Manton Reece

Garrett Dimon writes about removing all analytics from his web site and how little he misses it:

What over a decade of number-crunching analytics has taught me is that spending an hour writing, sharing, or helping someone is infinitely more valuable than spending that hour swimming through numbers. Moreover, trying to juice the numbers almost invariably divorces you from thinking about customers and understanding people.

We don’t have page-view stats on Micro.blog because they are incomplete without counting the Micro.blog timeline and feed readers, and I’d hate for someone to be discouraged when just getting started. Newsflash: your blog does not have a million readers. That’s okay! If you really want stats, you can add some custom JavaScript to include Google Analytics or Fathom Analytics, but most of the time it’s a distraction.

I love having everything together on manton.org. Whether it’s blog posts about tech, personal stuff, or photos, I don’t have to think too much about where to put it. If I’m writing on the internet, it goes on my blog.

But I’ve been wanting to experiment with sharing more location information too, and use that to try out location as a built-in Micro.blog feature, so I’ve created a new blog manton.coffee and imported my 2500 check-ins from Foursquare/Swarm representing about 8 years.

To build this, I upgraded Micro.blog to support venue names and location coordinates. We try to be very careful about privacy, and currently the apps do not fill any of this data in, but in the future it could be something people opt-in to for a post. The extra data is available to Hugo templates, which is how I’m including the little maps on the home page.

We’re working on some other features with higher priority than this, so consider this mostly a sneak peek for now. I’ll enable the Foursquare/Swarm import as an official feature after the glitches are worked out. Better integration with OwnYourSwarm should also be on the roadmap.

We’ve released a new version of our photo-blogging app Sunlit. Mostly a bunch of bug fixes, including these changes:

• Updated thumbnail previews in a new post to maintain the aspect ratio of the photo.
• Added an option in the Settings screen to clear cached photos and drafts from previous versions of Sunlit.
• Improved spacing of icons in tab bar.
• Fixed swipe left on a post to view the conversation.
• Fixed several other issues and potential crashes.

You can download Sunlit for free in the App Store.

I’ve removed the option for Facebook cross-posting on Micro.blog. Facebook recently disabled our API access, and my initial request for re-approval was denied. While I hope to eventually get it enabled again, I don’t want to have a feature on Micro.blog that is broken.

A year ago Facebook turned off API access for creating new posts unless they were sent to a Facebook page. I adapted Micro.blog to that change, but it already severely limited the usefulness of cross-posting to Facebook. At the time, Bridgy disabled all Facebook support:

Facebook’s moves to restrict its API to improve privacy and security are laudable, and arguably the right idea, but also mean that users can no longer use third party apps like Bridgy to create posts.

I hope that by officially saying goodbye to Facebook support we can focus on making the other cross-posting options in Micro.blog more robust. I’m currently looking into improving LinkedIn support, and we recently added Tumblr cross-posting to go along with Twitter, Medium, and Mastodon.

Facebook and even Instagram are at odds with the principles of the open web. I never want to remove a Micro.blog feature that users find valuable, but in this case we have little choice, and it’s best for Micro.blog to move on.

Yesterday we updated the iOS app for Micro.blog with several bug fixes and tweaks for iOS 13. Today I’m updating the macOS app with an important fix when running on macOS Catalina.

Here are the changes:

• Fixed post selection options popover on macOS Catalina.
• Updated for “notarization” to avoid launch warnings.

Along with macOS notarization, this release also now uses the “hardened runtime”. I thought this might break some features, but I haven’t noticed any problems. Choose “Check for Updates” in the app to get the latest version.

I’ve posted an update to Micro.blog for iOS with several bug fixes. Here are the changes in version 1.7.1:

• Updated a few more screens for Dark Mode on iOS 13.
• Fixed updating timeline when favoriting posts in Discover.
• Fixed alignment of popover when selecting a post.
• Fixed disabling cross-posting from post options screen.
• Fixed uploading videos to WordPress.

You can download it in the App Store.

There’s a new trailer out for Klaus, which hits select theaters and then Netflix in November. Amid Amidi at Cartoon Brew writes about director Sergio Pablos:

His goal hasn’t been to simply bring back 2d animation, but to push the craft forward, and Klaus’s distinct look is achieved via an innovative lighting and rendering pipeline that is applied to the drawn animation.

I’m excited for any hand-drawn feature film, especially one that comes from Sergio Pablos. Over the last few years his team has posted some early concepts and tests to their blog. I also mentioned Sergio on an episode of my podcast Timetable in 2017.

When Apple Arcade launched, I thought it would be fun to try a new game each day for 30 days. And it was fun! For… 18 days. On Saturday I sat down to play my 19th pick, Oceanhorn 2, and realized that playing a new game each day wasn’t working.

Unlike visiting 30 coffee shops, 30 libraries, and 30 parks — where each series of blog posts I explored Austin and got a lot out of it — playing video games has proven to be too big of a time commitment for me right now. I love video games and there are some great games in Apple Arcade, but if I’m on my phone for an hour I need to be using that time for something work-related. It was creating too much extra stress for too little return.

Oceanhorn 2 is also a good place to wrap up this experiment because it’s one of my favorites. It’s heavily inspired by Zelda. I’m going to enjoy playing it a little bit more over the next week or so. All the other games I’ve played are collected in this category on my blog.