Rolling out some plumbing for future work. Some features are best deployed in phases... Database changes first, then other services bits, then finally clients. Nice to be able to see how things are running before launching for real.
2023-02-20
Micro Camp 2023 will be in May. Online-only this year. Email @jean if you've got an idea for a short talk you'd like to share with the Micro.blog community.
2023-02-20
Reading about Biden’s trip to Ukraine. Flight to Poland and then 10-hour train to Kyiv. Hoping we see some photos of the train… Fascinating everything that went into the trip. 🇺🇸
2023-02-21
Still kind of jarring to see the Akamai logo when I'm using the Linode manager.
2023-02-21
Not a lot of words, big change:
Enabled spell checking as you type in new posts for desktop web browsers. For mobile, the best editing experience will still be our native iOS and Android apps.
2023-02-21
Working on a couple new features. Some things we try to roll out across all platforms at once. Some it's better to release for the web first, then follow up with native app implementations. Not an exact science, just depends on what feels foundational or optional.
2023-02-22
Finished reading: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. So much fun. Still going to skip the movie, doesn’t seem possible to adapt without losing too much. 📚
2023-02-23
Adding per-post cross-posting to Micro.blog
Today we updated the web version of Micro.blog (and the Mac app) to provide better control over how new posts are routed to external services like Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn, etc. Just like showing blog categories, you can show checkboxes and uncheck which services you don't want Micro.blog to cross-post to. This setting is remembered only for the current post and by default posts go out everywhere.
This is a fairly big change. I expect we'll learn more as people actually use it. I wanted to get it out for the web and Mac first because we can ship those without waiting for approval from Apple and Google. Mobile versions will follow.
Some of the gotchas you might run across:
- This is designed for setting on new posts. There's no interface for changing it when editing a draft post yet.
- Micro.blog will only show the cross-post services you have enabled in Account → Edit Feeds. If you have multiple feeds, things might be a little weird if there's no obvious mapping between feeds and your blog.
- This is for blogs hosted on Micro.blog. If you are posting to an external blog like WordPress, there's no mechanism to customize cross-posting other than the existing global options.
We've also expanded our support for the Micropub API to include syndicate-to fields. This is well-covered in the spec. The Mac app is open source and uses the same public API.
2023-02-23
It's really cool what @lex has been doing with his Daily Lex podcast. I hoped we'd see this kind of thing when we built podcast hosting in Micro.blog. Recording even a short show nearly every day is hard... I've tried and want to get back into it.
2023-02-24
From Platformer, this rings true especially for the Twitter API free vs. paid changes that never materialized:
Musk seems to announce a new thing coming “next week” all the time, and often those deadlines pass and whatever feature was allegedly coming is never heard of again.
2023-02-24
I've documented how Micro.blog works with the Micropub API's syndicate-to parameter now that there's more control over cross-posting. Always feels good to revisit an IndieWeb API.
2023-02-24
Spending a little time this morning improving performance to combat "hackers" making a bunch of requests to our servers, as they attempt to exploit holes that don't exist. A large percentage of our total hosted blog traffic is just 404s. Waste of internet bandwidth. 🙁
2023-02-24
Actually made a to-do list to coordinate shipping a new feature on all platforms at once: web, macOS, iOS, Android. Takes a lot of juggling even for minor code changes.
2023-02-25
New episode of Core Int: I'm the King of the World. We talk about @danielpunkass trying to ship Black Ink for iOS. Then we react to the latest news of Twitter's Titanic-like slow sinking.
2023-02-25
We’re doing another photo challenge in March! Post a photo each day to your blog, inspired by prompts that we’ll post to Micro.blog.
2023-02-26
Rounding up to 300 characters
In 2014, as I was starting work on Micro.blog, I blogged about the properties of a microblog post, including the character length:
I picked 280 characters instead of App.net’s 256 characters because it’s slightly less nerdy, and feels right at exactly double Twitter’s 140. This should be thought of as more of a guideline than a rule, though — just something to shoot for.
After that, Twitter also doubled their character limit to 280 characters. Mastodon launched at 500 characters. In the years since, it has felt less symbolic for Micro.blog to stick to 280 characters. Thinking about a post-Twitter world, 280 actually now feels kind of wrong.
Micro.blog is based on real blogs, so you can have full-length blog posts with a title, categories, photos, inline links, podcasts, and anything else you’d expect blogs to have. Those full posts don’t have a limit. It’s the Micro.blog timeline that encourages the 280-character limit to make the timeline as readable as possible, not cluttered with long posts or “read more” links.
Today we’re making the next big change to how the timeline works: we’re “rounding up” the character limit to 300, and for short posts that contain a block quote, we’re doubling it to 600.
Unlike some social networks, Micro.blog’s character counter is for the text you will see in the final post. It strips out any Markdown or HTML tags when calculating the length, so there’s no extra cost to italic text or links. And with the 600 limit for quotes, it’s more consistent to use Micro.blog’s “Embed” link to paste in someone else’s post from the timeline and know it won’t be truncated.
This gives posts a little more room to breathe. The posts are still short enough that it’s not a significant change to the reading experience in the way that bumping it all the way to 500 would be. It feels right for Micro.blog.
Micro.blog on the web, the Mac app, Android app, and beta of Micro.blog 3.0 for iOS on TestFlight have all been updated with this new limit.
There’s still more to do. We plan to adopt this change for Micro.blog replies as well, which have always been treated differently than regular posts. Because that’s a more disruptive change, we’ll roll it out separately in the coming months. We have some ideas for improving the UI for long replies to tie replies back to your blog. That will take longer to get right.
Enjoy the extra 20 characters! Happy blogging.
2023-02-27
