I've been critical of the $3500 price specifically and the entire premise of the Vision Pro more generally, but now that I know it comes with a polishing cloth, I'm in. 💰
Created a page to track my goal of visiting all the Texas state parks. It's a pretty daunting list, but it'll be fun to update it throughout the year. This is the kind of thing you lose if everything is just a post on someone else's social platform.
It seems really easy to trip up Safari into trashing localStorage, even before its 7-day window. For example, if I load the same site in private browsing mode, then go back to the regular session, the cookies remain but not localStorage. Seems like a bug, or privacy protection gone awry.
Usually CNN.com is not great. Shallow soundbites and clickbait along with your breaking news. But sometimes there's a true surprise, like this long article about Chinese immigrants to America. Flight to Ecuador, then the trek north. A stunning journey that it's hard to fully comprehend.
2024 has started busy. Juggling a lot of different things, hopefully it all settles out. Still aiming to release a major new feature toward the end of the month. There is a new companion mobile app too that @vincent has taken the lead on.
ActivityPub plugin for WordPress has bumped to version 2.0, lots of good changes. No-brainer prediction that blogging with ActivityPub will continue to improve throughout 2024, in Micro.blog, WordPress, and elsewhere.
If you use Micro.blog on the web, you may notice the layout has changed slightly. These kind of design updates are my favorite. Just a little better, not throwing everything out in a way that would be jarring.
Excited to see the Rabbit R1. Only $199! Not sure who is going to crack this AI device category, but it's going to happen. Nice line from the keynote: “Our smartphone has become the best device to kill time, instead of saving it.”
Weird morning, apparently I forgot my Apple ID password? The password in 1Password didn't work. Either someone in the family reset it, or I've been hacked, or I've lost my mind. 🙂 Reset it.
Doing more work with CloudKit. Honestly haven't really done much with it before. Everything I do has a custom backend service, so CloudKit is just rarely needed.
Outrage is like a poison. It's good to be passionate, thoughtful, outspoken even. But if there's a trend in the last handful of years of social media it's that everyone is mad about everything. It's sometimes warranted and always exhausting.
2024 is going to be something else. One feature I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while is a news section in Micro.blog curated by a journalist. We just aren’t big enough to hire anyone for this. Maybe volunteers? No algorithms, no misinformation.
Just did some research for a reply to “someone who is wrong on the internet”, drafted the reply in detail, then discarded it. It doesn’t matter! Have to keep reminding myself that not everything is an invitation to debate.
Got some really interesting replies on my post about a potential news section in Micro.blog. To be clear, this is not being worked on anytime soon, maybe never. We have our hands full with other things! But the discussion gave me a lot to think about.
Missed this Patreon blog post from last month on accounting for Apple's 30% cut:
Apple is requiring us to start using their in-app payment system in order for Patreon to remain available in the App Store, which means purchases made from our iOS app will be subject to Apple’s 30% App Store fee.
The default setting will be that users on iOS will have to pay more than on the web to cover this fee. And last week we had the Hey Calendar rejection. Strange that Apple is tightening the screws with the EU's Digital Markers Act waiting in the wings.
Rabbit has sold through their initial 10k units already. @danielpunkass and I talked about this for the upcoming podcast... I'm fascinated by the cloud backend (would be neat to train it to post to a microblog) and the personality they've managed to get into the branding and design.
Because my thinking-out-loud about news headlines in Micro.blog went over so well, for my next trick I'm planning to go into hardware: Micro.phone will have a really small screen.
Last month I mentioned we have a brand new feature rolling out later this month. It is coming along really well, but probably will slip until early February. Any launch is a lot of work and I don't want to get too pulled away from the other maintenance and fixes we're always doing.
John Gruber in a post on the passing of Niklaus Wirth:
Most of the apps that established the Macintosh as the platform for people with good taste in the 1980s and early 1990s were written in Pascal. THINK Pascal was an IDE years — maybe over a decade — ahead of its time.
THINK Pascal really was amazing. I've got fond memories of that era, reading Inside Macintosh books at the cafe or school and going home to tinker in THINK Pascal at night.
I have gripes about Substack even aside from content moderation, but I do think it's worth giving them credit for letting you bring your subscribers — email addresses and payment info — with you when you leave. Imagine if Apple was cool with developers having their own customers in the App Store?
Going to be a cold weekend in Austin. But iced coffee is still my default as long as we’re above freezing. ☕️
Finally figured out why I hadn't had much luck with edited posts on Micro.blog making their way to Mastodon. Mastodon requires an "updated" date, not just "published". Fine, but these are the little things that make interoperability in the fediverse essentially trial and error.
I've decided to opt-out the Micro.blog apps from the Apple Vision Pro store. My boring CEO take: it's not something we have time to test and support with a small team. More rant-y take: I don't believe in the product yet, and worry about us all living in a headset. Touch grass, friends!
On this week’s Core Int, we talk more about AI devices, comparing the Rabbit R1 and Humane Ai Pin, and speculating about where things go from here.
Calm before the storm. Slept in a little, catching up on work now before Home Depot and related errands. ❄️
Rolled out several behind-the-scenes improvements this morning to cross-posting and ActivityPub. This from @news may be helpful:
Added some new logging to help troubleshoot potential cross-posting issues. Now before cross-posting, Micro.blog logs which external services the post was configured to send to.
New video from @numericcitizen all about Micro.blog standalone pages and related tips. Cool!
Brr, woke up to about 25°, cold walk with the dog. Hope everyone across the country is bundled up and staying warm today. Looks like we'll get some freezing drizzle but hopefully not much in the way of serious sleet or snow. Still slightly traumatized from the ice storm a couple years ago. ❄️
The case for .bar
Micro.blog supports importing from a lot of different services: Twitter, WordPress, Medium, Tumblr, Ghost, Markdown, Substack, Write.as, Foursquare, Goodreads, and others. For each one we want to add, I download an archive from a test account on the external service to figure out what the format looks like, then write custom code to handle it.
None of these formats look anything like one another. Just a few examples:
- WordPress uses an RSS file with extra fields for WordPress-specific info. No images are included, although they can be downloaded separately.
- Ghost includes a JSON file with their own fields. There are some weird quirks like the placeholder string
__GHOST_URL__being used in image URLs. - Substack has a ZIP file with a CSV file inside and individual .html files for each post.
Some services have an even less stable format. Both Twitter and Instagram have changed their format after it was widely used, requiring us to retool our import. And Glass's export file does not include post dates or text captions.
One of the great things about indie microblogging is owning your own domain and so being able to move between services. But without a common format, it can be very difficult to migrate posts.
This is why I proposed the Blog Archive format (.bar) back in 2017. It's essentially a ZIP file with all the posts and images for your blog. It uses JSON and HTML. There is nothing in it that is specific to any one blog platform, but it's easy to extend with your own data if needed.
Micro.blog for macOS even supports previewing these .bar files. Double-click the file and it will show a list of the posts that will be imported. And because it's really just a .zip file, you can rename it and use it anywhere. Or treat it as a single file that can be backed up.
In the years since I started using .bar, I've still yet to see any competing file format that solves the same problem. I'd love to see it become more widely supported.
Starting to worry about this Cowboys game a little. 🏈
