From the news blog:
We’ve updated how blog themes are edited. If you don’t have a custom theme, Micro.blog will now create a placeholder one for you, with an “Open” button to edit any templates. There’s a new sidebar of template names, faster search, and faster CSS editing.
There are a bunch of little tweaks to make themes easier to use. Going to try to do a video tomorrow to help explain it.
Finished reading: The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz. I enjoyed the first half of this book. But after the time jump, for me it couldn’t recapture what had worked in the opening characters and story. 📚
I've recorded a short 2-minute video to show how we've updated Micro.blog's editor layout for blog theme templates. Simpler, faster. You can find it on YouTube here.
The new Overcast is looking good! Smooth upgrade. From Marco's blog post:
For Overcast to have a future, it needed a modern foundation for its second decade. I’ve spent the past 18 months rebuilding most of the app with Swift, SwiftUI, Blackbird, and modern Swift concurrency.
Too many guns
John Gruber blogs that it's the guns:
The truth is that our nation, great though it is in so many ways, has a horrific history of political violence and a seemingly innate obsession with firearms. [...]
Tomorrow morning Chuck Schumer should put on the floor of the Senate a law mandating strict background checks for all gun purchases. Perhaps tie it to a reinstitution of the 1994 assault weapons ban that Republicans allowed to expire in 2004.
AR-15s shouldn’t be legal. Here in Texas, the minimum age to buy one is still only 18, despite families in Uvalde pushing to raise the minimum. The velocity of a bullet from an AR-15 is ridiculous and multiple rounds can be fired quickly before anyone even notices. Trump is extremely lucky that it just barely grazed him.
A couple years ago on the train, I had lunch with a random passenger. Amtrak will often sit people together for meals. This passenger loved the outdoors, camping and hunting, and he said something that will always stick with me: he doesn't use such powerful semi-automatic weapons for hunting because they do too much damage to the animal.
We shouldn’t be okay with these weapons of war having become so commonplace. It’s tragic.
Om Malik blogging about the Taboola deal:
Apple’s decision to strike a deal with Taboola is shocking and off-brand — so much so that I have started to question the company’s long-term commitment to good customer experience, including its commitment to privacy.
Apple was a great company when their business was aligned with their values and the interests of customers and developers. Services and ads have pulled them too far off track.
Finally some good news. We need more big plans like this:
President Biden is finalizing plans to endorse major changes to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks, including proposals for legislation to establish term limits for the justices and an enforceable ethics code, according to two people briefed on the plans.
He is also weighing whether to call for a constitutional amendment to eliminate broad immunity for presidents and other constitutional officeholders…
It's a high bar to pass a constitutional amendment, but this is the right path anyway. 🇺🇸
Sticker Mule
At Micro.blog we've used Sticker Mule for a while. A few years ago, I remember reading something about the founder supporting Trump. We actually talked about it internally. Do we care about the political opinions of companies that make a product we pay for?
Ultimately, I decided we rarely order stickers and it's a slippery slope to judge every company this way. What if the guy who runs the convenience store supports Trump? Can I still pick up a Dr. Pepper from his store or do I need to shop elsewhere? That's silly. Small businesses especially should be allowed some leeway, as long as it's not interfering with the relationship between owners and and their customers, and as long as they don't appear to be actively using their business to promote causes we don't agree with.
Fast forward to this week when Sticker Mule co-founder Anthony Constantino sent this email to customers. Here are a couple excerpts:
I don't care what your political views are but the hate for Trump and his supporters has gone too far.
People are terrified to admit they support Trump. I've been scared myself.
Anthony has misjudged how people are reacting to the attempted assassination. We don't want Trump killed, but we are not coming together over this to support him. Anyway, let's continue:
Btw, this week, get 1 shirt for $4 (normally $19).
I suggest buying one that shows you support Trump.
This whole email crosses a line. It's inappropriate. It's elevating his personal opinion to put it right in our face. I'm not going to use Sticker Mule again because now I know my money is used in part to send what are effectively promotional emails for a convicted felon, a candidate who is unfit for the presidency.
Same thing with Elon Musk, who said this week he will donate $45 million each month to a pro-Trump super PAC. He will also relocate SpaceX to Texas because he doesn't like California's politics. Twitter X is a disaster regardless, full of hate and misinformation, and I'll be staying away from the platform.
I think about my own blog too, where I've frequently written about politics. No one who reads my blog will be surprised that I'm going to vote a straight Democratic ticket in November. I don't think I'm a hypocrite on this. While I will try to balance the tone in my posts on very divisive issues — writing about the war in Gaza was challenging — it is my personal blog. There's a difference between what I post on manton.org and what I post on news.micro.blog, or what I send to customers in email.
Micro.blog customers do read my blog, but my account is not auto-followed. If someone is annoyed with my posts, they should be able to ignore them and still be a happy customer.
Maybe that's the advice for Anthony and Sticker Mule: get this crap out of your company messaging. On a personal blog you can write about a range of topics. Folks who dislike your politics can choose to stay away. But spare us the lecture on Trump and unity, and leave it out of your emails.
Downtown from old east Dallas. Some yellow in the sky before sunset.
In Dallas for a few days. Iced latte outside at Ascension, near White Rock Lake. ☕️
Hard to believe it's only been 4 days since I blogged that the debate is over about the nominee. Schiff's statement + Pelosi saying he can't win + Biden getting COVID... At this point, it's like swimming upstream. Might be time to call it. 🇺🇸
Started a Micro.blog experiment that renders a snapshot of your blog post as an image, which could be used for Open Graph previews or thumbnails in the UI. Not sure the best form this should take when it's live. Suggestions? If you could have a little thumbnail of any web page, how would you use it?
I don't see myself buying a Vision Pro soon or ever, but love that a hot air balloons video is in the next batch of immersive content. Seems like a great fit. But also, maybe Apple is overthinking this... Any and all content would probably help.
I was trying some new things with Micro.blog themes and rediscovered that I had made a page that is just recent photos in the blog post category Coffee. This kind of thing is why you should have your own blog. 🙂
With the release of GPT-4o-mini, I'm updating some of the models used in Micro.blog. It's really nice to see the price decrease. Hopefully that is translating to more efficient, less energy use on the servers too.
Rewatched Twister (singular) this week. It holds up! Went to see Twisters (plural) tonight and it’s also good. Sort of a remake and sort of a sequel, but it works. 🍿
Wow. 🇺🇸
Micro.blog has a couple options for creating redirects, but adding pages to your blog navigation that go somewhere else hasn't been intuitive before now. I've added a new option that makes this much more discoverable.
