help others and offer advice. They also organized many local gatherings at coffee shops or bookstores, so I went one night and met a couple other Austin writers. NaNoWriMo works not just because of the intense deadline, but because of the shared goal as thousands of people are doing the same thing. That’s why 43 Things was such a good fit.

Here are the entries.

12,002 words (Nov 9th):

I’m still behind, but I feel good about my progress because I started a few days late. The last chapter I just finished was one of the first to really work, which seems to be a good sign that I’ve found some kind of rhythm to get through the next few weeks. Either that or the plot is building up to something too soon and I’m about to run out of ideas. :-)

25,043 words (Nov 20th):

I only just now crossed the halfway point. I thought I was on my way to catching up, but there were several days last week where I didn’t write at all. I’m still determined to finish, but it’s going to take some serious writing over the Thanksgiving weekend.

34,797 words (Nov 28th):

I didn’t write enough over Thanksgiving. I left the PowerBook at home and filled up spiral notebooks instead. Even without an accurate word count I knew I had fallen short of my goal. Last night I typed it all up until my wrists burned. I will finish but it is going to take a lot: 5000 words a day for the next three days. Until now my top daily word count has been about 3000, and the average somewhat less than that. Congratulations to everyone else who passed 50,000 over the weekend!

44,054 words (Nov 29th):

Looks like I will finish. I made a big push last night and wrote about 6000 words. Less tonight, but I still think I am on track to finish tomorrow. The story should wrap up right at 50,000.

50,136 words (Nov 30th):

Yay! I finished. I spontaneously started this endeavor a few days into the month and I’m still a little amazed that I stuck with it. It’s a great feeling though, especially as I was nearing the end and the plot was wrapping up. Sure, the story has some problems, and it could have benefited from some research. But actually I’m quite happy with the overall flow of the story and some of the characters. There are some good scenes in there that I’m proud of.

What a great film. To prepare I dusted off my old Laserdisc with the three original Wallace and Gromit short films, but the feature equals and surpasses those films in every way. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Aardman Animations fans should also seek out Creating 3d Animation, a combination behind-the-scenes and how-to book out a few years ago with great stuff on model construction and movement. In the age of computer animation it takes some passion to break the mold and work hand-drawn, but even more rare is the artist who wants to follow in Nick Park’s footsteps. It’s great to see the art-form of stop-motion come alive again to hopefully inspire a new set of filmmakers.

Speaking of old school, just today I saw that Hans Bacher has a weblog. I’ll never forget seeing his art from the Mulan book years ago. The man is a master at composition and effortless landscapes.

And like a lot of animators new to blogging, he uses Blogger. If you look at my NetNewsWire subscriptions (right), you’ll see an interesting trend of Blogger and LiveJournal icons. I’m not sure what that means, if anything.

They warned of 70mph winds, massive flooding, and loss of power, but in the last days before landfall Hurricane Rita shifted north and Austin didn’t receive even a drop of rain. The organizers of Austin City Limits Music Festival were so proud of themselves for waiting to cancel the weekend concert series, but the evacuees were less pleased — stuck in Austin at shelters because the hotels were booked for an ACL in limbo.

Meanwhile, people panic and grocery store shelves are almost out of canned food and bottled water. The less than 3-hour trip from Houston becomes a long full day of gas shortages and frustrated evacuees.

Cars are not an efficient way to transport large numbers of people, but the rail and public transportation infrastructure in this oil state is pathetic. Nightline’s Ted Koppel asked the obvious question to someone from Homeland Security, but they acted as if they didn’t even understand there was a problem. If you can’t get out of a major city with a week’s notice, how can you get out in a real emergency?

Dave Winer turned 50 today. I first met Dave over 9 years ago, back when the free release of Frontier ruled web application development and automation on the Mac. I ran the frontier-talk mailing list for a time, was active in that community, and built a bunch of great stuff on top of his work. A lot has changed since then, both on my platform of choice and in the tasks that Dave has tackled. While I haven’t kept in touch with him, I am usually quick to defend his record. If you ever find yourself upset with Dave, take a deep breath and then disagree in a way that shows some respect for what he’s been able to accomplish.

Or: How I learned to stop worrying and ignore the blogosphere guilt trip.

I’m not sure I ever wanted to “grow up” to be a magician, but I was pretty fascinated with it as a kid, and more serious about it than most. I knew the disappearing quarter tricks, had the special card decks, the fancy scarfs and foam balls. Once I went to a magic auction and won a box that could make anything the size of a baby rabbit appear or disappear. And, always, there were the trips to North Austin to a small converted shed in the backyard of a house where The Great Scott sold his magic books and items for eager kids and professional magicians alike.

He visited my elementary school once. My mom still has the photo of him pouring milk in my ear and pumping it out of the other. Among the right circles, I’d say he was pretty well known. It doesn’t surprise me that he and his wife have a web site.

Fred Donaldson (aka The Great Scott) passed away last week, age 79. That same week, I attended a course by Edward Tufte, who dedicates a chapter of the cloud book to magic (the included image is from it). A day after that, my kids saw another magician perform at the library, and a new generation of magicians was born.

Apparently I wasn’t the only person to purchase Delicious Library in the first week of release. They’ve had $250,000 in sales so far. For an app that no one really needs, this is pretty incredible.

And no office space overhead. At O’Reilly’s Mac conference Wil Shipley emphasized a similar point, to cut costs down by selling directly to the customer instead of a boxed product in stores. See Niall Kennedy’s blog post for a link to the MP3.

Wil also likes Cocoa Bindings. From an Apple interview about Cocoa Bindings, he said:

“It makes it really easy for programmers to present data in a way that’s very clear and intuitive to the user. It makes every app look and feel like an iApp.”

I haven’t bought into Bindings yet. I commented on Michael Tsai’s blog about it last month. The funny thing is, the little details in Delicious Library that are so impressive required some significant programming, and shaving a few dozen lines of code that handles sorting in a table view seems to pale in comparison. For example, look at the gradient in this screenshot, and how it works correctly for contiguous or non-contiguous rows. You don’t get that kind of stuff for free.

Traci couldn’t find the GameCube games she was looking for (mostly Pikmin), so for Christmas she bought me a Game Boy Advance SP. This was a very unexpected surprise. I hadn’t really used a Game Boy since the original one I owned was stolen/lost a dozen years ago.

To cut right to it, I returned my GameCube system to the store and am now the happy owner of a handful of GBA games, with more on the way (a new Zelda comes out next week).

I’ve also played a fair amount of Halo (1) lately, and did a lot of game research over the holidays, trying to catch up on what the game market looks like today. It all put something in perspective for me: I like 2d games. The lure of Halo 2 and Grand Theft Auto is strong, but I won’t buy an Xbox or PS2 just to play those games.

The GBA has a number of things going for it:

• Portability. It's a lot easier to flip open the GBA and play for 10 minutes wherever I am than dedicate time to sit in front of the television.
• Inexpensive games. I bought Advance Wars 2 (see image) for $10 at Best Buy, but $25-30 is common for most new titles.
• RPGs. It turns out RPGs work well on a portable system, and the GBA has a few good ones.
• Good-enough graphics. While there are first-person shooters and 3d racing games, the system is much better at pre-rendered sprites, multiple backgrounds for depth, and that sort of thing.
• Battery. 10-15 hours or more on a charge.
• Hacking. An active developer community, mostly hobbyists. I wrote a test “game” over the holidays.

But, you ask, what about the Nintendo DS? Isn’t the GBA obsolete?

I hope not. The DS is an innovative system, but it’s not a new Game Boy. It’s too expensive, too big, and too different. Nintendo wants to position the DS as a higher-end portable to go head-to-head with the Playstation Portable, but new GBA games will still be released over the next year or two. We are also seeing new GBA add-on gadgets, such as the wireless adapter and upcoming movie player. Some people speculate that a real Game Boy to replace the SP may come out in 2006.

Joystiq has some good points about the DS and PSP:

“The fact is, Nintendo just needed a product to head off Sony’s entry into the portable market. They knew Sony’s attack was inevitable and they planned well for it. They know that, as long as the DS competes with the PSP, the GBA can continue to be the money-maker it is. The high-end DS and PSP can disappear for all Nintendo cares. They’ll still have their little gem.”

The Xbox and PS2 seem to dominate the press, so it surprised me that the GBA was the best-selling game system in North America in 2004, with good holiday sales despite the Nintendo DS introduction.

Here’s what Retrogaming has to say:

“However, now with the advent of the Nintendo DS, I’m a bit worried that nobody will continue making quality 2D games for the precious system for very long. Even Nintendo themselves have already put Advance Wars 3 out on the DS. I understand they want some good launch titles for the system to fend off the PSP, but I’m still worried.”

The biggest risk to the GBA is that developers will focus their effort on DS-only games. But for now, I want to play some fun games again, and the GBA accomplishes that quite nicely.

Last week I received The Incredibles DVD screener in the mail through my membership in ASIFA-Hollywood, and Saturday a bound copy of the screenplay arrived. I’ll keep the screenplay on my shelf next to the rest of the Pixar books, but I ended up giving the DVD away as a present. I just thought of how excited I would be if someone gave one to me, even opened, and I’ve probably watched it enough already this week.

Okay, I haven’t watched it enough. In fact I’ve only begun to study the film in detail. There’s some great acting in there and it helps to watch in slow-motion. As an animator, how cool would it be to hit pause in a movie theater, then rewind and flip through frames of a great scene? Having the DVD for something that just came out in the theater sort of feels like that.

I saw The Incredibles last night. I’m sure I had a big smile across my face from beginning to end. What a great film. If anything could get me to stop thinking about politics, this was it.

There have been some interviews with Brad Bird and the other Pixar folks recently. The Luxo blog does a good job of linking to them.

See that little blue county in the expanse of red in the image on the right? That’s where I live.

Back in January, I said: “It’s about bringing more people into the process. But to do that right, we need a candidate who can speak passionately to the issues and inspire voters.” Kerry ran a good campaign, but I can’t help thinking that something was missing in both the man and the message.

Kos is calling on Dean to replace McAuliffe as head of the DNC. It’s time for the Democratic party to get back on the offensive. The last two years have been about building the groundwork for future wins — the internet infrastructure, the radio, the organization. It’s not there yet but it will be in 2006. All that’s left is to pick quality opposition candidates and to absolutely stop letting Republican’s frame every issue on their own terms.

One of the things that really bugs me is when Republican candidates run unopposed. This year, thanks to redistricting, our congressional district went from being all of Austin to a tiny strip of rural counties stretching from my neighborhood to Houston. The district was designed for a Republican win, and the Democratic party didn’t bother to challenge it until Lorenzo Sadun signed up as a write-in candidate.

There was no chance to win as a write-in, but he received 12% of the vote! 11000 people took the time to spell his name correctly because they wanted to send a message. And in the Houston suburbs, Richard Morrison came within 10 points of beating Tom DeLay, the closest contest DeLay has ever faced.

The truth is, we almost won. We almost unseated a war-time president who had 90% approval ratings after 9/11. We almost beat a party that used fear (terrorism and gay marriage) to get people into the voting booth.

We almost won, and all the hard work of the last 18 months will pay off big in two short years.

The daylight savings time switch has helped me get up earlier, so I easily made it to my voting location by 7am this morning. There was already a line of people (perhaps 50) stretching outside. It was cold, from the front that came in yesterday, but it didn’t seem to bother anyone too much. No one gave up and left during the 45 minutes I was there.

I’m optimistic.

Today is International Animation Day. My membership in ASIFA-Hollywood provides few perks since I live a couple states away from the Los Angeles area. They still send me announcements for LA screenings and lectures, though, as if to taunt me.

A few weeks ago I saw Ghost in the Shell 2 and Shark Tale. I was expecting to be really impressed with Ghost in the Shell, but instead was somehow numbed by the visuals and confused by the story. I think it was a good film, but I’m not entirely sure. Certainly some of the scenes were excellent, but overall the story didn’t hold together for me. I had to work too hard to take it all in.

I hadn’t planned on seeing Shark Tale until DVD, if then. Everything about this film looked bad, and I fully expected it to bomb. It ended up doing very well at the box office a few weeks in a row, and I found myself laughing at all the right points. I put it in the same category as Shrek; a fun film but not a great or lasting one.

Have a happy halloween weekend.

I sometimes work on my animated film late at night, when the family is long asleep and I’ve worked enough in the day that I can’t stand the sight of a keyboard or mouse. Unfortunately in those times, I also can’t seem to draw anything worth saving, or muster the effort to start a new scene. Rather than stare at a stack of blank punched paper, I look at thumbnail drawings, think a little bit, and then come away with something like this image.

It has been said many times before, that animation is all about timing. Look no further than Flash web cartoons. More than half are crudely drawn and so limited as to make the Flintstones look like full animation. But when they work, it’s because the creator had some knack for timing, and pulled some small acting miracle out of the spacing, replaying and tweaking it again and again on the Flash timeline.

Traditional animators, by comparison, have it a little tougher. Some investment must be placed in the hand drawings before taking the stack of 50 or more sheets to pencil test under a video camera. So we scribble in the margins, plan it out, and hope for the best.

The private park behind our house is owned by a local church, and they aren’t afraid to spend money on fireworks every year. Last week was probably the best show yet. We brought some chairs out to the sidewalk to get a good view over our trees. Our neighbors were doing hotdogs and marshmallows in their front yard and also provided sparklers. Fun times.

I took some cheap video with my digital camera. Some frames from it are below. It was so close overhead that the paper remnants from the fireworks were falling in the street and in the yard.

 

 

 

Yesterday I finally arrived back in Austin after 8 days in California. Last weekend started off with a trip to Los Angeles, where I met up with my old friend Justin and attended “2D Expo”, a conference sponsored by ASIFA-Hollywood for traditional animators. The conference was great, and I left feeling pretty energized. There is an opportunity right now for traditional animation to leave its Disney roots and break new ground. I met some great people and had fun talking about the industry and what comes next. Hope to be back to the LA area one of these days.

On Sunday morning, Justin picked me up from Burbank and we drove north on highway 1, which hugs the coastline all the way to San Francisco. We stopped at a few random scenic points, a nice restaurant overlooking the water, and at Big Sur. A healthy couple mile walk through Chinatown and dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf rounded out the evening.

Monday through Friday was Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference. At work we sent 5 people, so we had pretty good coverage of all the interesting sessions. As usual the keynote was not to be missed. I’ve yet to see a Steve Jobs’ demo that wasn’t effective. The first time I saw him was the Macworld Expo after he came back to Apple (but before he took over), and he even managed to make a NeXTSTEP demo look impressive. Contrary to what many people believed at the introduction to Mac OS X, Apple’s new OS is not just NeXT-based; it’s about a third NeXT, a third classic Mac OS, and a third something entirely new. That last third really shines in Tiger.

The weather was perfect today for the Zilker Kite Festival. It’s really incredible to see hundreds of kites flying overhead as you walk around. Homemade kites, children’s kites, giant kites, colorful kites. Kites shaped like cats, boats, dragons, snakes.

We arrived late in the afternoon, so we missed most of the contest portion of the event except for the “largest kite” category. If you ever thought flying a kite was easy, try one which requires more than one people holding the rope, with their heels dug into the ground just to keep from being lifted into the air.

Happy flying!

It snowed a week ago, and I’m just now getting the pictures off my camera. Real snow, the first I can remember here in at least 15 years. I was up Friday until 2am as the snow began to fall, so beautiful in the night. By the next afternoon most had already melted, but here’s a picture out our back yard that morning.

I have no idea what will happen in New Hampshire tomorrow. The media slammed Dean all last week, but it’s clear if you pay attention to the polls and the turnout for Dean’s events that the winds are shifting again. People are coming back to Dean. If he had another week I’d say he’d come away with the win in New Hampshire, and the momentum to have a strong showing in the next batch of states. With just one day left… who knows.

I thought a lot about how I should deal with politics on this weblog. Many bloggers who I respect have chosen to keep their opinions to themselves. I was going to do the same, and the few political posts I’ve made to this blog over the last year I’ve kept non-partisan.

But the last week I have been completely obsessed with the post-Iowa coverage, and I can’t see myself continuing to think and write about this election without being clear in who I support.

Howard Dean is the real deal. The other candidates are above average, but Dean is the most honest, has great accomplishments to show as governor of Vermont, and is the strongest candidate to face Bush. When Dean speaks it really resonates with people, gives them hope for this county. Despite the loss in Iowa, his grassroots campaign is impressive, with average contributions less than $100, and hundreds of volunteers traveling from other states to help the campaign. I still believe that the way he can win in November is by exciting new voters and getting Democrats and Independents (and Republicans?) to turn out in record numbers.

I subscribe to the other main candidates’ weblogs as well. Dave Winer criticized the Dean weblog for not going far enough, but the other weblogs are much worse. They are updated infrequently and usually lack any personal touch. John Edwards doesn’t even provide summaries in his RSS feed. But the topper is this headline from Kerry’s weblog yesterday morning, where they misspell “bloggers”. Oops.

Sure, that’s a silly criticism. It was clearly just a typo, and actually the Kerry weblog has improved considerably over the last week. But it’s funny because it plays into an assumption that Dean is the only campaign that really gets the technology of this election. Which, from my experience, is true.

Online activism will be huge this year. The power of MoveOn.org and the Dean Meetup is in providing a channel for ordinary Americans to effect an election instead of sitting at home grumbling that “there’s nothing I can do.” It’s about bringing more people into the process. But to do that right, we need a candidate who can speak passionately to the issues and inspire voters. That’s Dean.

I’ve come to enjoy the yearly tradition of putting up Christmas lights: balancing on a wobbly ladder, hanging over the side of the roof, and searching for that elusive burned-out mini-bulb. This year we put our lights up in record time, before the sun set on the eve of December 1st. Ah, the holidays.

(Not a great photo above. I was trying to capture the lights on the bird feeder.)

Most people who know me know that I’m a big fan of animation. There’s a great potential in animation to create stories and characters that move the audience in ways that are impossible in live-action. Many considered it the art form of the 20th century, but in the aftermath of Saturday morning cartoons and outsourcing to cheap labour in Asia, it is rare that audiences get a glimpse of what animation can do.

In addition to being a fan, I’m also something of an animator by night, working on a short traditionally animated film. I’ve been working on it for about a year, a few hours a week, in the evenings when time permits. (Often, it hasn’t.)

Lately I’ve found myself talking about this more frequently, so it seems the right time to expand the coverage of this weblog to include some of the things I’m working on. Mainly as a chronicle that I can come back and read later.

Here’s a little sketch I made last night while doing thumbnails (a quick way to explore the key poses for a scene before animating). As I get further along with the film I will post some storyboards, production stills, and pencil tests.

I just received my copy of Fragments in the mail. It’s a great collection of sketches and paintings by Pixar story artists Ronnie Del Carmen and Enrico Casarosa. (Pixar, for those not paying attention, is the new Disney – where artists control the process, and good storytelling still means something.)

There’s a shift occurring in the animation and comic world, a change that favors independent artists. Fragments is self-published. So are Michel Gagne’s popular books. The RustBoy book should be out by the end of the month, and all indications point to great sales that will help fund the film. Countless comic artists are publishing sketchbooks, or moving their comics online. The other piece of the puzzle is the technology: producing an independent short film at home has never been more possible, if you’re willing to put in the work to see it through to completion.

Why does this matter? It enables artists to create what they want, if the audience is there. And it provides a personal touch that big companies can’t match, such as this little cat sketch from the Fragments mailing package.

A new sketch group officially started up yesterday, led by local artist John Rubio. The first meeting was at Opal Divines. We passed around sketchbooks and discussed art, comics, animation, and how the digital world has effected independent artists. Some people brought laptops, some brought prints. Most everyone sketched.

Rick gave out copies of his comic book, Budget Strips; Justin had his Flash short films on his PowerBook; Ismael showed some framed prints inspired by doodles; and John and Jasun both had great sketchbooks. About a dozen people showed up, an incredible mix of talented artists. I’ve been trying to get in the habit of keeping a sketchbook and drawing more regularly, so it was a big inspiration.

I finished the fifth Harry Potter book last weekend. It was easily the best so far, and as usual a lot of fun to read.

Here are two pictures from the bookstore party last month. I picked up my copy at midnight with hundreds of other fans. I half expected a lot of crazies to show up, but it was all normal folks. Just people of all ages exciting about reading. A few dressed up. One woman let me take a picture of her Golden Snitch tattoo.

I guess I should go back to reading adult books now. Yawn.

I meant to blog every day from WWDC, but the network was just too flaky, and all my free time was spent coding. I wrote up a few things and will post them over the next week.

I hoped to feel rested, but I was drained after the conference was over. Slept on the plane back, and a big nap the next day trying to adjust. The church that owns the land behind our house put on an incredible fireworks show Sunday night. It lasted a good 30 minutes, and rivaled any city-sponsored fireworks I’ve seen. It was even bigger than the same event two years ago. We had just moved into our new house the previous day, and we sat on the back deck with a drink, staring at the sky above our house. It was a great welcome to the neighborhood.

A follow-up to yesterday’s post. Many people contribute to a film, and not all of them are given direct screen credit. Last month, legendary illustrator Al Hirschfeld passed away. His lines graced the pages of books, magazines, and newspapers including the New York Times, and proved an influence to many future artists. Disney’s Eric Goldberg brought Hirschfeld-esque lines to Aladdin’s Genie and the “Rhapsody in Blue” sequence of Fantasia 2000.

Amid Amidi of Animation Blast writes:

"In honor of Al Hirschfeld's passing last week, here's a reprint of the full-page ad that Disney took out in VARIETY. The ad features a drawing of the Genie from ALADDIN. Lead animator Eric Goldberg had used Hirschfeld's flowing calligraphic line style as inspiration for the character's design."

Thank you Disney. Despite massive layoffs, horrible cheapquels, and a general disregard for their past culture, it’s nice to know that someone there still gets it.

It snowed when I was about 5 years old and when I was maybe 10, so I assumed it would snow every 5 years. When you’re young, it’s easy to jump to conclusions and see patterns that don’t exist. Of course it hasn’t snowed since then.

But after a few days of teasing weather reports forecasting snow and ice, I woke up at 4am and stepped out on the back deck to see snow covering the ground. I raised my hands and could feel it falling, lightly. For someone who has lived in central Texas their whole life, this is a big deal.

It all melted within a few hours, but not before I made a miniature snowman with my kids.

For Christmas I received a copy of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. I was familiar with his work only from his web comics (the I Can’t Stop Thinking series is particularly good), but never read his books. Turns out, it’s excellent. Probably best enjoyed if you’ve read comics, but I think there’s some good stuff in there for everyone.

McCloud’s “6 steps” (Idea/Purpose, Form, Idiom, Structure, Craft, and Surface) can be applied to many pursuits outside comics. To master the artform you need to progress through each of those steps, but often a comics fan decides he wants to “be a comic book artist.” He starts copying the surface qualities of the work (“look, I can draw Superman”), but rarely does he delve into it enough to go back to the other foundation steps: having a unique idea or purpose for the work, and understanding the form and structure of the medium enough to produce something great.

Building software is not all that unlike creating a traditional work of art. (Odd that I’m including comics in “traditional” art, but there you go.) Crafting the user interface, thinking through the design, layering one piece on top of another. And above all, keeping in mind the problem being solved. It can be creative work, if you approach it that way.

Maybe that is one of the reasons why Cocoa is so successful. By putting the emphasis on up-front user interface design while simplifying some of the coding with a mature object-oriented framework, it opens up application design and implementation to more people. In a sense, allowing people to jump directly to Scott McCloud’s step number 6 (“Surface”, in this case Aqua goodness), and then work their way backwards as they mature as software developers – if they choose to.

What a difference two years made to Brent Simmons:

Oct 2000: "So much of my work is UI work. The command line is a vacation."
Oct 2002: "I love UI programming."

Joel likes Tintin comics.

It wasn’t long after I started programming that I developed a pet peeve with other programmers who don’t feel the user is worth the time to put an extra “if” statement into their code. Here’s an example: “There were 5 result(s) for your search.” Obviously it’s a trivial matter to check if there was indeed just 1 result or some other number of results, and leave the “s” off or not. The “(s)” annoys the hell out of me, and I think it is distracting for most users as well.

Tonight I saw something that tops even that. The web folks over at Tripod Blogs display this bit of brilliance under a blog entry:

In other words, they took the time to put “no” instead of “0”, but left the “(s)” anyway.

Safari puts the classic SSL “lock” icon in the window title bar. Here’s a screenshot:

Turns out this is easy to do in Jaguar with Carbon’s HIView system. Since the entire structure of the window (not just the content area) is a view, you can position items anywhere, including the title bar. Apple has published some example code showing how.

Another nice UI feature in Safari is the enhanced drag preview when dragging links:

Matthew Thomas continues to update his thoughts on Safari’s interface and what the new browser means for Mozilla.

John Gruber provides some even longer thoughts on Safari:

"That's not to say that there isn't some utility in breaking the traditional one-window-per-web-page metaphor, but I don't think tabs are the optimal solution. My guess is that Safari's engineers have something much better in mind, and simply didn't have time to implement it yet."

Okay, I’m done with the Safari-related blogging. Tomorrow: something different.

Steven Johnson for Slate, “Is the Computer Desktop an Antique?”

"Now that Microsoft has largely caught up to the Mac in terms of basic file manipulation tools -- thanks to Windows XP's elegant user interface -- the iApps have become a key differentiator for Apple. They are also an implicit acknowledgement that the desktop metaphor has its limits. Apple is moving toward a Swiss-army-knife approach to user interfaces: You need different tools to keep track of different kinds of files."

While Apple has moved to many small, focused apps to get the job done, they have also attempted to build a new suite of interface components so that each app is easy to use right out of the box.

One such nifty widget they have invented is the rounded search box. Most of the iApps use it, and so does the Finder. It’s got a little “x” that clears the search text, and rounded edges so the search box is easy to find. (“Which of these text fields do I type to search? Oh yeah – the round one.”)

Splasm Software’s Checkbook is the first app I’ve seen to copy Apple’s search box. Unfortunately they didn’t get it quite right. (Psst: The “x” is supposed to be inside the box.)

Out all last week, vacationing around the Gulf coast. It was good to unplug for a week and forget about the email, the blogs, and the constant hum of a noisy FireWire drive. I think we went three whole days without hearing the word “sniper”.

After ignoring Mozilla for 6 months, I took the latest version out for a spin a few nights ago to try Pie Menus. Although Mouse Gestures worked okay for me, I couldn’t get Pie Menus to work (maybe it doesn’t work on the Mac?). I can’t decide whether I like Mouse Gestures yet. Back and forward can be useful, but the gesture displayed on the left (go to home page) is just silly.

Hey Apple, can we use those fancy colored checkboxes from iCal in our apps, too?

Anyone care to guess what the difference between the OK and Cancel buttons is?

Every so often a web site will add something small that makes all the difference. Today the example of this for me was the Sample Code section of the Apple Developer site. A new popup menu allows quick viewing of source files before downloading the full archive. This change took minimal effort for Apple to implement, but it will save developers from having to download lots of small archives (cluttering up their desktop) just to find the piece of sample code they were looking for.