Nice spot to rest while walking the dog today.
For today’s photo challenge: balance. My glasses balancing on the “nosey” holder at my desk. I got this as a present a few years ago and still use it every day.
Reminder that because of the 30-day photo challenge, when you join Micro.blog today you get free blog hosting until March. Great time to share a link with your friends and loved ones. ❤️
IndieWebCamp Austin is next weekend, February 22-23! You can register here. We’ve updated the schedule session times and added a link to the speakers announcement. IndieWeb co-founders Tantek Çelik and Aaron Parecki will also be there.
I usually order an iced coffee, but need a little warmth on a cold morning. Coffee at Red Horn.
“Rise up! I will fight for this land, but there’s only one man who can give us a command so we can rise up.”
We’ve just posted episode 408 of Core Intuition. Update on manager meetings, running ads, and looking forward to IndieWebCamp Austin.
I don’t have any particular attachment to Sticker Mule, and in fact once tried to switch to another sticker company, but they make it really easy to re-order stickers. New batch just arrived for IndieWebCamp Austin!
Gluon is the first cross-platform mobile app for Micro.blog. It supports multiple Micro.blog accounts and features like local drafts, muting, and themes. Developer Vincent Ritter has documented the development process on his blog through several iterations of the app.
Congrats Vincent! You can download Gluon on the App Store here.
My go-to smoothie lately: one frozen banana, frozen blueberries, a little plain yogurt, peanut butter, sometimes kale, and almond milk. Apparently everything we buy is HEB-branded now.
We’ll never have ads on Micro.blog. It’s really important to me that it’s user-supported and the timeline only includes posts you want to see. But if ads are already on a platform like Twitter, why not use them? I’ve experimented a couple times with Twitter ads. This week I decided to run a very small campaign to help get the word out about IndieWebCamp Austin.
I’m not sure it’s very effective, but I find the results interesting. Here’s a screenshot of the stats after the ad ran over the weekend:
IndieWebCamp can be difficult to explain succinctly. Micro.blog can be too, for that matter. But I’ve found the IndieWeb events I’ve attended extremely valuable, both to be inspired by what people are working on and to have a little time to make Micro.blog even more IndieWeb-friendly. Hope to see y’all there!
Winning the Democratic nomination is about timing. I like where Amy Klobuchar’s momentum is right now. Good luck everyone in New Hampshire today! 🇺🇸
I added the placeholder for the 30-day photo challenge pin. You can view your pins in Micro.blog by clicking Account → “View All” in the top header.
I’m happy to announce that we have 3 short keynotes planned for the first morning of IndieWebCamp Austin! After coffee and breakfast tacos, we’ll get the day started with an introduction to the schedule and our featured speakers.
Natalie Hester — Natalie keeps a gratitude journal on Micro.blog where you can see snapshots of her life as a full-time partner to Ryan, new mom to Aria, and academic fundraiser. She will be talking about her unlikely journey away from Facebook and what it’s like being a new mom on social media.
Pace Smith — Pace is a queer trans intersectional feminist Sufi bridger. She codes, podcasts, blogs, makes indie games, writes limericks, and tries to make the world a better place. She will be talking about the role of the bridger and building trust on the web.
Aaron Parecki — Aaron is an IndieWeb co-founder and security architect at Okta. He is the editor of several IndieWeb specifications at the W3C. He will be talking about using an Indie Reader to take control of how he follows and responds to people online.
Before we break for lunch, we’ll plan the afternoon sessions. If you’ve never attended an IndieWebCamp before, the rest of the sessions are organized by attendees. This helps adapt the conference to the topics that attendees are interested in.
I hope you’ll join us! Register here for $10.
Sent the first new email newsletter in a while! You can view it on the web here. Unfortunately, I made 2 mistakes: the inline photos may have ruined the text version of the email, and I forgot to add SPF records, likely leading to spam filter problems.
The sign outside Cenote on a rainy afternoon. Coffee and work on resuming the Micro Monday newsletter.
For the last couple of years we’ve used Mailchimp’s Mandrill service to send transactional emails from Micro.blog. These emails are for when you get a link to sign in, or a reminder that your trial expired. It was convenient to have everything in Mailchimp because we also used it to send our newsletters.
Because Mandrill was going to be down for maintenance a couple weeks ago, I decided to switch over to SendGrid. I’ve used SendGrid in the past and while I left disappointed at the time, that was years ago and I recently got some great help from a SendGrid employee while troubleshooting Sign in with Apple. It was easy to switch back.
I’m also moving our newsletter emails over to SendGrid and hope to resume sending the Micro Monday newsletter this week. The savings are significant. We were paying MailChimp about $220/month. On SendGrid, the comparable set of plans will be only $65/month.
Daniel and I talked more about sending email on Core Intuition a couple weeks ago. We’ve had some good feedback from folks about their favorite email providers, both for and against nearly every popular service, so I wanted to document the change here on the blog.
Sometimes it’s good to hit “pause” on a conversation and take some time before replying, especially if a debate accidentally gets personal. We can disagree (often quite passionately!) without letting conversations escalate into attacks.
Enjoying the Oscars. I like that they do best animated feature early, but then there’s always a bit of a lull until some of the later categories.
I fixed one of the last potential glitches in refreshing feeds in Micro.blog. Should make a nice difference for active users who sometimes see inconsistent posting delays.
Posted a new Core Int about getting AirPods, follow-up with @danielpunkass on email marketing services, and comparing Micro.blog’s decisions to stay bootstrapped vs. venture-backed companies.
Today’s photo challenge prompt: contrast. Finally got some AirPods. They’re great, but still kind of miss when one pair of headphones could work reliably on all devices.
Made some additional improvements to Micro.blog’s cross-posting so that it can more reliably recover from problems downloading photos or sending them to Twitter. A few people have hit this recently.
When Daniel Jalkut posted about Apple’s email to keep his blog active in Apple News, I commented that Apple no longer even allows RSS for new blogs. I got this mixed up, though, confusing the options for publishers with what feeds users can add to the app themselves. Nick Heer followed up to clarify:
Nevertheless, it seems like it’s still possible — according to that News Publisher site — to create a new channel based on RSS. Existing RSS-based channels also appear to be functional still; this one is, at least. However, it is no longer possible to subscribe to an RSS feed as a user with Apple News.
I’ve now confirmed this. Today I tested using Apple’s News Publisher with a new Apple ID, and it does let you add RSS sources. However, it really discourages it. The default is Apple News format, and when you switch to RSS you get this prompt:
As soon as you start using Apple News format instead of RSS, you can’t go back to RSS. It’s hard to tell if this was a technical limitation with how Apple News manages different feeds on the backend, or a decision to move Apple News away from RSS. Probably a little of both.
A sign above. We’ve been watching them expand this HEB with grocery pick-up for months and it almost looks ready.
