I posted an update to Kickstarter backers today with a video of me talking about the Indie Microblogging book and next steps. I’m including a copy of the video here, followed by a transcript.

Hello Kickstarter backers. My name is Manton Reece. It has been a while, and I wanted to give you an update.

If you’ve forgotten, the Indie Microblogging Kickstarter was for 2 things. First was a new social network and blogging platform called Micro.blog. We launched this pretty soon after the Kickstarter wrapped up, and in the last 5 years it has really improved to be a full-featured blogging platform. Photo blogs, categories, new themes, a plug-in system, team blogs, email newsletters. And I rewrote the backend recently to be powered by Hugo, so you get some of the benefits of a static-site generator but with full native apps for iOS, macOS, and now Android. There are third-party apps, and of course an API and support for IndieWeb standards.

The second part of the Kickstarter — and that’s what I want to talk about today — was for a book. And again, I’m very sorry that it was so delayed. The book has taken a back seat as I focused most of my time on Micro.blog the last few years.

Today I’m happy to announce that the complete draft of the book is available. In the Kickstarter I promised ePub and PDF versions, but as I was working on it I realized that a book about the web should also be on the web. So you can read it now at book.micro.blog.

The book turned into a much bigger project than I expected. It is divided into 6 major sections, covering older social networks and blogging platforms and what we can learn from them, the foundation for indie microblogging, how Micro.blog works, IndieWeb standards, owning our own content, Mastodon, community management, and more. There are interviews in the book.

There are about 70 short chapters, and each one is on the web so it’s easy to link to.

So what’s next. I still have improvements I want to make to the book. I will be editing it over the next few weeks. When the editing is done, I will be sending out PDF and ePub versions to y’all, and I’ll also be preparing the print copy for anyone who backed the Kickstarter at the higher tiers.

Last year I collected some of my blog posts into a book, partly to test the printing process for the Indie Microblogging book. And this is what it looks like.

The cover will be different for Indie Microblogging, of course, and it will be thicker. Indie Microblogging is about 400 pages when printed. But otherwise it will be very similar to this. I’m really excited to get it out.

So that’s the update. Thank you so much for your support. For your patience. If you haven’t checked out Micro.blog in a while, it is way better than it has ever been. If you never used your free months that you got from the Kickstarter, feel free to drop me an email to help@micro.blog. I’m happy to update your account to give you more time with the blog hosting.

And finally, this week, we are actually having a free online conference for the Micro.blog community. It’s called Micro Camp. You can go to micro.camp to learn more if you’re interested. Thanks so much. Bye.

I’ve been improving the profile screen in the new Epilogue to support adding external blogs via Micropub. You will still manage your bookshelves with Micro.blog, but the posts can go to another blog.

Here’s a screencast video that shows off most of the UI for searching for books, adding books to a shelf, and configuring an external blog. In this case it uses the IndieAuth and Micropub plugins for WordPress.

I’ve been programming the Mac for over 25 years, but I’m stumbling through React Native and JavaScript like a newbie. I’ve always found the best way to learn is by doing. Hit some brick walls, dig under them, and then realize later that you built the wall yourself, fighting the frameworks.

One of the benefits of React Native or SwiftUI is a formal way to manage state, letting the frameworks update the UI for you when something changes. I’ve never thought of this as a big advantage, but maybe I’ll warm up to it.

As I work on rewriting Epilogue, I’ve improved the book details screen to include a list of your bookshelves. Tap a bookshelf to add the current book to that bookshelf. A progress spinner will show while Epilogue sends the book data to Micro.blog.

In the world of UIKit, I would probably have a reference to a UIActivityIndicatorView. When I’m ready to send the web request, I’d show and start the progress spinner by calling startAnimating() on it.

In React Native, I have a boolean state that keeps track of whether the progress spinner should be animating, defaulting to false:

const [ progressAnimating, setProgressAnimating ] = useState(false);

Then when the button is pressed, I set the state to true and carry on with the web request:

function addToBookshelf(bookshelf_id) {
  setProgressAnimating(true);

  // send book data to Micro.blog
  // ...
}

In the UI, the JSX references this boolean. The UI will automatically update whenever the value changes. I don’t need to hold a reference to the actual ActivityIndicator object anywhere in my JavaScript code:

<ActivityIndicator size="small" animating={progressAnimating} />

Here’s a 3-second video of how this looks in the app:

Next up: I need to add sign-in back to the app before I can do a beta. I’ll also be working on Dark Mode and the search box.

Drummer is a new outliner (with companion blogging system) from Dave Winer. As I’ve watched some folks on Micro.blog play with Drummer, I thought I’d take a look at how we could make it easier to use an outline in Drummer to write new blog posts for Micro.blog.

The result is an experimental feature in Micro.blog that adds support for creating or updating posts automatically from OPML files on the web. Write in Drummer, publish to a blog hosted on Micro.blog. There are a few moving pieces, so the best way to explain how it works is this screencast video I made (also available on YouTube).

I was fascinated to discover that when you look under the surface of Drummer, there’s the start of a Frontier-inspired scripting system too. I’m not sure where OPML support in Micro.blog will go from here, but this was fun to work on, and there may be more we can do with other outliners in the future.

Maurice Parker has a blog post exploring the differences between Drummer and his outliner Zavala. Over the years, outliners have gotten more feature-rich but also complicated. There seems to be a lot of potential for more lightweight outliners like Drummer and Zavala that can potentially talk to each other and to the web.

I’m always paying attention to new platforms that pop up, especially when there is some overlap with Micro.blog. The iOS-only photo sharing app Glass launched last week as an interesting alternative to larger social networks. Today I’m announcing a new version of Micro.blog with special support for Glass.

Glass has no public API or web version, but it does have a way to share a simple web page of your photo. We’ve leveraged this so that you can take one of your Glass photos and send a copy directly to your own blog.

Here’s a quick screencast video showing this feature in action:

This might look normal enough, but because Glass shares a web page URL instead of the photo, if you use any other app you’re just going to get a link. Micro.blog downloads the HTML, parses it looking for the photo URL and caption, then moves that into a Micro.blog post. The new photo is hosted on your blog, with your own domain name if you have one.

Glass is so new that it remains to be seen where the app will go, and how it might expand in the future. It shares some of the same principles as Micro.blog — no ads, no algorithms, no likes — but Glass lacks important open web features like domain names and IndieWeb APIs.

I’ll always prefer posting photos to my own blog instead of a silo. We do need more social networks, though, and any attention that can be pried away from Facebook and Instagram is a win. Best of luck to the Glass folks.

I’ve been experimenting with another new feature for books in Micro.blog. Bookshelves are like a little slice of Goodreads, but without some of the social features and complexity. Bookshelves in Micro.blog are focused on keeping track of books you are reading to make it easier to blog about them.

Here’s a screencast video of how it currently works:

Next steps might include showing a “Currently reading” page on your blog, and pulling any existing “Finished reading” blog posts into a bookshelf to get started. I think there’s a lot of potential, but I also don’t want to clutter Micro.blog for people who don’t need this. Looking forward to your feedback before we ship it.

Sunlit 3.0 will ship in 2 days, on Tuesday. Today I’m going to highlight how Sunlit’s timeline can be used to browse and reply to photos.

Sunlit’s timeline is built on the Micro.blog timeline. When you follow someone in either Micro.blog or Sunlit, their photo posts are added to the Sunlit timeline. It’s strictly reverse-chronological based on who you’re following. No ads. No algorithms.

This quick video shows how scrolling through the timeline works, and how to reply to posts and view conversations.

Tomorrow I’ll have the last post in this series about Sunlit 3.0. We’ve also been working on some additional bug fixes that will be rolled into 3.0.1, shortly after launch.

A couple weeks ago I posted a sneak peek at Sunlit 3.0, our iOS companion app for photos. Today we’re opening up the beta and also making the source code public.

You can sign up on TestFlight here. There are still some rough edges, and this version is mostly for iPhone. iPad will be improved in the next beta, and macOS will follow later.

Sunlit can post to Micro.blog-hosted blogs, WordPress, or any blog that supports the Micropub API. You can use it with a free Micro.blog account or a paid subscription.

Composing a new post is much more flexible now. You can post a quick photo, or you can create a full blog post with multiple photos and text sections. I’ve created a screencast below to show how it works:

Jon Hays also joined me on the latest episode of Timetable to talk about the Sunlit beta and more.

I was looking through some of my drawings while copying a backup from an old hard drive. Around 2003 and 2004, I worked on a hand-drawn animated short film in my spare time, based on my kids. I never finished it, but I made thousands of drawings for it, most of which I shot with a camera and put together as rough tests.

Here are a few seconds of one little scene that I found while looking through the old files:

Last week I drove to New Orleans for Peers Conference. It was a bit of a whirlwind because we also released video support in Micro.blog and updated 3 of the apps, which I knew might be a little too much to attempt to do while traveling. In fact, we did miss a couple bugs and updated Sunlit the next day, and a new Micro.blog iOS update will follow this week with more improvements.

I had a great time in New Orleans. The drive from Austin is 8+ hours, but I took even longer to make sure I had enough breaks from driving, for lunch and coffee and catching up on work. I took a few photos which I’ve collected together using Snapthread here to share as a short video.

We’ve rolled out some more improvements to Micro.blog. For blogs hosted on Micro.blog, you can now save a post draft to Micro.blog, then come back later to edit and publish it. The macOS app has been updated with support for drafts and a new “Posts” section to make editing or searching your existing posts much easier.

Here’s a short video of the new feature on the Mac:

This week we shipped the new version of Sunlit, featuring an Instagram-like timeline of photos from people you’re following on Micro.blog. You can post photos to a microblog on Micro.blog, or to WordPress and other compatible blogs.

The best way to understand Sunlit is to see it. I’ve prepared a short video below, talking through a few of the main screens, but the app has a lot more depth for editing photos and organizing photos into stories:

Sunlit is a free download in the App Store. There’s no in-app purchase. If you like it, I hope you’ll support Micro.blog with a subscription to a hosted microblog or new photo blog. You can learn more at sunlit.io.

We shipped version 1.3.4 of the Micro.blog iOS app. It includes a bunch of photo-related improvements and bug fixes, including better support for non-square photos.

We released an update to Micro.blog for Mac today with support for multiple accounts. I created a quick screencast video to show off what it looks like:

We rebuilt Sunlit for 2.0 so that it’s focused around blogs. You can collect photos together in stories and publish them directly to a Micro.blog-hosted site or compatible blogs such as WordPress. It’s a free download. (If you need a great place to host your photoblog, consider signing up for a paid microblog on Micro.blog.)

To show off Sunlit in the App Store, I created a few app preview videos. Here’s one of them:

I just submitted a new update to the Micro.blog iOS app. It adds a couple new features, including better support for quickly toggling off cross-posting, but what I’m most excited about is swiping to view conversations. Here’s a 45-second screencast demo:

Over the last couple of days we’ve shipped a few improvements to Micro.blog. There’s an update to the Mac version with some bug fixes and better support for showing the title field when you’re writing a longer blog post. The default themes have been updated too.

It’s also much easier to preview themes for your microblog. Under your account there’s now a “Preview Themes” button that lets you click through and test out the themes. Here’s a 10-second screencast recording to show how it works:

Here’s a short screencast demo of the upcoming version of Sunlit. We’ve rebuilt it for blogging and Micro.blog. You can create stories with photos and text to publish to your blog, with editing and filters, plus a new Discover section for browsing photos.

Last week I wrote about Micro.blog for iOS version 1.1, which adds several new features including support for multiple photos and longer posts. Today I want to demo how longer posts work on the web version of Micro.blog. Here’s another quick screencast with audio:

Micro.blog for iOS version 1.1 is now available. This release adds a number of new features:

• Added support for longer posts with titles. Type more than 280 characters to reveal an optional title field.
• Added Markdown syntax highlighting while typing.
• Added formatting bar for common styles. Select a phrase and tap the link button for easier markup.
• Added support for uploading multiple photos.
• Added a Browser sharing item to open the current post on the web.
• Fixed a potential crash in profile links and glitch when holding down to select text.

Here’s a quick screencast showing some of the highlighting and title support:

Hope you like the update. You can download it from the App Store

Micro.blog now has Markdown highlighting as you type in replies. Micro.blog has had basic Markdown support since the Kickstarter launch, but we’ve been improving how it processes Markdown and where the visual highlighting is used in the web UI.

Here’s a short screencast of the new reply UI:

When I was in San Francisco last week, I visited the Eyvind Earle special exhibit at the Walt Disney Family Museum. Eyvind was a background painter and concept artist on Sleeping Beauty and other 1950s Disney features. I love this series of small paintings he made to train his assistants:

Since I launched it over 3 weeks ago, thousands of people have watched my Kickstarter video, but I haven’t watched it again myself since that first day. I knew if I watched it I’d find new problems with it, and remember all the things I wanted to fix. It’s too late.

I had fun creating it. I wanted something with a hand-drawn feel, because to me blogging is about individual creative expression. It’s about not being afraid to publish something that isn’t perfect — something that is personal and a little rough, like a quick sketch.

Because I love traditional animation I wanted to draw all the frames with a pencil and paper, not digitally. Here’s me flipping through some of the drawings: