New features this week

I rolled out several new features to Micro.blog today:

  • LinkedIn cross-posting. I don’t use LinkedIn very often, but I kept hearing this request enough that it slowly bubbled up to the top of the priority queue as I was making improvements to cross-posting. Micro.blog can now send any new post to LinkedIn automatically.
  • Show following users on the web. For a long time you’ve been able to see who someone is following in the native apps, but not on the web version of Micro.blog. Now the web version more closely matches the experience on iOS and macOS. This is a nice way to discover new users to follow. (We still never show followers or follower counts.)
  • Better hosted page redirects. Blogs hosted on Micro.blog can have pages in the navigation for things like contact information, a resume, current projects, books you love, etc. If you want to link to an external site, you can just paste the URL into the contents of the page. These redirects work better now without briefly loading the blog layout.
  • Indiepaper for saving articles to read later. This is an experimental feature inspired by some ongoing work in the IndieWeb community. There’s a help page if you’re interested in learning more. I’ll have some more thoughts later on how this might evolve.
  • Pass-through legacy URL redirects. The last missing piece to migrate my main blog with 16 years of posts to Micro.blog hosting. Because I had accumulated so many random files on manton.org that I didn’t want to migrate, this feature allows me to have Micro.blog host all posts and photos, but if Micro.blog sees a URL it doesn’t recognize it can forward that to a different URL on the old server. (I’ll be enabling this manually for people who need it for now.)

It’s really nice to finally have manton.org hosted on Micro.blog. I’ve learned a lot going through this that I can use to help others migrating away from Wordpress.

I also cleaned up the text on a few pages and made other small bug fixes. Thanks for using Micro.blog! Your support means we can keep making it better.

Manton Reece @manton