I'm testing Calckey to improve compatibility with Micro.blog. Some of the UI is quite busy and not for me, but I love how they are showing ActivityPub usernames, with the profile photo and dimmed domain name. Might borrow this.
Did my daughter come to visit this weekend to see us, or to take the Switch and Tears of the Kingdom back to her apartment? Who can know. Anyway, we're busting out the N64 and Ocarina of Time... As soon as we get an RCA → HDMI adapter.
Love this from Matt Mullenweg. It's what we believe at Micro.blog, too.
…it’s not about how many views you have, how many likes, trying to max all your stats… sometimes a single connection to another human is all that matters.
Happy 20th to WordPress. Heck of an achievement.
Working on improvements to email newsletters in Micro.blog. I'd like to split out the editing of queued newsletters to instead have a separate per-newsletter "intro" text, with the rest of the email not editable. Does that cause a problem for anyone? Will allow more flexibility in other ways.
Spilled a glass of water all over my MacBook keyboard. So that's how my morning is going. Seems okay so far.
Launching new features tomorrow. Going to lay low this afternoon instead of deploying major changes near the end of the day, which I'm sure I would regret.
Trying audiobooks in Spotify for the first time. I’d like to see some UI tweaks for books, like less emphasis on chapters (books are not albums) and showing the time remaining with the speed taken into account.
This article in Forbes has some new (to me) details on the creation of Nostr.
New email newsletter templates
Micro.blog Premium includes an email newsletter feature, so readers of your blog can subscribe to receive posts by email. It’s designed around microblogs. For example, Micro.blog can gather up lots of short posts over the week or month and collect them into a single email.
Today we’re launching a revamped template system for these emails, bringing much more control over what the emails look like. You can edit the template to add a header or footer, or change the HTML tags completely.
Because emails are generated outside of blog publishing, we can’t really use Hugo directly for this. I’ve written a new helper app in Go to process the templates, so they feel as familiar as possible to people customizing their blog theme. (Hugo also uses Go’s templating language.)
You can see what the default email template HTML source looks like here on GitHub. Micro.blog plug-ins can also override this template! So you could have a plug-in that provided a new email design. There’s a help page here with more details about variables you can use in a template.
This is a major improvement. A couple things to keep in mind:
- The template is responsible for assembling posts together. Because it produces HTML, you can no longer edit the Markdown of the previewed email. Instead, you can add intro text, edit specific posts, or remove posts from the newsletter.
- The template could fail if there are syntax errors you’ve introduced in edits. Make sure to test your changes by sending a copy to yourself.
You can edit the template under Newsletter → Settings. If you edit the template and then install a plug-in with a custom newsletter design, it will still keep your changes. You can clear your custom template to revert back to the default template or a plug-in’s template.
If you’re not comfortable editing HTML, that’s okay. You can continue to use the email newsletter feature and ignore the custom templates. It’s just a little more power under the hood for folks who want it, and for plug-in developers.
Thanks everyone who sent me feedback about how you are using Micro.blog's email newsletters. I took this into account while finishing the new feature, but I realize it's a functionality change. It is very rare that we change a feature so significantly. Felt like it had to be done.
Introducing Nostr cross-posting
Similar to my announcement last month about supporting Bluesky, we’re adding Nostr cross-posting to Micro.blog starting today. You can enable it under Account → Edit Sources & Cross-posting:
Nostr might have the most uncertain future among recent up-and-coming social web protocols. I’m fascinated with the architecture because it’s so different than ActivityPub, RSS, and IndieWeb protocols. I think it’s interesting and worth tinkering with. I’ve been personally using it through Micro.blog for about a week, so why not let other folks play with it too?
Nostr is quite technical. If you don’t want to be on the edge, feel free to wait. It’s so early that using Nostr feels like testing a prototype, letting your blog posts loose into the wild west of the internet to float between Nostr “relay” servers.
To get started, you will need a Nostr account. Unlike every other social network, in Nostr you don’t actually register on a specific server. Your account is just a private key, which you will paste into Micro.blog. For iOS, I suggest using Damus or Nos. For the web, check out Coracle.
These apps and others will create your private key, name, and profile photo. Make sure to save your key in a password manager. If you lose it, you lose access to your account.
Micro.blog’s support for these emerging protocols is essentially one-way, pushing your blog posts out to people on other platforms. Later we will consider federation, where posts and replies from other platforms and brought into Micro.blog, like we already do for Mastodon and ActivityPub. I’d like to see how much traction there is before we do more.
I seem to have made a serious AWS pricing miscalculation, transferring a bunch of small files from EC2 to S3. Data transfer is free, but PUT requests aren't. With millions of requests, adds up to real money. This is why I usually prefer Linode's flat pricing.
Finished Ted Lasso. Overall really enjoyed it. This season almost lost its way a couple times, sometimes overthinking itself, but it wrapped up perfectly. 📺
I like this post from Dave Rupert on lessons from old Russian small nuclear generators:
I wonder if software has a kind of digital entropy, where even good software left untouched for a short timeframe rots and stops working.
App.net archive migrated
I've migrated the App.net posts archive to S3, to simplify hosting the archive. I'm not going to do any more work on this. No import feature for Micro.blog. The data files are there if anyone needs them.
Please only download your own posts, not everything. There are about 44 million posts in total. I'm happy to keep hosting this archive indefinitely as long as the costs are flat. I think it's important to have an archive of as much of the web as possible. But at the end of the day, App.net was not my platform, just something I cared about, to help bridge the gap between the early days of Twitter and newer, more open platforms.
Don't remember App.net? I wrote a chapter of my book about it.
Ugh, this is a new pattern for me in Wordle. 712 X/6. 🙁
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We caved and bought another Nintendo Switch. The OLED Zelda edition. So nice. 🕹️
Other things I learned about video games this week while we were temporarily without a Switch: the Wii with Skyward Sword still works, the N64 sort of works and then doesn't, and the Game Boy Advance SP battery is starting to bulge, but replacements are just $10. 🕹️
Traveling today. Got to the airport early, plenty of time to catch up on a couple things. Submitted Micro.blog 3.0.3 to Apple to review. Hope everyone's having a nice Friday!
Thanks again to @vincent for fixing one of the servers yesterday while I was in Rocky Mountain National Park with no cell coverage. Not happy with the blips in downtime recently, going to reprioritize this. Enjoying the morning with good wi-fi and coffee at Inkwell & Brew in Estes Park. ☕️
Beautiful photo from aows. When I retire, I'm just going to blog photos of train tracks.
Cool to see people using the App.net posts archive. Here's a post from @jsonbecker, a post from @otaviocc, and another post from @maique. I was starting to doubt preserving the archive and seeing these reminds me why it's worth it.
Outside the Glacier Basin campground at Rocky Mountain National Park.
Forgot the Stanley Hotel was nearby, the inspiration for the hotel in The Shining. Stopped for a little while, walked around, had a beer in the restaurant. I’m sure there’s lots of history here.
Raining off and on today, so I’ve spent more time driving and less time walking. Mickey is my traveling companion now for all road trips.
Finished reading: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. All the praise for this book is justified. A masterpiece. 📚
One of my favorite things about Colorado so far is the water. Looks and sounds like snow had melted somewhere upstream.
Nuggets vs. Heat. Finals, game 2. 🏀
