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A cool feature for FeedLand users. When you Like an item, it’s automatically added to two feeds – one for your likes, and one for all likes of all users on your FeedLand server. It’s basically a single-gesture linkblog. There’s a lot of that in FeedLand, where things have been factored to a point where they couldn’t possibly be simpler. Of course since they’re standard RSS feeds, you could follow them from any feed reader.
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While my posts on Mastodon tend to be better-distributed than my Twitter posts, the “discussion” there is every bit as insipid and pointless as it ever was on Twitter. People don’t read the posts, don’t click the links, ask impossible-to-parse questions, I have no idea why they bother.
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I asked ChatGPT what was the first weblog. And note, the response is archived on my own site, statically rendered, in HTML. Makes it easier to share results, and for those results to get into search engines. Screen shots are bullshit.
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Manton is our eyes and ears from BlueSkyLand. I applied for a beta, but wasn’t given one. Just as well, I’m kind of loaded up to my ears with other stuff.
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NetNewsWire will support Markdown in the 6.2 release. Brent Simmons describes it here. This is excellent. Markdown and RSS belong together. Interop is the way you move a standard forward. Now, the most popular feed reader on the Mac will include Markdown support. 💥
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I made some improvements to Manton’s Drummer-to-Micro.blog work he did last year. I’ve been using it to do my posts here. It’s part of my basic set of open Drummer outlines. There’s a thread where people can ask questions.
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December 28: Writing on the web could be much better than it is. I have always believed that the web was the ultimate writers platform. But if every means of distribution requires that you use their writing tools, it can’t come close to its potential.
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Good morning. I’ve been asking about where we meet to discuss ideas on my blog. A place we can talk about making our products do more interesting things working together. Not by capitulating, by cooperating. Sorry micro.blog people, that is not the place. If I disagree with Manton, and explain why – all I get back is that I must have misunderstood what he’s saying. That’s not constructive. Also something of an ad hominem. And btw, I think I understand better than most. I’ve been immersed in writing on the web since shortly after the inception of the web, 30 years ago.
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Manton is a friend, but I don’t agree with him on character limits in blog posts.. I hope in a few years all these discussions about what’s the optimal number of characters for a post will be seen as farce, like the scene in Amadeus where the Emperor says Mozart’s opera has too many notes. I don’t think it’s up to Emperors or software developers to have opinions on what’s the right number of characters in my writing. What if in turn, as a writer, I said Manton’s code couldn’t have more 500 characters per file. What’s the likelihood that my edict would make any sense? Hopefully that puts it in perspective. There’s a simple solution available to everyone, a More link at some arbitrary breakpoint, that does enough to encourage short posts if that’s what you’re after. And it also makes sense to writers.
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After a 20-day absence my micro.blog is back. I think finally all the corner-turns are done. It took months to get Twitter-dependence out of Drummer and FeedLand. But it appears to be done now. The final piece, Electric Drummer, my desktop multi-tab outliner, now works for updating all the different types of documents I use it to write for and it’s a long list. If this works, I now have it hooked up again to micro.blog. Conclusion, you can lift up a big piece of software, put in a new foundation and put it back down and have everything more or less work. But it’s all the breakage caused by “more or less” that gets you. And before that, being able to imagine how the software will work in its new form, for users, before having anything functional to look at. I’m accustomed to layering in stages. This goes totally against my normal process. So every step had to be done very deliberately with lots of things being undone because it didn’t lead in a good direction. To a user this might look easy, that was the point. Keeping the suspension of disbelief enough so people will believe it’s the same piece of software, when in some important ways, it’s not.
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You can’t trust corporate APIs. The only ones you can trust are open APIs that aren’t owned by anyone – like the web, http, html, rss. You have to watch out because the bigco’s will try to own those too. To a large extent Google already owns the web. And they are throwing their weight around in much more consequential ways than twitter. But Google is invisble to the press. That will end someday.
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A little story I probably have written before. I once made an exciting product called Frontier just for the Mac, and this turned out to be a mistake, because while I was making the product, Apple changed, and they eventually attacked and destroyed my investment, which was considerable, and also set us back a long way, all of us, imho. I’m typing this on a Mac b/c right now this is the best computer for me to use. But what Apple did to us was terrible. This is life. You have to deal with it.
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I can now settle the age-old debate about what is and isn’t a podcast. If at the end of your podcast, and in promos, you say “Available where ever you get your podcasts,” then it’s a podcast! If you don’t say it, then it ain’t a podcast! To illustrate, here’s the shortest podcast ever.
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Eli Pariser: “First thoughts on Artifact, the new news reader from the Instagram guys. Right now it feels like a slick, maybe more personalized rewrite of Apple News. But not much serendipity—it’s all pretty narrowly tailored to what I indicated as my tastes, and I haven’t discovered much that’s surprising or interesting there.”
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To anyone who cares about ActivityPub, Peter Zingg provides a great roadmap for what’s needed to get serious adoption.
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The last few minutes of an NBA game are the best. You can space out till then.
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The open source release of FeedLand is on the way. 🚀
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I did a top level demo of FeedLand for a friend all in one Mastodon post. Having 500 chars to work with makes a big difference as you can see. 😀
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Who owns the web?
I asked ChatGPT who owns the web. This is what it said.
The World Wide Web is not owned by any single person or organization. It is a decentralized system of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. The Web is maintained and developed by a community of individuals, companies, and organizations, who contribute to its growth and evolution. The core technology of the Web, including the HTTP and HTML standards, is developed and maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). However, the web is also regulated by different countries with different laws and regulations, but no one owns the Web.
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Clearly what will drive the microblogging market outside Twitter is Mastodon not ActivityPub. Here’s a short thread that explains.
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Why aren’t we marching over the Dobbs decision?
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My apps still work with the Twitter API. I don’t think any developer should try to make hay out of the pain of another developer. I wouldn’t do that to you, even if I had questions about the foundation of your product. You see this in sports, no one puts down a competitive team just because one of their star players is injured. For good reason – it can happen to you too and you don’t want to see people do that to you. Remember this isn’t just about Twitter, it’s about developers too.
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I work for the betterment of the network we all share. I’m not trying to get rich or famous, just fix the stuff that’s broken. I hope you are doing that too. Keep on truckin.
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We have too many timelines. One is the right number. :-)
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