I'm usually pretty good about catching and fixing auto-correct mistakes, but the one I always miss is when typing Hugo's shortcode and it turns into shortcake. 🍰
Recommendations and blogrolls on Micro.blog
Today we're introducing a new feature: blog recommendations. This was inspired by recent interest in bringing back blogrolls, including posts from Dave Winer, his service FeedLand, the recommendations feature in Ghost, and feedback from Micro.blog users asking for new ways to discover people to follow. It's a way to curate a list of favorite sites to link to from your blog.
Here's a screenshot showing my current blogroll. I'm still adding people, but generally expect most blogrolls to be more limited than someone's complete social following list.
To get started, click on Design → Edit Recommendations. By default, there is a single blogroll named "Recommendations", but you can create additional blogrolls, for example to organize blogs in topics like "Favorite Authors" or "Technology".
Your blogroll will be available in a few places within Micro.blog:
- Profile pages on the web will get a new "Recommended 5 blogs" link. This list can include any blog no matter where it's hosted, and Micro.blog will attempt to link to the Micro.blog profile where possible for easy following.
- Hugo gets a new
blogrollshortcode. You can use this to include your recommendations on a web page. It's provided by a plug-in that will be automatically installed if needed. - There's also a plug-in for the Marfa and Alpine themes to show a blogroll in the sidebar on your home page. Check out my home page for an example. (Currently this is only visible for wide browser screens, not on mobile.)
- There's data in Hugo for each blogroll, like
.Site.Data.blogrolls.recommendations, with anameandurl.
Like other features in Micro.blog, recommendations are built in an extensible way to give you control from Hugo themes, and with open file formats to connect with other platforms. Micro.blog manages updating OPML and JSON files. It also sends a webmention ping to the linked site when you add a recommendation, compatible with Ghost's support for webmention.
I'll be working on help pages with more examples for how this can be used. Happy blogging!
Getting great feedback about the new recommendations feature in Micro.blog. I've made a couple more improvements this morning. Blogrolls were a sort of early social graph, and they're still useful today! There's a joy in discovering new blogs that goes beyond the blandness of large platforms.
Excited to see Apple continue to improve the EU rules. The latest big change is web distribution, so we'll have something more like true sideloading. Seems like a reasonable approach:
To install apps from a developer’s website, users will first need to approve the developer to install apps in Settings on their iPhone. When installing an app, a system sheet will display information that developers have submitted to Apple for review, like the app name, developer name, app description, screenshots, and system age rating.
Fort Parker State Park.
"…a book is different—it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind…" — The Diamond Age
Dave Winer has a new page about blogrolls. Micro.blog's new recommendations feature supports this link tag too. I love seeing how an older idea can be dusted off and given new life for the modern social web! Lots of potential for the future too, linking blogrolls together.
The TikTok bill has passed. I like Ben Thompson's thoughts on this... We can support a sale (because there's risk with China's influence) while at the same time being concerned that forcing apps to be removed from stores is its own dangerous can of worms (and not something to make a habit of).
I can't blame spam for my failure to reply timely to support emails, but it doesn't help feeling overloaded with junk messages. Today I took a first step: a new workflow that automatically marks anything with "guest post" as spam. No real customers ever ask for that.
More updates from Dave Winer: he has a blogroll on his home page again, and a new site blogroll.social. One interesting twist is that his blogroll sidebar is sorted by most recently updated blog. We're going with manually ordered in Micro.blog, but I can see the value in automatic sorting too.
Ben Werdmuller on a first-class fediverse platform:
I’m not bullish on squeezing long-form content into a microblogging platform, whether on Mastodon or X. Long-form content isn’t best consumed as part of a fast-moving stream of short updates.
It's a good post. In some ways, Micro.blog best fits Ben's vision. But not exactly. A theoretical fediverse-powered Medium might be a better match.
Dichotomy. In Waco this morning in between state park visits. ☕️
To underscore how important sideloading or marketplaces are to me, I would be willing to set up a subsidiary in the EU, pay EU taxes, and have custom app code that runs just in the EU in order to get it. It's not only about the 30%. It's independence.
Mother Neff State Park.
It's a cheap shot to complain about developer tools — and Xcode overall is great! — but something is seriously wrong in Xcode debugging in recent years. Feels like I can reload an entire React Native app's JavaScript faster than I can view simple variables when stepping through Swift or Objective-C.
Finally got around to registering for FediForum. Looking forward to the discussions. I don't have any specific goals this time, just hoping to soak up what folks are working on and where we can improve Micro.blog.
No joke, $700 for an M1 MacBook Air (via Daring Fireball) might be the best deal for any Mac in the history of the company. They're going to sell a bunch of these at Walmart.
On the latest Core Intuition, we talk again about Apple and the EU, with the news of sideloading and steady progress to the rules. From the show notes:
They talk about whether Manton would open an EU subsidiary if given the chance, and whether simply plunging in and doing something is the best way to find out what it’s worth.
Spurs in Austin. Finally seeing Wemby in person. 🏀
