Manton Reece

You might think because I created Micro.blog that I have a perfectly simple blogging workflow that will work for everyone, all the time. Nope. I use a variety of different apps depending on what I’m trying to do:

• If I’m posting a quick microblog post and know what I want to say, I type it into the Micro.blog app for Mac.
• If I’m posting a single photo, I use Micro.blog on my iPhone.
• If I’m posting a bunch of photos like this post from Toronto, I use Sunlit to write a little something for each day.
• If I’m writing a longer post and have it all in my head, so I know I will post it very soon, I type it directly into MarsEdit and publish it to Micro.blog from there.
• If I’m writing a post and I’m not totally sure where it’s going, or when I’m going to post it, I type it into Ulysses. This is the majority of my posts. Then I copy it out as Markdown and paste it into Micro.blog.

And this only scratches the surface. There’s Wavelength for podcasts, and some people prefer apps like Icro, Gluon, Dialog, Quill, or automation via Shortcuts. This is why we link third-party apps from the posting screen in Micro.blog.

One of the things I’m most proud of with Micro.blog is that the API supports standards so you can use a variety of different apps for posting. There are so many different types of blogs out there, there shouldn’t just be one way to post.

We are getting really close to episode 400. Feels like a big milestone to me, and I’ve been wondering if we should change anything with the podcast format when we roll over into the 400s. But in the meantime, here’s 395:

Daniel and Manton try to take stock of long-term personal goals, thinking of how they align with and overlap with money-making goals. Manton reports back after watching Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” talk at WordCamp US. Manton reflects on the important of simplicity for Micro.blog in contrast to WordPress, while Daniel considers that MarsEdit also serves as a more complex interface to Micro.blog. Finally, they digest the latest Apple announcements, focusing on the merits of the new AirPods Pro, and whether Apple TV+ is a justifiable pursuit for the company.

Daniel has already given me a sneak peek of next week’s manager check-in and it’s a good one. I think that is going to become a regular segment.

Brent Simmons marking the 20th anniversary of his blog:

It’s tempting to think that The Thing of my career has been NetNewsWire. And that’s kinda true. But the thing I’ve done the longest, love the most, and am most proud of is this blog.

The great thing about a personal blog is that if you stick with it, your blog will very likely span multiple jobs and even major life changes. You don’t need to know where you’re going to be in 20 years to start a blog today and post to it regularly. Writing about the journey — and looking back on the posts later to reflect on where you’ve been — is part of why blogging is still so special.

IndieWebCamp Austin is coming up in February at Capital Factory. This is our 3rd event in Austin and I’m excited to start getting the word out and help a lot of new people discover the IndieWeb. Registration is already open.

Tom Brown and Jean MacDonald are joining me as co-organizers and we’re looking for sponsors to help cover costs for the venue and breakfast for attendees. If you’re interested in sponsoring or work at a company that would be a good fit to support the IndieWeb, please email me: manton@micro.blog.

Platinum event sponsor: $2500

• Your logo on the IndieWebCamp event page.
• A verbal thank-you during the morning and closing of the event.
• You can bring t-shirts, stickers, and other promotional items to distribute to attendees.
• A special mention and link in the email we send to attendees the day of the event.

Silver event sponsor: $1000

• Your logo on the IndieWebCamp event page.
• A verbal thank-you during the morning and closing of the event.
• You can bring t-shirts, stickers, and other promotional items to distribute to attendees.

Bronze event sponsor: $500

• Your logo on the IndieWebCamp event page.
• A verbal thank-you during the morning and closing of the event.

Ben Thompson has an excellent article this week about free speech, political ads, and Facebook. There’s a good debate to be had about the roll of curation and fact-checking ads, but on the problems of massive, ad-based social networks there can be no doubt:

In the long run, though, it is very problematic that such a powerful player in our democracy has no accountability. Liberty is not simply about laws, or culture, it is also about structure, and it is right to be concerned about the centralized nature of companies like Facebook.

Platforms that have as many problems as Facebook does can always be improved, but by design they can never be good enough because their size alone is one of the problems.

The good news: it’s up to us. We can choose to reject these platforms and move to a more distributed web of indie microblogs. We can choose to reject the attention power-grab of the algorithmic timeline. We can choose to build the web we deserve… but it’s not going to happen if you keep feeding photos into Instagram.

There’s a powerful filter mechanism inside Micro.blog for automatically assigning categories based on criteria in the post. For example, if the post includes an img tag, assign it to a Photos category. Or if the post includes the 📚 emoji, assign it to a Books category. I blogged about this in September.

Today I’ve expanded this feature to also allow matching on whether the post is a short microblog post or whether it’s a longer post with a title. Like other parts of Micro.blog, it uses the title to determine how to categorize the post. Posts without titles are always considered short microblog posts.

To create new filters, go to Posts → Categories → Edit Filters.

You can use this in combination with matching the title or text in a post, or leave those fields blank when creating a filter to match all posts. This makes it easy to move all full-length posts into a category, which can also have its own RSS feed.

There’s a new built-in theme available on Micro.blog called Lanyon, based on the open source Hugo theme of the same name. It’s a clean, readable design with a slide-out menu for page links.

I’ve been working on getting several new themes ready for Micro.blog. Some Hugo themes work with only a couple tweaks, and some take more time. My fork of Lanyon with Micro.blog-specific changes is on GitHub.

Two new versions of the third-party Micro.blog app Icro have been released. The iOS version now supports push notifications, and a new version is available for macOS for the first time.

Because the official Mac app is distributed as a direct download, this is actually the first Micro.blog app available in the Mac App Store. It was ported to macOS using Catalyst, so it requires Catalina, which I just upgraded to. It’s great to have another microblogging option on the Mac!