Colin Devroe: Recent Episodes
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Photographer. Darkroom printer. Blogger. Antiquarian. Reverse Engineer. Art curator. YouTuber, lol. Senior Product Manager at NerdPress.
Aphera:
Aphera is the Raw photo editor built natively for Mac, with a from-scratch imaging pipeline and a workflow designed to disappear.
Built by Latent Co. (aforelinked) which includes Ryan Carver as lead singer, Naz Hamid on drums, and Juan Pablo Zambrano on guitar.
Josh Ginter, in his excellent Sunday Edition from mid-July:
We spent five days camping in a one-bar-of-LTE-but-still-won’t-work area last weekend, so this is the first installment of the Sunday Edition in a few weeks. The days off were a good recharge, but I also can’t say it was fully enjoyable. I’m not sure a person can go from a long period of heavy work to instant shut-off without a slower pullback of sorts. I think things were too abrupt for me, and it impacted our time away.
I feel this in two ways; what is it with cellular network signal strength indicators? Are they the modern equivalent of fake progress bars?
And, also, “pullback” is a thing I’ll be aiming for prior to my next getaway. So often the period right before some time off is harried rather than relaxed. It is a sprint and scramble to make sure I get as much off my plate as possible before I step away. Perhaps I should be doing the opposite somehow?
Red Bull’s website has a blog post about photography on it (cool!) that says “Blogs aren’t really a thing anymore.” (ironic, and not cool!). I’m glad I’m not fond of Red Bull.
Christoph Rauscher, in a post about his 6th year running a weeklong workshop called Writing = Design (which sounds lovely):
It was so peaceful, this one week of human writing. We developed sentences from words, focussed on first drafts, and provided thoughtful feedback for each other. Our group spanned from 24-year-old students to 60-year-old design professionals, and not for a single thing in the world would I want to exchange those perspectives with some artificial machine-made fabric. I’ll try to take that spirit into my everyday life, aiming to de-pollute (is that even a word?!) my thoughts and words from the possessive narrative that “AI tools” are supposed to dominate my life. They don’t. And that’s called agency—so glad I still have that.
Merlin Rebrović:
… I’m using AI to design AI-powered tools and I work with some people who are AI-pilled. When I get home, I read and listen to AI maximalists and billionaires’ manifestos so that I know what my executives are consuming and to get ready for what I’ll hear from them at work next week. I also follow people on the opposite spectrum, who talk about societal, environmental, and economic harms of AI, as well as predatory marketing tactics and lobbying employed by big research labs. Wading through all of that continuously takes energy and time.
I’ve been working in tech since 1994. Tech has always moved quickly and I’ve always done my best to jog along and keep up. Over the course of these decades there have been several times I’ve felt the need to sprint.
To me, a sprint is not sustainable. It is a short period of time where I must almost totally consume myself in order to do my job well. Sometimes the sprints are necessary because I fell too far behind and I needed to catch up, other times it was because I wanted to be at the head of the pack. Most of them have been relatively short-lived sprints; lasting perhaps half a year or so.
This AI sprint seems to only be getting faster and lasting longer than any other sprint I’ve experienced.
It can be argued when the sprint began. Artificial Intelligence has a much longer history than just the last few years. In fact, much of the work in the field was done before I was born. But this most recent race is the one I’m personally taking part in.
As Head of AI & Product at NerdPress, I’m obligated to keep up with what is happening in the industry, what the tools are capable of, and how best to apply them to our team’s work. It is a lot. And I feel Merlin’s words above where it is a bit consuming. But I took it on. I decided to start sprinting. I wasn’t asked to. Which I’m sure helps to make it a bit easier for me than others who were forced into the sprint.
Will it end? While I’m a little bit tired, a little frazzled, from nearly a year of all out sprinting, I think the pace is about to quicken yet again.
But now I have help. I’m no longer running alone. I have several AI agents to help me. To some, that sentence feels icky. But I’m totally OK with it. Even as the pace continues to quicken, I feel empowered to keep up much easier today than I was able to even a year ago. And I think the next year or more is going to be at least three times more work to do than the previous year.
So, I guess I’m saying that I’d better get really good at knowing when to take a short break, hydrate, shake out my legs, and get sprinting again. Because I think this is going to be a marathon and I’m here for it even after all these years.
There were issues with Signboard’s updater on Windows and Linux. Those have now been fixed so if you’re running Signboard 1.5.0 or earlier you should be able to update to 1.6.0 now.
Finished reading Meat Eater by Steven Rinella. I enjoy a good outdoor adventure story. Even hunting stories. So often lately the story has become about the gear and the trophy… and the over-hyped energy around a kill. All the wrong reasons to be hunting in my opinion. Steve doesn’t really do that. And he started humble.
Tyler Hall:
The first version, from November 2020, was called AntiPhoto. The name was a mood. I had tens of thousands of photos and videos scattered across drives and old phone backups, and Apple Photos wanted me to live inside its library, on its terms. I didn’t want a walled garden. I wanted something that could point at a messy folder and just make sense of it.
I linked to Tyler’s project over 5 years ago. I was excited about any new Mac-based solution for photo management at the time. And I’ve tested several builds of Iris Photos since (thanks Tyler).
The 1.0 release looks great. Many of the things the app does out of the box I do within my Apple Photos library (such as have smart albums for dates and people).
The only downside (for me) about Iris Photos is that it prefers that your entire photo library exists locally… preferably directly on your Mac. I simply do not have the disk space for that. So since my reluctant switch to iCloud Photo Library I’ve been using that exclusively.
Congrats to Tyler for shipping!
Models. Big huge scary models. Small, purpose-built models. Slow models. Fast models. Expensive models. Local models.
Models. Models. Models.
Which model should you pick for your question, task, or goal? How much of your usage budget will you use when you do? Could it have been done by a lesser model for less usage?
As the frothy sea of AI continues to ebb and flow this seems to be one of the more challenging and hard to answer questions for those of us using AI agents to help us with our everyday workload.
The answer to this question doesn’t yet seem clear.
Orchestration; which asks a single agent/model pair to delegate work to lesser agent/model pairs is one leading answer. And it works in some contexts. For example: “Do this big task” can be planned with a larger more capable model and then delegated to one or several more sub-agents and cheaper models to do laser targeted work. In practice, this works pretty well and the tooling for this is beginning to mature to the point it happens invisibly.
But, for the most part, the leading orchestrators use their own cloud-based models (and usually only a very small subset of them). Meaning, Claude might spin up 10 sub-agents on Sonnet to do the work, but you’re limited by still needing to use an Anthropic-based cloud model.
Something I played with a fair deal is using prompt heuristics to determine which model may best suit the current task. I created a catch-all “model” that delegated to other local or cloud-based models based on the request, whether or not it included private data, etc. It works fairly well but there are so many model variants that keeping up with whatever is the latest (that can run on my hardware) is nearly a full-time job… and getting an agent to delegate the tasks rather than just single-threaded prompting isn’t easy. And isn’t something I’ve considered cracked, yet.
But I think we’ll see the solution to this question appear within the next year. And I am sort of hoping it will be in an unexpected way.
Just look at the options we have in front of us.
Take, for example, something incredible like chat jimmy. chat jimmy runs an older, less capable, Llama model but runs inference near instantly. Seriously, give it a try. It is so fast it almost doesn’t matter that it isn’t nearly as good as more capable models. Think of this; if chat jimmy needed to run 10 times to produce valuable results, it would still be 100x faster than today’s leading models.
Now, imagine if Apple, AMD, or Intel were able to take a somewhat more capable model and grind it down into the bits necessary to put directly on the silicon they ship with their products. And imagine if all agents could utilize these on-device super fast models for some tasks and only rely on the larger cloud-based models for planning and orchestration and more important things like security and testing?
I think we’re on the cusp of something like this being available. I’m already using something like it locally — a main, orchestrating agent and super fast sub-agents that only do very targeted work. But I don’t think it is the solution just yet.
As the frontier models grow, the local models are shrinking. As the frontier models chase general intelligence, the local models are focusing on very specific sets of tasks.
I think overall the gap between frontier cloud-based models and local models will only widen and, eventually, for most of our everyday work we’ll be able to use a suite of smaller models that are orchestrated by agents. The frontier models will try to solve protein folding while our local models will write website code.
It could be argued that Apple believes this already. What they call Foundation models are really just a set of models that are purpose-built for the task they are supposed to do; image recognition, speech to text transcription, emoji generation. Everything else they leave up to the frontier models.
We’ll see how it shakes out. But I think we’ll be seeing a lot more models and model variants until it is figured out.
Famously, for years I have read every single blog post in NetNewswire, every tweet on Twitter (when that website existed), and every toot on Mastodon for the websites and accounts that I follow. It was sort of a disease that I couldn’t shake. I felt like I had to read every single one.
That is, until recently.
After a long week away I found myself struggling to catch up. And I tried. I really value the insight and experiences of all the people and accounts that I follow across the web. I’ve learned so much from them. But if it stops being fun or valuable and causes me stress I thought it would be good to reevaluate my process.
I’ve taken social media breaks several times. And when I do, I declare a bit of bankruptcy rather than trying to catch up after a month or more away. Each social media break I’ve taken I found worthwhile.
Recently, though, I’ve just given up completely on the idea that I can catch up. So I think I’m over the habit of even trying to read every single post.
For the last several months, I’ve not been keeping up on reading RSS feeds or Mastodon. I fall far behind and then quickly skim the entire timeline to pick out things to read. But even that practice I’m starting to eliminate.
In NetNewswire I’ve refactored my previous setup. I used to keep folders of feeds called “Trialing” and “Subscribed”; if a feed was valuable enough for a long enough period of time it would be moved from “Trialing” into the “Subscribed” folder. Or it would be deleted. These days, I changed to a “Some posts” and “Every post” folder. The “Every post” folder is very, very small selection of feeds. So for all feeds I either read some posts or every post. And I’m slowly whittling those away.
I’ve completely given up trying to read every toot. So now I use the official Mastodon iOS application or the website (I’m no longer subscribed to Ivory as development of that app has seemed to stagnate) and I open it occasionally and read the most recent few posts and then move on with my day.
I have no desire at all to use any apps that combine multiple network feeds together. As Dave Winer would constantly remind everyone; that is what RSS is for! We don’t need all these apps! But, no one listens.
I am sort of hoping my addiction (I guess I’m willing to call it that) to social media is totally gone. I can drop in from time-to-time, see what is going on, and drop out. It is likely how everyone else uses it anyway and how I likely should have been using it all along.
Tracy Durnell is shaking things up:
I’ve done a purge of my feed reader (down to 80 feeds lol). Rather than defaulting to my phone, I’m recommitting to books as my after-lunch reading.
She goes on to list some new rules to help decide what to read online.
Readers of my blog may recall, I do this routinely. I gobble up everything for a time, then I prune (more like lopping) way way back. Then I start over.
The AI slop explosion is real and I’ve not dodged it. In fact, I’m right in the thick of it. It has been a sprint to keep up with. But I feel like my reading Tracy’s post, albeit a few months later since I’ve been so busy I’ve neglected my feed reader, is as good as any reminder to scale back and revisit my information intake yet again.
See also: 2012, 2013, 2015, 2025. And many others.
There is no white-walled room, pre-recorded, distillation of the essence of chamfered edges here… or talk about liquid anything. This post is about how Signboard is quickly becoming so feature-rich you likely won’t use them all.
Signboard 1.5 just shipped and the landing page has been updated.
This release brings much tighter Obsidian integration (including a plugin which will be released into the community there soon) with linked notes, full folder conversion and support for Base file generation. What does all of this mean? That placing your Signboard board folder into your Obsidian Vault makes it super powerful to use the two apps side-by-side.
Here’s a Signboard + Obsidian use case; these days we’re recording and transcribing everything. Zoom and phone calls. We’re pulling down entire websites into Markdown. Allowing agents to run amok all over the web gathering research for us. Where do you put all of this data? Everyone is using Obsidian for this of course. Signboard isn’t the right place. Signboard is where you track what you need to get done, what you’re doing, and what you’ve completed. But now you can link a card with an Obsidian note or folder.
A linked Obsidian note in Signboard 1.5This is far more useful than it may seem. And agents know how to use it too. So now your Signboard cards, which can link other things like images and videos and documents, become your one-stop shop for everything you need to get your work done.
This release of Signboard also brings a more dense table view (in addition to the already powerful calendar, this week, day, and agenda views in the planner area).
The new sortable table viewSignboard 1.5 also extends the number of boards you can have open at once from 6 boards to unlimited boards. I find the board switcher (CMD + K) to be critical to switching between my projects. But, what I love is that the planner view brings them all together in one place – no matter how many boards I have open in Signboard.
You can also keep your system calendar up-to-date with any tasks or cards that have due dates in your Signboards by publishing a local calendar feed.
The macOS calendar with Signboard tasksI’m super happy with where Signboard is today. There are a few little bugs in this build that I’m hoping to have buttoned up in a future bug release, but for now it has more features than most people will likely ever need. Enjoy!
I think WWDC 2026 looked fantastic. Great updates across the board. I have the feeling a lot of people will be installing the public betas. Oh, and I’m glad Shortcuts can be written by an agent. Because this human was terrible at it.
I’m trying to record a demo video of all of Signboard’s features, including those that will ship in version 1.5 (coming soon), and I’m just failing miserably. I’ll do it another day. So many great features in this app.
A wee bug fix release of Signboard 1.4.1 was just released. I am looking forward to writing and sharing more about this app, and how I and others are using it, very soon. My productivity is through the roof.
Andrew Wilder, CEO of NerdPress, and I were on The Simple Pin Media Podcast Episode #462 with host Kate Ahl.
The bulk of the episode walks through 3 core features of Hubbub; Share Buttons, Save This, and Action Buttons. We discussed how publishers are using them, and how we approached building Action Buttons to deliberately empower publishers to go from “LLMs are stealing my traffic” to “LLMs can return readers to my site.”
My thanks to Kate for having us on.
Signboard 1.4.0 just shipped and it includes a new Planner workspace that contains the date-based views of Calendar, This Week, and new Day and Agenda views. This allows you to get a bird’s eye view of all of your open Boards (or, drill down into just one).
I’ll write more about this release when I have time.
Terry Godier:
The blogs you read in 2012 redirect to parked domains. The forums where you learned what you know got bought, gutted, redesigned, and left to rot.
Terry must be tons of fun at parties. Way to rope us in Terry.
He redeems himself by the end:
But the actual internet — the protocols, the federated services, the plain-text commands, the open feeds, the small servers, the personal sites, the things people built when user and developer were sometimes the same word — is still right there.
Build protocols not platforms.
Tangentially related: The blog isn’t dead. It is just sleeping. and Blogging is alive and well.
WordPress takes a lot of heat. Some of that heat has been thrown by me. It can be frustrating to run a WordPress-powered site, to develop products for it, to ship code within it, and to deal with all of the personalities in its community. But there is no denying that it is that very community, the openness of its core, the pluggable nature of its design, and the distributed ecosystem around it is what makes it powerful.
WordPress is capable for the same reasons it can break from time-to-time.
But! There are ways to limit its breaking! And NerdPress excels at it.
Tina Collier, one of my colleagues at NerdPress, wrote about why WordPress sites can break and acknowledges that the stack of dependencies (PHP, WordPress, plugins, themes, custom code) can get out of alignment:
No one in this scenario is being malicious or careless — developers really would prefer their products not cause issues! — but this is how an open ecosystem with thousands of contributors behaves, and it’s why an update on your site can behave differently than it did for someone else.
One of the greatest challenges in shipping Hubbub, a NerdPress product, is the myriad of environments it can find itself running within across such a wide variety of dependencies. But we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Bulldozer (best name worst name?), my very simple but rickety PHP script I’ve used for years to help me move images into yyyy/mm/dd directories based on their creation date, was just updated significantly to be much more reliable and also work very well with agents. Get the latest on GitHub.
Big spike of traffic to my post about making a goal to get bored more often. Boredom is more important than ever.
Andrew Wilder (our CEO), on the NerdPress blog:
From start to finish, this was a coordinated team effort: updates, firewall protections, client communication, and vendor collaboration all happening in parallel. It’s a good example of how we approach these situations: move quickly, reduce risk immediately, and then work toward a complete, long-term solution.
The team at NerdPress is truly amazing and always goes above and beyond for our clients. It is awesome to see this behind-the-scenes every day and I’m glad Andrew took the time to give everyone else a glimpse of what makes this company great.
Craig Mod:
Here is the insane business plan of what I would do, the thoughts of some fool on a hill halfway across the world:
No more keyboards or mouse support for iPads. Touch only. Nix half the iPad lineup, simplify simplify simplify. Gut iPadOS and rebuild it around touch fluidity and fluency and focus. Work with Procreate to expand their offerings. What is the Procreate equivalent of every creative tool? Look back to the playfulness of PushPopPress. Now, make a 12″ MacBook Air. Get rid of the other Airs. For the MacBook lineup, offer a cheap Neo, an ultra-portable high-spec Air, and powerful, portful Pros. And macOS? No touch. Good god, do not succumb to the siren call of touching MacBook screens. Instead, go into a three year period of major OS refactoring. Speed above all. Mythos harden the OS but increase malleability. What does an LLM-first macOS look like? One you can plug into and automate with ease. Make that. (Plot twist: It turns out it’s the same thing as a user-first OS.) Think about keyboard fluency. Bicycle for the mind the hell out of the thing. Make it absolutely clear about how iPads are used and how MacBooks are used. Think about them as true companions, but with no overlap. Maybe Ternus will usher in parts of this.
Somewhat recently I was in need of replacing my amazing iPad Pro 13″ from 2017/2018 and picked up a new iPad (not Pro). I’ve immediately regretted the purchase. Not just because I really should have went Pro, but also because _everything_ I’m doing these days requires macOS. iPadOS, while awesome at a very finite number of things, is nearly useless in the current work landscape.
Highly recommend Fat Gold co-owned by Robin Sloan. Delicious. And the wee guide that comes along with some products is
A few tins of Fat Gold with the “How to use it up” guide
I like to run Signboard releases myself for about a week before I release them, so this one took a little longer than previous releases.
Version 1.3.0 changes up the typeface in the card editor, and adds checkboxes next to task list items making them easier to mark as complete while retaining full Markdown syntax.
Thanks to all that have linked to Signboard, written in via email and said nice things, and have provided feedback and pull requests!
Last week was a big week for agents. I wrote about the agentweb on Tuesday. To compete with Anthropic’s managed agents service (which I’ve used a fair amount at this point and it is quite good) OpenAI released Workspace agents to a few customer segments, Google released enterprise agent platform, and Microsoft scrambled to release a preview of hosted agents and says Copilot is now in “agent mode”. There will now be an explosion in the number of agents.
I don’t like to speak in absolutes. But all business software must be agent-ready as soon as possible.
Every app, website, SaaS product, cloud service, hosting platform, protocol, database, file system, and CLI is being rewritten for agents.
What is an agent? An agent is an app that receives prompts, interacts with large language models, loops until it can satisfactorily resolve the prompt, and replies. Some agents know how to code, others know about making Excel spreadsheets, some try to know it all. But the models it calls are really its greatest strength.
ChatGPT is an agent that calls the GPT-5.x class of models.
Codex is an agent that is specialized in building apps (though, its skills are growing quickly) that calls the GPT-5.x class of models. Sometimes Codex-specific models.
Claude is an agent that can answer questions and write basic files. It uses the Sonnet, Opus, and soon Mythos class models. You primarily chat with Claude.
Claude Code is a version of the Claude agent that knows how to code. Like Codex. It is available on the web, in an app, and within a Terminal on the command line. It can read and write text files like crazy. Yesterday I wrote 15,000,000+ lines of code with Claude Code.
Claude Cowork is an agent too and is, I think but do not know, a fork of Claude Code specifically tailored to work with different filetypes like presentations, spreadsheets, and PDFs. It knows more about marketing and sales than coding. However, like Claude Code, it uses ephemeral apps to read and write files. (So does Claude Code and Codex. If you ask them to read an Excel document and manipulate it, it will quickly write a Python script to do that, and then trash it immediately. I’m oversimplifying it, but this is generally what it is doing.)
There are other agents like Perplexity (which works with several models), Gemini (which Google calls their agent and their primary models), OpenCode, Goose, and several others.
You can use these agents on just about any model you like. So if you don’t want to use Claude Code with Anthropic’s Opus 4.7 model, you can use it on top of Google’s open weight model Gemma4 and code locally for free if you’d like.
Agents can search and read the web. Because many agents can read as well as see, they can often browse the web, find something for you, fill out a form, and if given the permissions and credentials, buy something for you.
But that is an agent pretending to be a human. Browsing pages, clicking buttons, and filling out forms.
The agentweb, which is very quickly sprouting up all over, doesn’t have or need a visual component. It doesn’t need webpages at pretty URLs. Using APIs and protocols like MCP, agents can sign up for and use services that don’t even have a proper domain name. They can create accounts, buy things, use things, and learn how to interact with services they’ve never seen and you didn’t teach them about.
The first to see this in action have been the developers (like me). Agents can use MCPs to use WordPress plugins like Hubbub or desktop apps like Signboard, to sign up for services using Stripe’s Projects.dev, and buy things that they need to get the job done, all without ever asking me for permission. (I have my agents always ask me for permission, but I’m sure I won’t in the future). Agents can navigate the agentweb on their own, there is no need for the silly, slow, ad-ridden web sites… they just bounce from MCP to API to MCP to website, back to MCP until the task you set them out to do is completed.
The agentweb will dwarf the humanweb in a matter of years or perhaps months. More services, data sources, community connections and shopping will be done through the agentweb than on the humanweb.
The humanweb will still be here. Ready for us to fumble through, search, and bash our fists into our mouse buttons on. We’ll still laugh, cry, and be utterly joyed by great websites for many years to come. But the primary way we will all interact with the internet will be via the agentweb.
Takuya Matsuyama, developer of InkDrop, who I’ve been following for a few years wrote about maintaining mental health in the AI era for software developers. He also walked through Japan, enjoying the trees, while reading this blog post.
A few pull quotes:
It’s easy to fall into the trap of trying too hard to keep up, only to end up exhausted.
Eating is an essential part of living. Yet, keeping it simple is surprisingly hard.
There are endless food products, recipes, and health tips — and TV shows constantly push us to make beautiful, varied meals for our families every day.
Software developers can’t live without software. It is literally an essential part of our lives, and keeping it simple is surprisingly hard. Let’s learn from his philosophy behind his principle.
Takuya dealt with burnout last year. And he finds that Ichiju Issai, or one-soup, one-dish, approach helps him. A worthy read or listen.
What do you do at 5am on a Friday? I release new versions of Signboard.
Signboard’s new “Coffee” color schemeSignboard 1.2.0 includes the following improvements:
- Added restore from archive view and CLI
- New color schemes: Mid-winter, Coffee, and Cozy Blush
- Added better board filtering; Today, Overdue, and multi-label select
- Added basic activity to cards: created date, list moves, etc. More to come.
- Added Tasks.md import
- Added new keyboard shortcuts
- Added new help docs in /docs
- Simplified header UI and improved vertical height
- Fixed an issue with MCP interactions with Claude
Until this release, Signboard’s archive was a black box. But now you can archive cards, lists of cards, and entire lists and be able to restore them to exactly where they were or somewhere else. It is pretty nice. I say, archive liberally!
Enjoy!
This morning I released Signboard 1.1.0 which includes Trello and Obsidian import, new color schemes, the ability to archive entire lists of cards (and the list itself), and other improvements.
Importing from Trello was always possible (but only partially supported). Now Signboard can import far more data from Trello board exports. The Obsidian import works with just about any Markdown files created with Obsidian but especially those created using the most popular community kanban plugins.
The fun part of this update though are the new curated color schemes. Here is what they look like.
LavenderHarvestEvergreenOliveRosewoodSee you next Friday.
Small detail in Signboard… as you drag a card it begins to slightly tilt in the direction that you’re dragging. Makes me happy.
Signboard 1.1.0 is coming tomorrow and it will include curated color themes (so aesthetic) and importing from both Trello and Obsidian. And a few other nice new things.
Signboard has had a hidden secret from the beginning, you can import data from Trello. Starting in 1.1.0, which will ship this Friday, that feature will no longer be hidden. Oh, and you’ll also be able to import from Obsidian and its leading community kanban plugins also.
John O’Nolan added a new CLI to Ghost called ghst:
We’ve spent 10+ years focusing on having a clean, well designed interface for Ghost. It’s something we care a lot about, and spend a lot of time on.
But within about ~1hr of using Ghost via Claude/CLI, it was hard to imagine going back to caveman-clicking around a browser to get something done. Particularly for complex or compound tasks that might require visiting several different areas of the app.
Totally.
I added both an MCP server and CLI to Signboard and I find myself constantly interacting with it. I sort of cover it a little in the video demo…
Let’s say I’m brainstorming an outdoor project for the yard. I’m getting ideas, calculating material costs, figuring out a timeline, and planning. At the end of that I would then set up a new board (or, at least a card or two) in Signboard to plan out the entire project. Now, with a Signboard skill in Claude Cowork, I do all of this brainstorming with Claude and then, at the end, ask it to create the new board and all the necessary cards, due dates, sub-tasks, custom labels etc. to hit my target due date.
As an aside: This is why I suggest keeping an eye on agentic commerce. While doing this sort of planning, if Claude could just buy everything for me (which, perhaps it already can but certainly it will be able to very soon) I would let it.
Great point from Jim Neilsen re: the instructions found deep inside a model or agent’s instructions, which we may not prefer yet live with if we don’t know to override them:
It’s like a Trojan Horse of craft: guidelines you might never agree to explicitly are guiding LLM outputs, which means you are agreeing to them implicitly.
It is worth the effort to dig under the hood of the tools we use so that we know what we may want to change. Especially so if we continue to get results we don’t prefer.
Simone Giertz in an interview with The Creative Independent:
One of the things that’s most important is if I’m really proud of the thing that we’re putting out. That’s always been one of the core tenants and that goes for both the YouTube side of things and for the product side of things. If it resonates with people or not is a little bit more out of my control.
I find this is the best approach.
Giles Turnbull:
Colin Devroe released Signboard, a lovely little local kanban board app for your Mac. Each board is just a folder, and each card is just a text file, and when you move cards, it moves files. So deliciously simple.
Thank you Giles.
SignboardIn September 2025 I wrote about Signboard and had started scratching away at making an app that I had wanted for a long time.
Since then, I’ve been using the app and I’m so happy that it exists and it is really fun to work on. At each opportunity, I’d add a feature, fix a bug, add a feature, fix a bug. You keep doing that enough times in a row and months later you have something usable. And Signboard is definitely very usable.
Last week Signboard hit 1.0.0. I made a landing page for the app. The app has all of the major features I had originally envisioned and a bunch more.
Here are a few highlights above and beyond just a kanban app:
- Calendar and This Week views – Inspired by my years long use of a custom Bullet Journal setup, these views give me a bird’s eye view of my week and month in a unique way. I love to be able to see what I’m doing on Tuesday or Thursday. (zoom into the screenshots on the landing page)
- MCP and CLI – Back in September I never would have predicted that Signboard 1.0.0 would ship with MCP (a way for AI agents to interact with your Boards and Cards) and a fairly full featured CLI. This has proven to be useful in ways I never could have planned for.
- Cross platform – I wanted Signboard to run on all desktop OSes since the beginning. But I had no idea that it would work so well. Signboard on Ubuntu is .
- Custom Themes per board – This is just fun and will be getting much more fun in upcoming releases.
I waited a week after release to write more about it here just in case there were some big issues (which I sort of expected?). But, from what I can tell, it is very solid and today – with the release of 1.0.1 that was purposely meant to help make Signboard even faster and more reliable – it is even more solid. If you have it installed use the “Check for updates” feature.
I have no expectations for Signboard other than that I will be using it every single day as I have been since I began. I really like it. And that is good enough for me.
I added a way from within the app for people to support its development and for those that make money using it to do so. Otherwise, it is free for personal use. Enjoy!
Signboard running on Ubuntu and Windows 11.
Ubuntu – Signboard and the Signboard CLIWindows 11Bug fix release coming Friday.
We released Hubbub Pro 2.29.0 today. We acquired this WordPress plugin just over 2 years ago and we’ve added tons of features and improvements that are helping publishers grow their websites, their mailing lists, and ultimately their revenue. Still so much more to do.
Back in February I bought a four-wheeler and I’ve been having a lot of fun putting in some miles, adding accessories, and being outdoors. It is a 2026 Polaris Sportsman. A great way to end winter. It affords me to get to locations to do some photography that I wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise. And, I’m planning a few overnight trips with some camps and morning breakfasts over a fire.
I’m using the Simply Static WordPress plugin to generate the files for two of my websites. It is a nice plugin with some good features and I gladly pay for it.
One of the websites is just over 5,000 files. To me, this seems like an average-sized website. SS takes nearly 15 minutes to generate the website. Tuff, my homegrown SSG that was a pile of spaghetti code, used to generate a similarly sized site in about 12 seconds – and I thought that was very slow at the time.
Perhaps I need to pull Tuff apart and rebuild it for WordPress?
I find myself in need of new Apple TVs, AirPods, and AirTags. But I have the feeling that Apple is on the cusp of releasing new versions of all three. I must be patient!
Manuel Moreale, who is purposefully taking in far less information during the month of June, mentions this about the silent periods that he used to fill in with podcasts:
First couple of days I could see my brain wanting to fill the silence with something but that was mostly out of habit more than anything. It’s now a week and I don’t even think about podcasts anymore. It honestly was easier than I thought.
Find times to be bored. Let your mind wander in silence. For me, it has allowed real ideas – ideas that are authentically my own and not spurred on by someone else’s thoughts – to spring up and take shape.
See also, from 2010, The “What To Do When You’re Bored” List.
I’ve been running macOS in “Increase contrast” mode for nearly a year. Yesterday’s WWDC keynote, which debuted the Liquid Glass design across all of Apple’s OSes, reminded me to look at my settings again. Toggling that off again is an entirely new experience using macOS. It is like I don’t even need to download the beta! (I won’t be downloading in betas, btw. But I appreciate those that do. Thank you.)
Craig Mod, writing for Literary Hub:
When I’m not talking, just walking (which is most of the time), I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total void of stimulation beyond the immediate environment. My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No “teleporting,” you could say. The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom. And yet, boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom—without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells. And for so many people these days, they’ve never so much as attempted to dip in a ladle, let alone dive down into those uncomfortable waters made accessible through boredom.
For me, from this boredom—this blankness of mind as I walk past sometimes fields and sometimes giant gambling pachinko parlors—words flow. I can’t stop them. My mind begins writing about what we see and refuses to shut up. That gap created by a lack of artificial stimulation is filled—thanks to the magic plasticity of our brains—with words and more words. Without Candy Crush, an inverted event horizon spawns, and out shoots: thoughts. I dictate as I walk. From afar, it looks like I’m either on a board meeting call with a CEO or am insane. Amidst all of this, in the lulls of dictation, I photograph—people, objects, mountains, trees, stumps, deer, shrines, temples, dogs depressed and dogs joyful, homes well used and those abandoned.
I’m of the firm belief that boredom is vastly underrated and should be a state cultivated by those of us that spend an inordinate amount of time on our devices.
Get bored. On purpose. Often.
/via Molly White.
Chris Glass:
I’d love to see the next version of macOS introduce some basic gestural controls that can be used when a camera is present. I’m talking easy stuff like scrolling, zooming, navigation… I’m sure they can throw on some visionOS gestures to boot.
Click-through to his site to see a video he created showing how it would work.
This seems like something all devices with a camera should consider adding. Perhaps it it could toggled on/off easily.
V.H. Belvadi:
What we need is a notes app that looks and behaves like a rich text editor but saves in Markdown. And by this I do not mean the clunky ‘source editor mode’ or whatever Obsidian calls it, where the Markdown formatting characters appear and disappear constantly displacing the text on your screen; instead I mean proper formatting like in a word processor. For everywhere else where Markdown is used intentionally the markup should be handled openly, like iA Writer and BBEdit do already, and not be hidden away.
I primarily use Apple’s Notes app for note taking. It syncs across all of the devices I use, has rich text formatting like headings, bold, lists (I do not use or need links). I use its document scanning feature because it is good but not because I want it part of my note editor. And, Notes can be shared collaboratively with most of the people I need to share notes with. It is one of Apple’s very best applications on all platforms.
That being said, I wish it saved to a directory of flat text files instead of some SQLite database synced across the cloud. I could use Obsidian to have something like this but it has simply never stuck with me. It is far too clunky and cumbersome. And isn’t anywhere near as good as Notes is across all platforms. I know that is vague feedback but it is simply true.
Many Obsidian fans are willing to put up with the slight inconveniences it comes with to use something that stores files, in an open format, and isn’t owned by a large tech giant. It is also very extensible and is opinionated. I totally see the appeal. But I just can’t get it to work for me.
What I would like is a version of the Notes app that saves files. I want every feature of the Notes app, including and perhaps especially the collaboration, except that it saves files instead of a database.
But I will likely never get that. Apple won’t do it and a third-party may not be able to do it. So, I’m stuck with the Notes app which is very good.
So, this happened. I hadn’t posted about our new family member Kona Barkley because several in the blogging community have lost their special pets recently.
For the past two months, Eliza and I have been chasing this little guy around, cleaning up after him, training him every day. We’ve been on several travel adventures, he’s spent some nights in the camper, lots of miles on the road, and enjoys playing fetch in the backyard.
I’m going to keep this simple so that I actually end up publishing this prior to WWDC. Here is my list of wishes for this year across Apple’s operating systems.
- Add a Switcheroo-like profile picker to Safari to allow opening a specific profile when a link is clicked from outside of the browser.
- Completely ditch Siri – Keep the name, but tell us that you’ve taken all of the Siri code and
rm -rf‘d it. The number of things Siri does reliably right (adding a reminder, starting and stopping a timer) can be rewritten very quickly. Ditch everything else. And for anything outside those few things it does well, use an LLM. Whatever it uses now is very much broken. - Force dark mode on anything that doesn’t support it (web sites, emails, apps, wildcard: images?)
- Improve Reminders “column view” (kanban) especially on macOS. In particular, dragging and dropping task cards is unreliable.
- Pause GIFs in Messages
- Message threads in Messages group chats. The way replies work right now feels dated and ugly.
- Photos for Mac move referenced library to a different volume. I do not allow Photos to manage my originals, I keep them in place. But I’m running out of space and I’d like to move my entire library without using my hacky hack.
- Improved notifications across all OSes – Maybe this is just a me thing, but notifications are nearly worthless to me across all of the platforms. I generally turn them all off except for very specific apps and contexts. And even then, having a huge pile of notifications is worthless to me. There must be a better way.
- A native way to run Electron/Chromium apps – I think Electron, or whatever it is called today, is here to stay. And so many of the most popular apps use it, macOS should embrace that and make macOS the best platform to run these apps rather than trying to force native apps.
- A complete revamp of iPadOS – I think the iPad deserves to be as capable as a Mac. Give us real windows, give us mouse support that is as good as macOS, make using an iPad feel empowering rather than limiting. (Maybe some of this should only be enabled when a mouse is connected?)
- ~~Allow me to click on a day in Calendar and open it in “day view”. Maybe there is a way to do this that I don’t know, but I currently have to select day view and then move the to the date. I should just be able to click it.~~ This is indeed possible. I just had to double click directly on the date number. Yay!
- Add a professional meeting planner to iCloud+. I know we have the Invites app, but that isn’t really great for sending a link to customers. Something like Calendly. Allow people to choose a time based on some settings.
- More feature parity across all platforms – Of course, not every single feature can or should be on all platforms. But why isn’t the Wallet app on all platforms? Why is it harder to use Apple Cash in Safari on macOS than it is on iOS? Why does Shortcuts on iOS have an Automations tab but not on macOS?
- Much larger storage options, for sane prices, in iCloud Drive.
- A $1,500 Apple Vision headset – With the primary use being wirelessly or wiredly connected to any Apple device and using it as a mixed reality display option.
- Long shot: Run local LLM models– native support for running LLMs. Right now, several hoops need to be jumped through to run models on the command line or using Open Web UI.
- Bug fixes!
Purchased a few new-to-me audio goodies over on Bandcamp including Somebody by Stefan Bohacek and FLOW by Mr Jennings.
Purchased Under Tangled Silence by Djrum at Simon Collison’s suggestion. I suggest you consider doing the same (that is, follow Simon’s advice on all music).
Jeremy Keith, in his interview on Manuel Moreale’s People & Blogs series:
I never write down those things bouncing around in my head. I know I probably should. But then if I’m going to take the time to write down an idea for a blog post, I might as well write the blog post itself.
I never write drafts. I just publish. I can always go back and fix any mistakes later. The words are written on the web, not carved in stone.
I’m the same. While I may work on a post off and on for a period of time (so, I suppose, that is a draft) I rarely have a draft laying around for very long. And I almost never have multiple drafts lingering.
I just publish.
TIL that when people said they read a book they sometimes mean they listened to a book. Ok, it wasn’t today that I learned this but I am hearing it a lot more often.
After over 8 years my Logitech MX Master 2S had a button jam. It was a fantastic mouse and I’m very happy with the life it had. So I immediately purchased the 3S which is better in a number of ways; USB-C, better buttons, better wheel.
The Logi Options+ application, which Logitech provides to configure the mouse, is pretty nice but I’m having issues with it. For example, App Expose sometimes works sometimes doesn’t when mapped to one of the thumb buttons. Hide Others, a keyboard shortcut on the Mac I use liberally, is also a little flaky via the new mouse.
Does anyone else have these issues? Does anyone have a solution for not using Logi Options+ at all but configuring the mouse with some much less bulky?
Andy Adams:
For some reason, years ago, we all agreed to spend most of our online time looking at photography on a canvas smaller than a cocktail napkin. It’s awful when you think about it: Thoughtful appreciation is the whole point of looking at photographs. And most of us cannot truly appreciate an image as it’s screaming by on a handheld social media newsfeed. It doesn’t help that my middle-aged eyes are changing.
My photographic pursuits started on a mobile phone and migrated into the analog world of darkroom prints. The experience of a photograph is best expressed on a piece of paper of some kind. There may never be a worthy substitute.
If you do not have access to a photographer’s work in print, a photographer’s website viewed on a large screen is a far better experience than any social networking app on mobile phone.
Andy again:
I found myself wondering: Do people still look at photographers’ websites? I look at them all the time. But I may be in the minority.
I do Andy! In fact, in Anybox (here is how I use the app) I’ve got a list labeled “Photographer’s Websites” where I currently have 150 websites stored. Over coffee, especially on cold mornings, I’ll open Anybox on my iPad or Mac and tap on a few random sites to see the latest work. As Andy noted in his post, many don’t update them very often – but I am still inspired by the work I see there.
Instagram is, by far, the worst way to share photographs online. It is a network, not a camera, and is certainly not built to be a good photo viewing experience. It is a tiny billboard floating in an ocean.
My thanks to Steve Burge for inviting me on to The PublishPress Podcast. In this episode we chat about NerdPress, blogging, Hubbub, Hubbub’s Save This feature, social media, and the importance for publishers to own their own audience. Honorable mentions are Flipboard and Mastodon.
Blogging is still very big business, with Colin DevroeAt the end of the episode Steve always asks his guests for a link to a publisher that they are currently enjoying. Of course, I couldn’t pick just one.
- Bartosz Ciechanowski
- Julia Evans
- Molly White
- Simon Collison
- Simon Willison
I appreciate Steve’s interview style and how his team edited the episode to make me sound smart . I like doing these podcast appearances as they help me to articulate my thinking around these subjects and practice being able to speak about them.
You can watch the episode on YouTube, listen on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or Pocket Casts.
Unsure of what vibe coding is? See Simon Willison’s explanation of a term recently coined by Andrej Karpathy on X. It is a buzzword that is lighting the world in fire it seems.
But I just want to quickly recommend; do not hire anyone (a person or an agency) that thinks vibe coding is a good idea for production level products.
Experimenting? Playing? Thinking through ideas rapidly? Absolutely.
Think I’m crazy? Look at this email I just received from “Ian Foster” of Grayphite – a supposed “Cutting-Edge Software & AI solutions” business. I doubt Ian is a real person and I won’t link to Grayphite’s website because if this is how they spam into the market for customers they should be banned.
Trying to trick customers into thinking that vibe coding is good because it will “write code at 5x speed”, reduce costs, etc. is misleading. By mentioning Andrej by name in this email “Ian” is likely trying to give Grayphite some credibility in the AI market. But anyone that knows what Andrej actually wrote in his tweet knows that “Ian”‘s mention of him does the opposite.
If you’re currently in the market for developers or agencies to help you build a product, do not hire anyone that recommends that you build the product by vibe coding. In fact, a litmus test may just be that you ask anyone you’re about to hire if they think vibe coding is a good idea for production level products.
A few times over the last several decades I’ve unsubscribed from every social media account, RSS feed, newsletter, YouTube channel, etc. and started with a clean slate. My goal was, as I wrote about in 2012 on this blog, to break out of my echo chamber and hopefully expand my thinking.
Slowly resubscribing to my interests is a lot of work. But it has been worth it and I know I have been exposed to people, organizations, and information that I never would have been otherwise.
And yes, many times, the same accounts creep their way back in since I value the person’s opinion, their work, or they are great curators of the web, or are generally a creative person that I enjoy following because they inspire me.
More often, though, I’ll go through and dramatically cull my subscriptions (perhaps by about 25%) to reduce the noise, cut down on distractions, and free up some of my time. And slowly over time, I find myself subscribing to too many accounts again. And the process repeats itself at random intervals.
So I’ve decided to no longer leave this to chance. I’m going to add a regular cadence to this activity of both unsubscribing and resubscribing to new and different voices on the web. Not a completely clean slate, it just ends up being too much work, but a liberal pollarding.
In the spring, I’ll unsubscribe from at least 30% of the accounts. In the fall, I’ll find new and different accounts to follow. Hopefully to help inspire me through the long cold winter.
Tomorrow is the first day of spring, time to get out the shears.
See also: The unfollow Q&A
The sun has returned!
I mean, it has always been there. Relatively speaking in the same place it was over the last few months. But the Earth’s tilt is such that as it revolves around the nearest star the portion on which I live (the northern hemisphere) is getting ever so slightly closer and faces it just long enough that temperatures are beginning to warm.
And I’m a very happy person indeed.
I think I wrote far too many times on this blog that it has been a cold winter. But, it has been, in fact, a cold winter! And this has really cramped my style. It has stifled my creativity, hampered my movement, and chilled my emotions.
March is a bit of a wildcard. It came in like a lamb so I sort of expect it to give us a good sock in the stomach on its way out. As I look in my photo library at photos of past Marches, I clearly see that winter is not yet over and that I need to temper my excitement.
Garlic, planted in October 2024, shows signs of lifeI almost, almost, got out into the garden and began to move soil (we’re rebuilding our raised garden beds this year, and I’m eager to get started). But not only is it too early I think it would result in double work. I think if I move the soil now I’ll only have to move it again in the near future. We’re planning on lots of backyard changes; shed being moved, pathways laid, top soil deliveries, new drainage trenches, felled tree removals, etc. Lots to do. But I think getting started too early will only lead to frustration and disappointment and the chance of needing to do things twice.
A bayside home in Sandbridge, VA • 35mmI’ve scanned in most of my film backlog. There is more to do, I haven’t edited any of them, archived them, or cataloged them. But, at least I’m making progress. One of them is above.
I worry that as the weather breaks I’ll likely want to do this even less than I do right now so perhaps I’ll prioritize this work for the very next rainy day.
I keep whittling away at getting a local LLM to become an agent that knows a lot about our business. It is more of a pet project at this point – a project that gives me a direct way to learn these tools. Of course, we already have apps and services that can chew our sales data and let me know about trends, statistics, etc. But I think it would be very useful if I (or any other team member) could ask an agent a question and it return the answers, charts, etc. I think these LLMs are already capable of doing it, but I think the tooling around them needs to mature more to make this far easier to do locally.
Right now I’m using Ollama to download, manage, and run the models locally. I do this on the command line sometimes (I’ve set up a bash alias called “bot” that runs my local models via Ollama). But lately I’ve been playing with Open WebUI via Docker. It can see my local Ollama models and gives me a ChatGPT-like interface for interacting with them (which is far nicer than the command line for most things).
Again, huge shoutout to Simon Willison for his work in testing all of these tools and copiously writing about them.
A cluster of links:
- The Social Life of Photographs – Jessamyn West writes about how the Flickr Foundation is focused on maintaining the serendipity of bumping into other photographs while doing research.
- I MADE THIS FOR YOU – Ethan Moses releases a bunch of art made with his amazing cameras in hopes to raise enough capital to give away his 3D print files for free. I linked to Moses work in WIS #88 and just recently mentioned this on Mastodon. If you’re into photography I recommend looking at his work.
- PHOTON – The visuals in this…
- V.H. Belvadi – Belvadi’s personal website is so very nice. /via Naz.
Gus Mueller argues that Apple needs to support developers running LLMs locally on the Mac, rather than simply try to catch up on their own.
There isn’t one specific quote that I can pull out of Gus’ post that makes his point so do go and read his post. But he also said:
So I can run models locally on my M1 Mac, and while it’s not as fast as running it on Anthropic or OpenAI’s servers, it was still usable. Which is mind blowing to me. I honestly never expected to see this tech in my lifetime. (Yes, LLMs get a lot wrong, but they also get so many things right and help me out with tedious coding chores).
I prefer running LLMs locally. I ran them on my Intel based Mac and now on this M4 based Mac it is so much nicer. The models are getting smaller and more capable, the tooling is steadily improving, and the chips in our computers are amazing. So let us run them locally! Natively! Securely!
I have more to write about LLMs. They are amazing and infuriating, an abomination and a revelation, a coup and a boon, a bubble and a burst – all at the same time.
My personal OneDrive has seemingly gone off the rails. It reported that I had deleted thousands of files when I hadn’t. I’m also seeing many duplicated files for no known reason. Stranger still, my 2021 blog post about resetting OneDrive was my most popular post last week. Coincidence?
It has been a long, cold, mostly icy winter. I’m not sure if age makes this feeling more acute, but the data seem to show that this winter has been colder than average. I can’t remember the last time I pined for spring this badly.
But, just yesterday, as temperatures finally hit 50ºF, the garlic began pushing through the still hard frozen earth. Woohoo!
A quick update on our home addition; it is done! My mother-in-law is moved in. She’s comfy and cozy and we are really happy with how the entire project turned out. On time and on budget. Unheard of! I’ll share a photo in an upcoming Diversions when the muddy soggy frozen mess of our backyard has been fixed up.
Photographically this winter has also frozen my creative side. I’m at peace with it. Life doesn’t always allow us to work on our art. And if it comes, it comes.
Due to the construction the darkroom was a mess. Construction dust, disarray, and neglect. But I’ve been slowly able to steal some time to get it back into working order. I recently developed some color film, which led me to question whether or not I want to continue doing so, and was able to get that area cleaned up. Next I’ll spend some time getting the printing area clean and organized.
35mm film hanging to dry in an old dusty basement cornerWe have a lot to do outdoors this year in our yard. In fact, since the addition construction tore up our yard so badly, we’re going to invest both time and money in getting it to our liking this year. So I may not be able to revisit the layout of the darkroom until next year. But I still have plans of making a capable darkroom. I have nearly everything I need to do so.
To break up the long, cold winter we took a break at a resort in the Dominican Republic on Hispaniola for about 8 days. It was, as resorts go, very relaxing. We had a great villa to stay in, a pool to float in, some mediocre cocktails to enjoy. I finished re-reading Dune. I’m debating continuing the series which I hadn’t done in the past. Should I?
Speaking of cocktails. I’ve been really enjoying gin lately. It is so interesting to me how my tastes have changed over the years when it comes to spirits. I think I’ve ridden the entire spectrum. Scotches to whiskeys, vodkas to mezcals. It is an expensive hobby, and I totally understand why some abstain, but I really enjoy the stories, the people, the places that are involved in some of my favorites. Lately I’ve been enjoying Japanese spirits – perhaps because I want to travel there so badly.
I have a bunch of links to share:
- George Tice: Seeing Beyond The Moment – Tice recently passed away and I hadn’t been very familiar with his work. This documentary is a great introduction.
- The making of Longquan celadon – via Dan Cederholm.
- LocalSend – Cross platform AirDrop substitute.
- Gina Trapani’s Life In Weeks – I have no desire to spend the time to make one of these, but they are very cool.
- The Hardest Working Font in Manhattan – Marcin Wichary doing Marcin Wichary things.
- The Uncomfortable – “a collection of deliberately inconvenient everyday objects by Athens-based architect Katerina Kamprani”.
- Ravens – A trailer for an upcoming film about photographer Masahisa Fukase.
- Nick Carver Frames from Andalucia – A short video profile of Nick Carver by Jaime Dezcallar. Jaime’s series of videos have less than a few dozen views somehow. See also Taylor Pendleton, Luke Stackpoole, and Mike Chudley.
For the past 6 months I’ve had the ActivityPub WordPress plugin installed here on my site and have been federating its content. I’ve learned a lot over that time about how it all works (I am still fuzzy on a few of the bits, but overall I think I understand it much better than before) and I’ve enjoyed seeing some of the interaction from Mastodon trickle in.
That said, I have my reservations about whether or not blogs – or, more specifically, my blog – should federate content into social networks this way.
Because my website isn’t a full-blown Mastodon instance, keeping up with replies, boots, and other interactions is a bit of work. I found myself needing to open Ivory (my Mastodon client of choice), navigating to my blog’s Mastodon account, and seeing if there was any interaction there.
In addition to that, for the interactions that did come into my blog (and I approved them), when I replied via my site it would reply on Mastodon as my website’s account.
This is all very cool, mind you, and technically interesting. But I think it leads to a bunch of confusion. Not the least of which is that I’m left with multiple accounts on the fediverse. I kinda sorta wish I only had one! Even though I’m a fan of ActivityPub, and perhaps an even bigger fan of Mastodon, I don’t think every single thing we do on the web needs to be federated via ActivityPub.
It reminds me of the struggles I’ve had for many years around POSSE. I’ve written about it before. Trying to syndicate my content to a slew of social networks just feels like work. My North Star continues to be Jeremy Keith‘s homegrown syndication solution that, somehow, he finds the time and energy to build and maintain and share. I don’t know how he does it – while also playing some awesome tunes and building great websites.
I haven’t yet uninstalled the ActivityPub plugin but I am considering it. For now I’ve removed the references to my site’s endpoint here on my site and on Mastodon. My site’s content is syndicated with RSS and that should be enough for the open web to subscribe to, digest, etc. I’ve also kept commenting open on my blog for new posts for a while now. I think that should be plenty and will stand the test of time.
Florian Ziegler recently wrote about this same topic.
I’m guessing that the answer to “should I federate my blog with ActivityPub?” will be different for every blog and every one. And I haven’t yet made up my mind for mine, but I’m leading towards no.
It used to be, that I was the first person in line to download new software. I’d sign up for beta access, email developers for early looks at what they were working on, or even install beta software on my daily devices.
But as time went on, I valued my productivity more than having the latest software. I have an awful lot of work to get done in a short period of time. I don’t have time to deal with the bugs of beta software anymore. So I generally wait several months to update to the latest operating system, or wait until a device had two or three revisions before purchasing it.
But now I feel even less inclined to update my software because I’m worried about what will be in the update that I do not want. Or, what features will I lose? Or, what new policy or restriction will be included?
Apple, in general, is headed in a direction with its software that is even more locked down than ever. They are now the company that Steve Jobs wouldn’t like. Each time there is an update I worry about what will be locked down next.
WordPress, software that I use everyday for work and also am writing this post in right now, has an uncertain future and each update to its core or its many plugins has me code spelunking before I update.
More and more software stores its data only in the cloud. For some web apps, I’m ok with that and understand the model. But for many apps local files would be much better.
Not to mention the “AI all the things” fad happening right now. I’m not against LLMs, but I’m not for forcing LLMs into software for people that would rather not use them. Each application I update I see sprinkles of AI-related things that I may not need. And these models aren’t tiny (yet?).
So, I’m now even slower to update and less likely to be in line to have the latest software available.
I want software to be; fast, reliable, and simple. I want open software. I want software with a business model that I understand and allows me to pay. I want files. Local files. I want to own my own data. I want privacy. I want encryption. I want to choose when and how to use a local LLM. And I want to know what is contained in a software update (with great detail) so that I can choose if I want to update it.
As you all know, I’m a big fan of a the Pomodoro Technique. Recently, while catching up on my backlog of Jack Cheng’s excellent Sunday series, I came across a snippet in Sunday #434 regarding an interview Cheng did with author Linda Sue Park. In that interview, she mentions whittling away at the Pomodoro Technique until she ended up at 12-minutes… which works for her.
Jack told (a friend?) A.W. who coined the term the Cherry Tomato Technique.
So if you don’t have time for the full pomodoro, go cherry.
Side note re: Cheng’s Sunday series; I only recently discovered Jack Cheng’s Sunday series and I really love his format. It is similar to how I write Diversions – my series of posts that I really wish I wrote more of. So, perhaps I’ll combine Linda Sue Park’s method of productive writing with my desire to get my own series of posts out more often.
(The following is a very quick mind dump. Unedited. Raw.)
I prefer black and white over color film for most of my photographic work.
I do shoot color film. I mostly like to capture personal memories on color film while reserving black and white for my more serious, thought out photography. I think black and white captures the spirit of a person far better than color does. But I think color does far better at capturing the mood of a scene than black and white does. So while I shoot less color than black and white, I think it has its place for me.
But I’m rethinking my use of color film.
On Monday I developed 5 rolls of color film in the darkroom. Developing color film is slightly more complicated than developing black and white film – you must keep the chemicals within a specific temperature range. This means that developing takes a little longer to get set up, and it also means that I have be more mindful and attentive during the entire session.
There are a few ways I could help reduce my cognitive load and make developing color film much easier on myself.
I have a larger Patterson tank that holds more rolls of film. I haven’t used it yet but I could mix larger batches of chemicals and use this new tank and finish more rolls in a single development session. This would significantly reduce the amount of time I need to keep the chemicals at temperature.
Or, I could make it easier to keep the chemicals at temperature. My current method for bringing my chemicals to temperature (and keeping them there) is about as crude as it gets – I have a large basin I fill half way with very hot water and I put my chemicals in it. I’m constantly recycling that water to keep things right at the proper temperature for each step. It is a carefully choreographed dance (read: hectic mayhem) to keep everything just so. I could invest in a sous vide apparatus to keep my water temperature constant meaning that I wouldn’t have to babysit it.
But should I be developing color film at home at all?
I’ve never sent my film out to any third party to be developed. Not a single roll. Since starting my film photography journey in 2019 I’ve developed every single frame (for better or worse) on my own. I’ve toyed with the idea of sending my color film out to be developed, scanned, and returned to me.
But I’m also considering not shooting color film and all and moving to digital for my personal memories. Vacations, family events, small moments – these could be captured on a simple camera (not a mobile phone).
But which camera? Do I need lenses? Do I go mirrorless? How many megapixels do I need?
Leave it to me to find another reason to buy yet another camera. I have way too many cameras. But I love them all.
I really want an excuse to join the Fuji family. My eyes are on the GFX 100 system but I don’t feel like spending $15,000 on a camera for the purposes I described above (though, I still want to buy one some day). I’m thinking an X100VI might be a good option?
So, what do I do? Keep shooting color? Keep developing, processing, scanning my own negatives? Go digital? Something in between?
Naz Hamid writes about how we should all keep social networks in their place; as methods of distribution rather than longterm means of connection or publication. He also contrasts that to how we could be thinking of our websites:
“If you care about your creativity, and what you make and bring into the world, I’d suggest having your own website. A place you can shape and change as often, or as little as you like.”
Please do read Naz’s entire post. See also Making social choices.
Cedric Raguenaud argues that..
“When we label our photographic pursuits as “work,” we unconsciously impose constraints and expectations that belong in the professional world. Suddenly, we feel pressured to maintain visibility, chase originality, and demonstrate creativity, not for our own satisfaction, but for an imagined audience or abstract standard of success.”
Many people, myself included, call some of our hobby projects “work” when we want them to be thought of as serious attempts at the medium. A quick sketch (or, study) of the human form is usually labeled such compared to, say, a meticulous oil painting that hangs in a museum.
For me, it is how I categorize my photography. I have the photos I take on my phone to remember a coffee I’ve had, or of a niece playing in our backyard, or maybe of a trip. I call these snaps. But I also have portraits that I’ve spent a long time thinking through, developing, processing, darkroom printing, editing, matting and framing.
Hobby? Yes. Work? Also yes.
But I hear Cedric. I wouldn’t want to put any undue pressure on myself with my hobby photography projects the same as I would if it were my vocation. But for many, many artists throughout time art wasn’t their primary means of making a living. In fact, most artists never make a living on their art.
So I disagree. Some art is work (the verb, perhaps) and it is ok to call it so.
/via Florian Ziegler.
My default web browser is set to Switcheroo – a custom-made macOS app by Zhenyi Tan (with some feedback and guidance from me). Whenever I click on a link a modal of sorts appears letting me choose which Safari profile I’d like to load the link within.
Here is what that looks like.
When that tab loads the window it is in comes to the front. Actually, sometimes it does. Since I have so many profiles and more than a few tab groups in each, Switcheroo sometimes has trouble doing so. We’re still working on it. Feel free to lend a hand.
But, let’s imagine it worked.
Pretend I have an active Safari window, with my personal profile loaded, and the newly clicked link within it. And if I want to focus specifically on that one tab, I can use macOS’s “Hide Others” command (Command+Option+H) to hide all other apps except Safari. But that still leaves open the 3 other Safari profile windows I have loaded.
So I created a Shortcut that sort of works for this.
Using some AppleScript, I tell the current application (in this case Safari) to set all of its windows invisible except the frontmost one.
This works. All of my other Safari profile windows disappear and I’m able to focus on the active window. However, there is one caveat. All of the other windows aren’t “hidden” in macOS terms, they are actually invisible. They are no longer available to me even from Safari’s window list.
To rectify that, I have another Shortcut to restore all of the current application’s windows. Effectively, reversing what I’ve done.
I invoke both of these via the Menu Bar. Though I’ll likely set a keyboard shortcut for them soon.
This method could be much better. Here are just some random thoughts about how it can be improved.
- I currently use my Logitech MX Master 2S’s “middle click” button to invoke macOS’s “Hide Others” command. I wish I could call these Shortcuts with it as well. Can I?
- Setting “visible” to false isn’t exactly what I want. I’d like to hide the windows rather than make them disappear (a macOS nuance no doubt). But, I don’t think there is a way to do that with any application in macOS.
- I could see using some logic to combine these two Shortcuts into one.
Feel free to offer suggestions or code.
Chris Armstrong, advocating for a digital garden over a blog structure:
A blog structure places the highest emphasis on ‘what’s new’… but what’s new has had the least scrutiny and little authority.
Robin Rendle linked to Armstrong’s post recently and reading it reminded me of my 2011 post The blog format is ready for disruption.
In that post, which is now nearly 14 years old, I argue that the structure of reverse chronological lists of posts on homepages wasn’t the best way to showcase what a blog is about, the type of content you’ll find there, or as a means of exploring through the archives.
I think we’ve seen some disruption since those days. Many homepages of personal blogs are more like about pages than they used to be. This way you can read a little about the author and then you can choose to click through to the list of blog posts. I think this is good. But, it doesn’t solve all of the issues I brought up then.
In that post I also discussed monetization, feeds, memberships, newsletters… it feels like the exact same world we live in today. I suppose I still feel that the blog format is ready for, and in need of, disruption.
My current homepage, similar to then, has a bit about me. And it also has posts, images, and projects. The posts on the homepage are from my featured tag. I use that as a way to curate which posts show up on the homepage. At least that is something but it isn’t a great solution.
Anyone have any ideas?
This morning I checked in on Pixelfed, the ActivityPub-powered Instagram alternative. I had created a profile on an instance in 2021 and I check in from time-to-time to see how it is coming along. All told, the experience is fair. But I’m far more excited by how well it is connecting to other platforms.
An iOS client app has been in TestFlight (which is Apple’s platform for sharing beta versions of your app to a wider audience for feedback) for a fairly long time. It is pretty clearly a web view shoved into an iOS app and the experience is exactly what you’d imagine that to be. Odd refreshes, a little jittery at times.
Update! Just a few hours after I published this post, the iOS app was made publicly available.
That being said, I don’t care. The entire point of Pixelfed is that it is federated, open source, and it isn’t owned by a company driven by ad sales. And when you’re browsing around on Pixelfed you can hardly tell if the photos you’re viewing are from the Pixelfed instance you’re on, a different instance, or even from an instance of Mastodon. It is truly great to view photos from all over the fediverse in this way. It almost makes me with Ivory had an Instagram-mode when viewing the fediverse.
I only briefly mentioned Pixelfed in my late-2023 prediction post about ActivityPub crossing the chasm in 2024. I plan on revisit that post and see how things played out – but Pixelfed seems to have matured enough to be well positioned as an alternative to Instagram as people decide to leave that network for another one.
One thing is definitely in low supply there from what I’ve seen; good photography. It seems an awful lot of people logged in, uploaded a photo or two, and left. And many of the “popular” accounts have follower counts in the single hundreds. So the network has some growth to do yet. Also, because you can view Mastodon profiles from within Pixelfed’s Instagram-like interface, it makes it seem like lower quality photos are being shared there than actually are.
For instance, look at my Mastodon profile from within Pixelfed. This isn’t my Pixelfed profile. It is my Mastodon profile as viewed from within Pixelfed. And you can follow it from within Pixelfed. Which I think is a strength not a weakness. However, the random images I share via Mastodon do not look very nice in a grid like that. I wouldn’t blame someone looking at this profile and questioning why I put “photographer” in my bio.
As I browse around Pixelfed this morning I think I’m stumbling into a fair number of profiles that have no idea they are being viewed in an interface like Pixelfed. I don’t know that Pixelfed can or should do anything about this issue. But you might see the same thing if you give it a try.
One thing that I can do about this issue, perhaps to help out some, is to upload better photos to my Pixelfed profile from time-to-time. And ask you to follow it there. Another thing I can do is donate to support its continued improvement.
I’ve said this a few times so I’m sorry for repeating myself; the social web is a mess right now. And in the best way possible. So much new work is flying around, new ideas are being attempted, and people are browsing each one to see which they prefer. Except this time, many of the platforms are working hard at being able to talk to one another so that (hopefully) it will matter far less where we all end up. We’ll all be able to follow one another from the platforms of our choice, using the apps we like the best, and it will all just work.
Every person and organization has to make their own decisions about which social platforms they will have an account on, publish their content to, engage with, and support (with use or contributions both time and financial).
There is no right answer for everyone. And, to many that run an online business, hoping to capture the attention of just enough customers to remain sustainable, perhaps they shouldn’t care at all and just publish everywhere.
However.
I think it is a mistake for many of us (individually) to support social platforms that are built and grown on venture capital with the promise to provide outsized returns to investors. We have enough history to show us that model is highly unfavorable. Communities should financially support the social platforms they want to exist and use.
Yes, have your own website. Yes, publish there first and syndicate that content to any other platforms that you choose. At this point, this should be standard practice for both people and organizations in my opinion.
But also, if you can afford to be choosey… perhaps start choosing platforms that we know have our best interests in mind, that support the open web, and that won’t rug pull the moment they need to.
In Re: Bluesky, published in mid-November which seems like 7 years ago now, I mentioned that I have my reservations about the organization. I think AT Protocol has some interesting things in it. I think the platform and client app also are doing some interesting things. But, they are raising money again. And with Meta’s recent policy changes causing a-yet-brand-new exodus from their platforms recently, I see people running to Bluesky and I must admit I’m a little baffled. Why jump from a Meta backed service to a VC-backed one? Bluesky’s debt to investors is already at a point that no other business model other than advertising (and we know where that leads) makes any sense.
The truth is I do know why… follower counts. People are still chasing follower counts. Mastodon (which may not be perfect but the model is far more attractive and sustainable than anything else out there right now) isn’t growing at the pace Bluesky is and so people aren’t even considering it. That is a shame. If a few million people found a cozy instance to settle into, supported it and the Mastodon project with a few dollars here and there, they’d have the web they want.
I don’t want to be reactionary. I try not to be. And I work on a social sharing plugin so my livelihood is based on the success and failure of all of these platforms. However, for me personally, I think I need to start being choosier in the services that I visit on daily basis. To that end, I’m going to be removing some apps from my mobile devices and visiting those platforms far less. And focusing on RSS and Mastodon and making larger contributions to their sustainability.
After purchasing the new MacBook Pro with a matte display (and loving it), this weekend I converted all of my devices to matte using screen protectors.
Saving links to get back to at a later time is a problem with a million great solutions. I even helped create an open source one that is still chugging along, works great, but hasn’t been updated in far too long. My current solution to this problem is an app called Anybox. I’ve been using and paying for it for a few years and here is how I use it.
If you know my solution to this problem, then you know I like to categorize my links into actions. So that is what I do in Anybox. I have the following tags: Read, Watch, Listen, Buy, and Do. I get by using this small selection but I could easily be convinced that I should have a few more.
As I save links throughout my day I quickly select one of these tags so that I’m able to quickly sort my entire list by the action I plan to do with them later. I have a few additional tags that I use sparingly: Evergreen (links to sites that I may revisit often), Photographer’s Websites, and Artist’s Websites (should be self explanatory, but I collect a slew of these).
The Anybox macOS appTo track my progress (have I read, bought, or listened to the link?) I use the star feature combined with a Smart List for each action tag. Each Smart List is set to show links tagged with each action tag, the added bit is that the Smart List only shows me links which are starred. When I un-star them, they are removed from the Smart List (but, are still tagged). This helps keep my individual lists tidy.
All of this is synced across my laptop, phone, and tablet. And it all works great.
Anybox is chocked full of features, many I do not use regularly but when I need them I’m very happy they are there. My particular use case is not likely to be what the author intended but it works great for my needs. And they also have added nearly every feature I’ve asked for via email.
Give it a look. Maybe it will work for you.
TIL what a digital mending circle is.
Jack Cheng:
What, you ask, is a digital mending circle? A virtual co-working session for the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.
Oh I need this.
I feel like computer hardware (processing units, graphics/neural processors, memory, storage) has gotten mind bending fast while at the same time the software we run day-to-day has gotten noticeably poorer.
I often think “what if the software engineers of the early days were to develop software today?” You know, the men and women that had to find a way to use every single bit and byte to their advantage. The engineers that created games using systems less powerful than the processor in my AirPods. The designers that made low resolution displays display smooth type. The audio experts that somehow got single speakers to make aliens come alive.
Give those people our modern tools, gigabytes of memory, and processors that handle billions of calculations every nanosecond – I’d bet that they could make modern software sing.
I had no idea Anthony Bourdain had a Reddit account. I’ve only just recently begun to be able to start watching / reading his work again. /via Mia Quagliarello via Rolling Stone.
It turns out The Browser Company is just a company that is going to continue to build new web browsers ad infinitum. I suppose I should have known.
Simon Willison, from a clip I created of an episode of Around the Prompt:
I love AI as an accelerant of personal productivity improvement.
I plan on writing an update to my post from April 2023 about using ChatGPT as an accelerator where I’ll say something similar.
Here is the clip:
Wow, it has already been one year since I joined NerdPress. And I couldn’t possibly be happier that I did. The NerdPress team are such great people to work with. Everyone is very dedicated to their job, but they are also well balanced people who care about their work, their community, and their core values. They don’t just say so they actually do it.
My thanks to Andrew Wilder and Heather Wilkins for bringing me on board. I’m very grateful for our partnership and your leadership. And a big thanks to everyone else on the team for immediately making me feel at home and empowered to do my job.
This time last year we were working very long hours – we had just acquired Hubbub and were working feverishly (literally) on the rebranding, website, point-of-sale, the plugin, and all of the communications that go along with an acquisition. And just a few days later we announced the sale was complete.
Since then we’ve made a lot of progress in making the product our own, growing the revenue, acquiring some new products, and expanding the team around them. And there is much more to come.
The product would not have gotten the attention it needed without us adding Jordan Gilreath to the team. The man is a customer support monster. Anyone that has supported a WordPress product knows that the hardest part of the business is providing good customer support. Well, NerdPress doesn’t know how to provide anything other than incredible support and Jordan has maintained that in his support for Hubbub. Customers love him. My thanks to his hard work every day helping customers.
I’m particularly proud of how many customers have continued to support Hubbub’s development and growth. Acquisitions like this can go very poorly if not managed properly and it speaks volumes about NerdPress’ reputation in our market that people trusted we would be good stewards of the product. Hopefully they feel we’ve done a good job so far.
Any software product requires a fair amount of upkeep, perhaps especially so in an ecosystem like WordPress with changes happening rapidly, scores of products all trying to interact with one another, and the wide variety of technology stacks it can run on. With Hubbub we had some work to do to address potential security vulnerabilities, known issues, and other bugs. You can see the tear we’ve been on in addressing them.
We’ve also added a smash hit feature called Save This, which has empowered our customers to grow their mailing lists at a time when perhaps that is the most important thing they can be doing for their business.
We are all very excited to be part of NerdPress’ future. The team is continuing to grow and we are eager to begin shipping updates to our other recently acquired products. I think 2025 is going to be amazing to watch.
Wow, so much has happened since #6. Where do I begin? Should I try to recap my travels to Portland or to Atlanta for WordCamp or FinCon? Should I summarize all of the progress we’ve made on the addition to our home? Should I write about my recent upgrade to an M4 MacBook Pro? Or, do I focus on the updates that have come to the ActivityPub plugin that has me rethinking how I use my personal website (yet again)?
How about all of it?!
I’ve posted a few photos from Portland, though I have many more photos that I’ve taken on film that I just haven’t developed yet. This weekend I went to do exactly that and hit a roadblock. It would help if I had fresh chemicals around!
I’ve also commented on what happened at WordCamp and wrote some key takeaways from FinCon. So I won’t rehash any of that.
Instead, I’ll focus on the reminder that traveling (in general) and going to events has a positive impact on your outlook, your network, and your business. Not all of them can be directly measured or are reflected on the bottom row a spreadsheet – but you can feel them as you move forward. You may face a challenge and end up thinking of a company or person you met at an event that can help. In short; go to events.
The addition is moving along quickly now. This sort of project seems to be one where the beginning parts; planning, drawing, documenting, etc. are the slow parts. Then, once the work begins, it is difficult to keep up with.
Working from home affords me the ability to jog outside once or twice a day to snap a photo or two of the progress. I’m very happy that I’m not the one doing the work this time.
The foundation and floor baseI know snags are inevitable. In fact, the forecast at the end of this week already looks like it will slow down progress some. But that is how these sorts of things go.
The new lighter, faster 14″ M4 Pro MacBook Pro is really a delight to use. I hit a snag or two when upgrading the software that was Intel-only to their Apple Silicon counterparts (especially Adobe) but other than just a few hiccups — the upgrade/migration process is so easy.
My previous MacBook Pro was no slouch but this one is a screamer. Building projects, running local LLMs, or just having literally every single app open doesn’t seem to phase it. Using it as a laptop, something I was never able to do with my previous computer, is also really fun. I can actually get a lot of work done and the battery life is great!
My last bit of equipment upgrading is going to be a Thunderbolt dock and at least one external SSD. I need my port situation to be a bit cleaner and I’m hoping a dock will free me up to just have a single wire running into the laptop. And, as of today, I’m not backing up using Time Machine so I cannot delay getting a new SSD.
The social media landscape is a mess! Part of me loves the messiness. It is an interesting time and lots of people are experimenting with many things. New platforms, new ideas, new ways of sharing. Gone are the days of only one or two social networks thriving.
But another part of me is frustrated. I don’t really know what I want to do with my personal blog as it relates to the social web. I have the ActivityPub plugin installed, and it works well to distribute my posts onto the fediverse as a first class citizen. But it isn’t (and likely never will be) perfect.
If you’re at all interested in your website joining the fediverse, I recommend giving the plugin a try and learning how it works. This isn’t cross-posting. It makes your website “an ActivityPub endpoint” so that the account is your website (and/or its authors). It is very cool and interesting.
The reason the ActivityPub plugin has me rethinking my personal blog use, is that I can begin to see a future where all of my favorites, boosts, quote posts, etc. live here on my website – rather than my Mastodon account. But for that I’d want to restructure my site’s design a bit (and likely my RSS feed). Of course, if I explore this at all I’ll write about it.
Regardless of how this phase of the social web shakes out I know I’ll be publishing here on my blog.
An edition of Diversions wouldn’t be complete without some links:
- Christoph Rauscher’s newsletter – I like how Christoph publishes his newsletter. Lovely.
- Live at Delia’s Third Happening – Site Nonsite live album recording.
- Vault – By Commercial Type.
- Rex Brasher Field Notes – Lovely little film about Brasher’s work as well.
- Rachel Binx’s website – Go take a look.
- Apple Pay Plates – This is me buying Crocs or fanny packs.
Manuel Moreale (Manu):
“I don’t know what to write about” and “what if no one will read it?”. These are the two most common reasons why people don’t want to start a personal blog. I already addressed the first one, so let me tackle the second one in the easiest way possible: I’ll read it.
Me too.
Oh, and I too addressed the first one. Lots of stuff here also.
I think it is important to note at the outset that we no longer live in a time where only one or two social networks will succeed. Gone are the days where “everyone” is using a specific social network for a period of time and then migrating to a new one every few years.
We now live in a time where many smaller social networks exist, some of them will likely exist for decades to come, and most of them may never reach hundreds of millions of monthly active users and that is a very good thing for the web. It is a bit messy, somewhat confusing, and totally great.
Bluesky, like so many other social networks before it, has seen bursts of sign ups for different reasons. Its most recent burst, to the tune of about a million new sign ups per day, may seem impressive. However, the CEO of Threads will be quick to remind you that it has seen that same sustained pace of growth for months even though they are already over 250M accounts.
But these numbers come with so many caveats I cannot even list them all. We know a huge portion of Threads accounts were Instagram accounts. We know there is account overlap. Many (most?) of us have accounts on all of these platforms. Many (most?) of us will post on all of these platforms occasionally. Or, some will use apps or services to cross-post to all of them all the time.
Regardless of the caveats, it is safe to say that Bluesky is growing and a fair number of users that have signed up over the last few weeks may end up staying there longer term.
Though I’m not personally a fan of Bluesky (reasons: hasn’t federated yet, and backed by VC) I want to see it succeed. Having more social networks in the world is, I think, better than having less. But eventually, if all of these separate platforms and protocols connect to one another, we’ll all be talking about a single platform: the web. And that is my ideal.
I hope Bluesky federates soon. It grates on my nerdy nerves that many believe it is a member of the fediverse – but that is just me being an old man. Even Bluesky members knowingly joke about the fact it isn’t yet federated. I know, the client app is open source. I know, it is an open source protocol. But Bluesky (the service) has yet to federate. It takes a bunch of third party bits to decentralize the data, and a bunch of other third party bits, to share the data between platforms.
I mentioned my wishes for Bluesky on Bluesky. Since they are seeing so much growth, and have been able to use that growth to raise capital, I hope they use this window of opportunity to make Bluesky interoperate across the open web. Or, at the very least, make the tooling such that “anyone” can spin up an AT Protocol-powered instance called Purplesky or Yellowsky a lot easier than it is today.
The underlying connective tissue, the protocols of RSS, ActivityPub, and AT Protocol just haven’t yet found a way to all seamless play together. But I’m really hoping they will.
This way, each service can succeed and find their own community, their own sustainable business model, and their own set of apps and services that can all communicate with one another. Just like the open social web has always been.
PS. Can we all just look back at 2021 and say that Twitter squandered an opportunity to join the fediverse? What a different world we may be in!
TIL That in macOS Sequoia you can connect to your iPhone wirelessly to use as a camera for Zoom, etc. Perhaps this was always the case? But I have been plugging it into my Mac this whole time!
Switcheroo, the small open source macOS app I use as my default browser to recreate a feature I miss from Little Arc, has reached 1.0.1 and has a new icon! Thanks to Zhenyi Tan for continuing to contribute updates. (See also)
TIL The Apple News app has a setting to only show stories from channels I’m subscribed to. I wish I had known this sooner!
This morning I strolled into the darkroom fully planning to mix a fresh batch of color film chemistry to develop some film tomorrow. I was certain I had at least one fresh pack. I’m all out! And, most places I purchase chemistry is out of stock. I guess I’ll use tomorrow to make more new images. Not a bad problem to have.
The pro move when updating to a new Mac (or, new iPhone, iPad or updating to a new OS version) is to leave the device plugged in for nearly an entire day while all of the indexes are being rebuilt. This may be especially true now with Apple Intelligence.
I’ve spent just a few hours migrating to the M4 Pro MacBook Pro today. This included using Migration Assistant which was fast with a Thunderbolt cable, reinstalling some packages via Homebrew (because I switched from Intel), and logging into a bunch of things. Overall, switching computers is easier than ever.
Wow, is this computer fast. Running Llama locally feels instantaneous. Looking forward to really trying to break this thing.
This morning YouTube suggested Austin Ha’s review of the new ultrawide display option in Apple Vision Pro. His video shows a dream of mine; to have any sized screen with me anywhere I want. I really hope the AVP continues to improve.
Jeff Triplett, in a post encouraging people to post more:
It’d be best to publish your work in some evergreen space where you control the domain and URL. Then publish on masto-sky-formerly-known-as-linked-don and any place you share and comment on.
This continues to be the ideal; publishing on our own blogs and then, if we desire, share on the vast array of social networks available to us now.
However, this also continues to be extremely hard to do well. I struggle with this as much as anyone. I want to publish more on my blog but it is easier to publish elsewhere. It is also difficult to format syndicated posts across platforms in such a way as they do not feel alien.
You can spot a POSSE’d post a mile away. Mentions of usernames that do not exist on the platform, incomplete sentences cut off by character limits, and just generally poor formatting. Every platform has their own nuanced post formats and it is next to impossible to have a blog post format well across them all. POSSE’d posts are often neglected by their authors if they aren’t active on that platform, leaving discussions to dry up and stop.
While POSSE may be better than nothing it certainly isn’t very good or easy. I applaud those that do it fairly well.
My belly aching about POSSE aside, I agree with Jeff and aspire to do the same. Publish your content on a domain and platform that you own. It seems more important than ever to try to do this.
/via Nick Simson.
At 44 years old I now find myself needing to use reader glasses (1.25x) in the evenings. I have 3 pair of inexpensive readers that I picked up in various pharmacies and discount stores; but I’m wondering if there are any nicer brands out there? Affordable yet quality? Or, should I keep picking up inexpensive pairs because I’m likely to lose and break them?
I have a few images I need to create for an upcoming Hubbub presentation and I used it as an opportunity to trial Pixelmator, which was recently acquired by Apple, for the first time. It is very good. Very Apple-like. Even some of my Photoshop muscle memory translated.
Over coffee this morning, browsing my unreads in NetNewsWire, I stumbled on Simon Willison’s mention of Alex Chan’s “Using static websites as tiny archives” post. And then I saw Jeremy Keith also mention it. So I thought I’d mention it to!
There’s no web server, no build system, no dependencies, and no JavaScript frameworks. I’m writing everything by hand, which is very manageable for small projects. Each website is a few hundred lines of code at most.
This quoted bit is the key takeaway for me from Alex’s post. No web server! No build system!
When I was working on Tuff, my own personal static site generator that I used for about a year to create my personal website and a few other sites, I also began work on a local HTML website to browse my entire personal photo library.
My personal photo library is big. One terabyte and counting. But, using Tuff, I was able to generate a pretty good index to browse the archive by date and a few other ways. It took just seconds to parse the entire library to generate the site.
But I haven’t revisited the archive in over a year. Would it still work? Would it still build?
Not exactly. Or, at least not as easily as Alex. The HTML files are all there but I built Tuff in such a way as to rely on a web server (in my case Apache using Docker and mostly for cruft free URLs). So I can’t just open a single HTML file like Alex can or Jeremy can. It is easy to spin up a web server, but I’d much prefer Alex’s approach for these archives. Fortunately, this is a very easy update for me to make and so now this archive works off URLs that end in .html – the way Tim intended.
Then, I thought I’d try building a fresh up-to-date copy.
Well, I’m happy to report it worked. Tuff had to build several thousand new thumbnails but once that was done it created the archive in just 9 seconds.
I’d like to get away from a build process but I’m not sure I’d be able to. How does one write thousands of HTML files without a build process? But, I can simplify what Tuff is doing to make it much more future proof and single purpose. I’ll be looking into doing so to keep things as simple as possible.
As I predicted in February 2023, I’m upgrading to the M4. I went with a Space Black 14″ MacBook Pro with the M4 Pro (14 CPU cores 20 GPU cores, 16 Neural Engine cores), 48GB memory, 2TB hard drive. The cost of which was a fair bit less than my previous laptop. I’ll explain my choices in an upcoming blog post. Oh, and as far as I can remember, this was likely my first ever preorder. (see also)
Arun Venkatesan:
Now, seven years later, I’ve started to understand more clearly why and how arun.is exists.
Independence, Creativity, Connection. Be sure to read the entire post. See also Arun’s People & Blogs interview.
A few NerdPress team members sponsored/exhibited at FinCon 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia this past week and I thought I’d distill the numerous conversations I had with attendees, speakers, and sponsors into three key takeaways.
- Own your audience – Creating and distributing valuable content for an audience (whether free, behind a paywall, or a mix of the two) is a lot of work. Online platforms and social networks end up benefiting more from your hard work long term – so be sure to capture the audience along the way. Combine that with decreasing usage of search engines and increased usage of AI, the age of build it and they will come may be over. Using Hubbub’s Save This feature is one way to turn traffic into subscribers. Also, jumping onto the fediverse and owning your social graph is another.
- Focus on what you do best – Managing a community, fixing issues with your website, and navigating the ever-changing online media landscape are each full-time jobs onto themselves… continue to focus your time on what you do best. It is why NerdPress was a sponsor – it is worry free support for WordPress websites. Many FinCon attendees had outgrown their current platforms, and are now looking to use WordPress and its plugin ecosystem to build more powerful websites.
- Structure your content for AI deals – This last takeaway may still need some time to bake, but more and more AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta are making revenue-sharing deals with content platforms and creators as they share that insight in their products. Structure your content and licensing to allow for this new wave of monetization before it peaks.
Visiting Atlanta in fall is… very warm! It was nice to be downtown and see the FinCon audience be so enthusiastic about what they do.
As I mentioned in Diversions #5, I bought a pair of Crocs. It wasn’t long after purchasing that first pair that I bought a second pair to wear more casually in the garden, on the beach, or in mud – keeping the first pair nice for special occasions. Now I’m shopping for a third pair to wear around the house with alpaca socks.
I have a large batch of film to develop from the last few months. Before I get to those, here are a few quick iPhone 12 Pro Max snaps from a recent trip to Sandbridge, Virginia.
In September I was in Portland, Oregon for WordCamp (as I mentioned). Here are a few snaps taken with iPhone 12 Pro Max and Halide’s Process Zero. Film snaps to come when I develop my next batch of color rolls.
In this post, I’m sharing my personal thoughts on the Automattic vs. WP Engine trademark dispute. These views are my own and may not reflect those of my employer or anyone else on my team. Additionally, this should not be seen as a comprehensive retelling of the events from the past few weeks. Much has happened even during the period I’ve spent writing and rewriting this post.
I wrote this post for me. Writing is how I think.
The last few weeks have been an emotional rollercoaster as I’ve tried to determine what this trademark dispute means for the WordPress ecosystem, the community, the software, and, of course, my livelihood.
Automattic’s dispute seems fairly straightforward to me. But I am no lawyer. While I think I understand the rights and ownership each person and entity has in this case – I could be wrong. And each side could be misrepresenting their own rights to win in the court of public opinion.
Even ardent supporters of WP Engine would likely agree that their prolific use of the term WordPress could be confusing to some. Ardent supporters of Automattic, also, would likely agree that the communication of this dispute to the public could not have gone worse for the community.
I was in Portland for WordCamp but didn’t attend the closing Q&A session with Matt Mullenweg in person. After a few days of what was an exciting event, I was feeling pretty socially drained and returned to my nearby hotel room. Of course, I’m always excited to hear what Matt has to say so I did open my laptop and watch the livestream as it happened.
The confusion and unrest in the community have been palpable ever since.
People want the leaders of their communities to be reliable, stalwart, reasoned individuals. No matter what is happening, they do not want to see community leaders lash out, react quickly, and make sweeping changes. That is, until they have had the time to fully understand why those changes are being made. The reason we all feel this way is that we immediately get worried that we could be the next target of that leader’s ire next.
Perhaps that is precisely why the public rollout of this dispute was handled in this way. To shake things up. To bring any would-be or even unwitting offenders back in line. Maybe it will work out that way. But when there is talk of forks, mirrors, or leaving a community altogether it is sad to see.
—
It’s easy to sit back and say how I would have handled the situation differently with more public outreach, warnings, ultimatums. Giving the community time to catch up to what Matt already feels he knows. And I don’t think I would have used WordCamp as my platform. It was disheartening to see so many very excited attendees deflate so quickly. For most of the week we were talking about new features like Playgrounds, Interactivity API, and other things — to only be talking about this ever since. But hindsight is always clearer. My guess is Matt either expected WP Engine to back down much sooner or was prepared for exactly this fight. We may never know.
—
Communities and momentum are fragile, and it’s always unfortunate when something disrupts and causes people to question their place in it. I really like WordPress (yes, I like Gutenberg a lot) and the community of people that are in it. I personally plan to try to be an even greater supporter of the ecosystem than I’ve been. And I sincerely hope morale will rebound once the dust settles and we can get back to talking about exciting new features.
I pushed an update to Stupid today that features a theme inspired by Jacques Monneraud‘s ceramic work. Best if viewed on a phone.
I’m experimenting with the ActivityPub plugin a bit. I’ve always wanted separate fediverse accounts for my personal projects such as Stupid, Stripe Transfer, etc. but the thought of managing those didn’t seem fun. The plugin allows each author to have their own account; so I’ve added one for @stupid to play with and customized its author page. Still more to learn.
Sophie Koonin:
Conferences are a fantastic way to not only broaden your horizons when it comes to your job and your skills, but also meet excellent people who might lead you to a new role, or new experiences.
I totally agree. In 2018 I wrote You should attend events, meetups, and conferences. I think it is as valuable today as ever.
Don’t miss Sophie’s new garden theme.
iOS 18.0 is very nice even on my limited iPhone 12 Pro Max. The Passwords app, Transcripts, Home Screen customizations, Hiking Routes, Safari highlights, Call recording, Notes updates, Math in Notes, Messages updates, Lock Screen customizations…
People are saying that this is a lackluster update? Far from it. I think this update is fantastic.
My coffee game has been on point recently; I’m grinding beans to just larger grain than espresso, brewing in a pre-warmed moka pot, keeping the brew warm in a pre-warmed 18oz Yeti water bottle, and pouring as-needed into a (you guessed it) pre-warmed ceramic mug.
I’m attending FediForum! I’m looking forward to seeing the progress the community is making on expanding the fediverse. All of us at NerdPress / Hubbub are happy to be supporting the event.
It has been a cool start to September. Mornings begin at around 40ºF and the day heats up to near 80ºF. It is a time of campfires and canning projects.
Eliza does far more canning than I am able to do. She’s canned lots of candied jalapeños, sauces and salsas, peppers, and today she’s making a batch of apple butter. I’m very pleased that one of her hobbies is canning. I’m definitely a benefactor.
This past weekend, though, we were able to spend some time together picking our grapes, making jelly and canning it. It was a lot of fun.
We have a single, 3-year old grape vine that we planted not too long after we moved into this home. It was just a tiny thing when it started and Eliza bought it at Sam’s Club. Our main reason for planting it was to create a privacy barrier on the outside of our pavilion. Our yield this year was 6 pounds of usable grapes which made about 19 small jars of jelly.
The home addition I mentioned in Diversions #3 is a go. All the proper paperwork has been completed, plans approved, contractor contracted, financing secured, etc. It was a process that I do not think can be rushed or done any quicker. But it can certainly be improved. I think there is room for disruption for someone that wants to come in and provide an experience for people doing this sort of work to make it much easier. We break ground in about a month.
I recently connected my site to the fediverse via the ActivityPub WordPress plugin. What does this mean? Why am I doing it? Should you consider doing it too? I think I’m going to write a post to specifically address this. So stay subscribed for that.
I briefly mentioned our trip to Virginia by sharing Jacobsen’s mirrored tomb. We had a wonderful trip with two of our best travel friends and visited some caverns, wineries, and had a great cabin on the Shenandoah. I should probably develop those rolls of film.
You’re probably here for the links, so why make you wait any longer?
- Crazy-Horse Key Organizer – This bit of EDC kit is tempting.
- Simon Collison’s Journal – Back in late-August (I’m catching up on my RSS feeds) Colly wrote up how he refactored his Stream and Articles into a single Journal feed. I love his website.
- Chemvert – An $89USD app that helps you edit your negative scans. I’ve just downloaded the demo, so I can’t give a review yet, but I’m glad there are more apps trying to help us analog shooters. via Dmitri
- Japan’s last sign painters – Typographer Shoko Mugikura interviewed them for FontStand News.
- Dynamicland’s new website – Bret Victor announced the new site on Mastodon. The amount of work that has gone into these real world interactions can not likely be overstated. I hope some of this work trickles out into products we’ll all use every day.
As I briefly shared on my personal Mastodon account last night (this fediverse thing is going to get confusing, isn’t it), here are a few photos of this year’s garlic. I planted in October 2023.
April 2024May 2024June 2024 – Picked the scapesBagged and frozenJuly 2024 – Picked to drySeptember 2024 – Ready to be storedI’ll likely plant about 200 cloves in October. And the process starts all over again.
A fair number of suggestions to my computing setup post came pouring in. Thank you! The more rumors I read or watch seem to indicate there will not be a Mac Studio this year with an M4. So if I’m to make this purchase I may not have that as an option.
I think I’ll be able to make a decision by the end of October.
The idea of trying to paint the full picture of my computing needs exhausts me for some unknown reason. Even this short post has been a chore. But I thought it important to get some of my thoughts down because it helps me to clarify my own thinking and will hopefully help me make some decisions. And I would love it if you commented via my website, on Mastodon or on Micro.blog or email or USPS.
The main issue is that it just so happens that I find myself at a time where I have a 5+ year old Intel-based MacBook Pro, an 8 year old iPad Pro, and a 4+ year old iPhone 12 Pro Max.
All of these devices are currently working fine, their software is up-to-date, and except for the MacBook Pro – their batteries are in very good shape. (The MacBook Pro has never had great battery life.)
One could say that I do not need to upgrade any of these devices just yet. I could likely hold out another year. But Apple has made it plain that the M-series chipset has their full attention. There are apps from the App Store that will not run on my Intel-based Mac (the iOS/iPad OS apps). The upcoming Apple Intelligence features will not be available for any of my current devices.
To add to the incentive, I’ve had a good year financially. I could use an expense or two to write-off before the end of the year. In fact, based on my math, I think I’ll want a fairly big expense if possible. (Try as I might, I’m having a hard time understanding exactly how much I should be trying to write-off.)
So, let’s just say that I’ve decided I should upgrade one or all of my computing devices before the end of the year. What should I buy?
I work at my desk about 98% of the time. In over 20-years of using a laptop as my primary computing device, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used it on my lap. I have had years of more mobile work – going into coworking spaces or working both at home and an office – and years where I’m only at home. Currently I work almost exclusively in my home office connected to a display.
My main computing tasks are programming, graphic, video, and photo editing, and most recently running local LLMs.
I’m wrestling with the following questions:
- Since I work from home, should I switch to a desktop computer?
- For the few times per year that I travel, should I keep my current MacBook Pro or should I trade up to an M-series laptop for compatibility reasons? This way I’d have both a desktop and laptop computer.
- For years I’ve not had enough internal storage to have my ever growing photo library (~1TB as of this writing) on-device, should I finally buy more enough to do so?
- Am I kidding myself that I feel like I need to max out whatever device I buy for what I do day-to-day? Perhaps I only need a relatively inexpensive laptop and I’d be fine?
My strategy when buying new work hardware is to buy as much computing power as I can reasonably afford and then don’t think about it for about 5 years. This strategy works and it helps me mentally when I consider the price tag.
For instance, if I price out a maxed out Mac Studio today (with an M3 chipset, not an M4 like I would likely wait for) it comes to around $8000+ USD. Which, likely seems like a lot of money to many but it really isn’t. I use my computer for 12-hours a day nearly every workday. Over a 5 year period it is only $1,600 a year. Or $6 per workday. Ask any business owner if $1,600 a year in expenses is a lot – I assure you that being a computer programmer is likely the least expensive profession known to humankind. For context my 16-inch Intel-based MacBook Pro was about $4200 USD.
But then $8000+ wouldn’t be my only expense. A new iPhone 16 Pro Max and iPad Pro would bump it up to well over $10000 USD. Still, in my opinion, not a lot over a 5 year time span.
Stay with me here.
But then I circle back to the last of my six questions above; do I really need this much compute? Or can I get away with far less? Should I just buy a used M3-based laptop and see if that would be plenty? Should I keep what I currently have until they don’t work at all? Should I go all-out?
I have no idea!
I’m leaving the comments open on this post because I genuinely wonder what all of you think I should do.
I’m drafting a post about my next computing setup in hopes that it helps clarify my own thinking and true needs. In short, I’m having trouble deciding when to upgrade, what to purchase, and how much to spend. Hopefully it becomes more clear before the year ends.
The mirrored tomb of architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen near Delaplane, Virginia. I exposed a few frames of film here as well but I likely won’t develop the rolls for a bit so I thought I’d share this one. Shot on iPhone 12 Pro Max using Halide’s Process Zero (which I’m loving).
I have been really putting my computer through a lot over the last year or so. Multithreaded processes that I’ve handbuilt, encoding video, running LLMs locally. My Mac is starting to shut off fairly regularly right in the middle of a task. When is Apple going to announce the M4?!
Kayaking in July 2024Few experiences have the serenity of kayaking on a lake. Especially in the evening at sunset. If you haven’t kayaked, I highly recommend it.
For years I kayaked very regularly. These days, I hardly ever do. But it is something Eliza and I want to return to. I’m hoping that writing it down will force me to get back at it. And fishing. I miss fishing.
Lately I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to so many people mention that they love the open web and seeing so many people return to their personal websites or using more open platforms. Me too! The amount of beautiful, fun, unique, niche, and did I say fun? websites I’m seeing these days is off-the-charts.
I’ve written this before; I don’t think the open or independent web ever went away. Yes, some people slowed down or stopped blogging in favor of siloed social networks. And billions of other people, who had never blogged, jumped onto those same silos. So it seemed as though blogging shrank. But I would argue it never really did. It has grown and continues to grow. And what we’re seeing now is the return of the web professional to their home gardens. And for that I’m very happy.
As I mentioned on Mastodon, Eliza bought me a Barbour jacket for our 25th anniversary. I’ve wanted one for longer than I can remember. I always have a hard time spending money on clothing for myself and an even harder time on what I consider fairly expensive clothing. I love it!
Progress on the prep for the addition to our home is happening much more rapidly now. I have no misconceptions about how this process is going to be very hard and disruptive – I know it will be. When it is moving too slow you wish it would go quicker and when it is moving quickly you wish it would slow down. I suppose that is all of life.
I’m nearly 44 years old. I wear Crocs and a fanny pack. And I don’t care who knows it.
OK. Now, for some links.
- Sentinel – Impressive embroidery from Marine Beaufils (on Mastodon).
- Music for Programming – A very fun website. The creator’s profile is on X and I refuse to link to it since you cannot see it without signing in.
- Drone flies up Mount Everest – DJI video of the route all the way up Everest. I’m exhausted just watching it.
- Kind of Bloop Vinyl – Andy is selling vinyl copies of Kind of Bloop on the 15th anniversary of his masterpiece.
- PsychOdyssey – I’ve been making my way through Double Fine’s documentary of making Psychonauts 2. I realize the documentary is edited for time but wow these people have a lot of meetings where only one person speaks or seems to have their opinion heard. I don’t think I could ever work at Double Fine.
That’s it for now!
Tracy Durnell, who is very good at weekenotes:
I don’t track anything that could make me feel actually bad about myself. I might be a little embarrassed if I don’t write as much as I wanted to, but no one’s going to judge me as a person for it — creative folks get it.
Read the entire post. I’ve been aspiring to write weeknotes for a long time now. And I still don’t know if I’ll ever do it the way that Tracy does (or with as much consistency). But, Diversions could help me having something similar.
WordPress 6.6 had broken dark mode here on my site. I’m probably “doing it wrong” and I should take the time to research what the preferred way is these days. But, for now, it is fixed. Sorry dark moders.
As I mentioned last week on Mastodon, I was invited, along with NerdPress CEO Andrew Wilder, on The Food Blogger Pro Podcast.
Me, Bjork Ostrom, and Andrew WilderHere is the episode:
It is also, of course, available wherever you get your podcasts. Here are some useful links to the episode in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Overcast.
The conversation was wide ranging covering our acquisition of Grow Social Pro from Mediavine (which is now Hubbub), our plans for Hubbub, the social media landscape, Flipboard, and of course the fediverse.
Diversions is the central hub for news about the membership, behind-the-scenes details of my personal projects, as well as a wide variety of links to people, places, and things that inspire me.
A bit of housekeeping: I’m turning Diversions public. While a fair number of people have signed up for both free and paid memberships (thank you!), my analytics show that not everyone logs back in to read each edition. Perhaps it is a bit too much friction? So, I’ll be turning the free membership into a more newslettery type subscription and the paid membership I’ll reserve for more exclusive content and still as a way to support my projects. Stay tuned.
I could bore you with excuses as to why there hasn’t been a Diversions since early June and that I plan to publish more regularly, but that would be breaking my very first tip for blogging – “Don’t post about what you will do, post about what you’ve already done.”
Summertime is moving at breakneck speed. As Anh put it in a recent, and lovely designed, weeknotes post “It’s July, and the passage of time continues to be disorienting.” Well, it is August and I only read that post today and so that just reenforces the point. I’m not sure if it is age, busyness, or waves arms gesturing at everything but disorienting is a great way to describe how time seems to be moving.
Since the last Diversions was published, we’ve had family reunions, building permits and variants filing, glamping trips, dinner parties (with us hosting 25 people ), blueberry picking, trees falling, software updates shipping, and lots of customers. There was a week that felt like far too much. I need to be more careful with my scheduling.
That being said, things are good.
Spending 8-10 hours cutting a felled tree led to some meditations on lessons learned from the experience. This was a tree we knew would eventually come down. Fortunately, the only thing injured was a relatively new pear tree. But the amount of work to clean up after something like this was not expected. Trees are bigger when they are laying flat in your yard and you don’t want them there.
One lesson that was reinforced was to take large projects and make them into many small ones. We’ve had a hot summer so working in the afternoons would have been extremely unpleasant – so, I woke up early each day and got a little more of the tree taken care of. Steady progress made me happy and I also didn’t totally wear myself out. There is still a bit left to do.
Another lesson is that even though a less-than-great thing happened, I did get a few years worth of campfire wood stacked in the backyard. Each windstorm usually snaps enough limbs to give me a fair amount of sticks and branches to have some nice fires. But this new bounty means that I likely won’t need to go get fire wood for our fire pit for many summers. And it was free!
I’m using LLMs a lot lately. I continue to use them as an accelerator. And they’ve grown more capable and I’m able to run them locally (both to cut costs and to get more familiar with how they work).
I’m using Simon Willison’s LLM command line tool to install and interact with models locally (and, online). The command line isn’t the best interface for interacting with these chatbots – a web UI allows for dragging and dropping, easier copying and pasting, and other tools built on top of the chatbots. However, it is a great way to do quick prompts right from where I am in my project. I’m looking forward to seeing how local models progress.
Some links for your edification:
- Jordan Stone on TikTok – If you would like to trip on acid without harmful drugs getting into your spinal fluid, here is your chance.
- Aegir Hallmundur’s blog – A fun blog where each post has its own style. It reminds me of Jason Santa Maria‘s blog “back in the day”. Particularly V4.
- Zellyn Hunter Recreates Schotter by George Nees – Don’t miss the multiple parts. I cannot skip a blog post recreating analog generative art.
- The Nook by Isaac French – Yes please.
- Solstice 2024 – Ian Giffin shares a pinhole solargraph showing the path of the sun on the shortest day of the year.
- Meredith Frampton – Extraordinary work.
Craig Mod in Ridgeline Transmission 189 Tōkaidō on Film — People:
One of my many todos post-walk has been to dig through the film I shot while walking the Tōkaidō in May. Finally getting to that. To keep things sane, I’ll be batching these photo posts. To start: Here some portraits I took along the way. I shot a lot more on my M11, digitally, but I’ve enjoyed leaning into the bounding lope of film this past year (can’t believe it’s been over a year since I started shooting film again). The distance between seeing, photographing, developing, scanning, and — once again — looking, is kind of nice. And there’s something indisputably lovely about having hard copies of everything in the form of negatives. Anyway, I’ll write more about film at another time.
I hope he does.
On my single post template I like to show the date the post was most recently modified to make it clear that it had been edited since it was first published. I also do this on my portfolio entries – which you can see on my Where I series of photographs on the bottom left-hand corner.
WordPress’ Modified Date block has a toggle for displaying the date only when the post has been modified, and completely omitting it when the post has not been modified. I like this feature because it keeps my pages nice and clean by only showing the information if needed.
An issue I’ve had on my site for the last several months has been that the Modified Date block doesn’t allow you to have a label next to the date to specify what the date means. Example: “Last updated: Date”. I wanted readers to know what the date meant.
So, in the Full Site Editor in WordPress I added a paragraph block above the date and simply wrote “Last updated:” in it. That works, but the words “Last Updated:” would appear whether or not the Modified Date block was displaying on the page or not. So I ended up with this little orphaned paragraph that meant nothing.
I hadn’t had a meaningful enough time to spend on a solution. I wanted to see if I could create a Block Variation that would allow me to add a label. Or, perhaps even submit a patch to Core to be included in a future WordPress update. And I may still do that.
But for now, I have a solution using CSS’ excellent :not and :has selectors.
First, I used the Group block to group the Paragraph and Modified Date blocks together. Then, I added a specific class to the Group block (this may not be needed, but I wanted it to be specific to me). Then I added the following CSS to my Child Theme’s stylesheet.
.container:not(.container:has(time)) { display: none;}
The Modified Date block adds a time HTML element to the page. If that element does not exist, I do not display the container, which includes my paragraph and label.
If you page through a few of my blog posts you’ll see that the Modified Date block is shown on some of them and not on others.
The quality of Threads’ For You feed has plummeted for me over the last several months. During its first few weeks, it was an excellent way to expand my network. Today, it seems to surface the most banal content on the platform.
Going to be near Astoria, Oregon in late Summer? Keith Taylor, who I had a chat with back in April, will have a piece in this year’s Analog Forever exhibit at Lightbox Gallery. Looks like a lovely show.
Manuel Moreale:
It’s called The Browser Company but what they make is a wrapper around the Chromium web browser. So the browser company is making everything but the actual browser. Can you imagine starting a company called “the pizza company” and then outsourcing the pizza part to a 3rd party? So bizarre.
These days, they are building a UI layer above AI to help people summarize the web rather than browse it. So, perhaps they should rename the company The Summarizing Company?
In August 2023 I begged Arc to allow me to pay them for what I thought was a great web browser in Arc 1.5.1. If Arc had a true iOS counterpart that synced tabs, spaces, etc. it could have given all other browsers a real competitive challenge.
Instead, not long later my letter to them, they embraced AI (as did the entire industry) and ditched the idea of making a full browser on iOS. It was clear that The Browser Company and I did not see eye-to-eye on what I expected from a web browser. So, in March, I went back to using Safari full-time (modifying how I used Safari based partly on how John Siracusa uses browsers and a helper app called Switcheroo).
The people at The Browser Company are clearly talented. They are nimble, move quickly, and ship great products. They’ve written a Windows browser using Swift and just recently their iOS app has been nominated for an Apple Design award for interaction. They have chops. But they just aren’t making software that I want. I wanted Arc 1.5.1. And they’ve left that behind.
Diversions is the central hub for news about my website’s membership, behind-the-scenes details of my personal projects, as well as a wide variety of links to people, places, and things that inspire me. It is free to sign up (or, you can choose to support my work financially).
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M.G. Siegler, writing on his newish blog Spyglass:
the Safari browser on iPad has always behaved more like the Safari browser on iOS versus the version built for Macs.
Just yesterday I had to log into Eliza’s Gmail account via Safari on my iPad. The experience was akin to a 2007 web app with no option to show me the real desktop version of Gmail. Both Safari and Gmail’s fault.
I would welcome iPadOS adjusting Safari’s user agent (and whatever else needs to be done) to run just like the real, grown-up version of Safari.
As an aside: Eliza’s Google storage was 106% full. So, of course, Gmail stops accepting email. She has run into this 15GB limitation on her free Gmail account several times over the many, many years she’s used Gmail. Each time I’ve logged in, searched for “has:attachments size:10MB” (or some variation on that) and deleted a bunch of old email. But this time there was just no more juice to squeeze from the lemon. Instead, we gave Google $20 for 100GB of storage for a year. You win, Google.
Molly White:
Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.
And, later:
Some of us might opt to leave those walls permanently, while others might choose to split our time between our beautiful, messy, free world outside to maintain smaller, meticulously-groomed simulacrums within the enclosures that hint — without angering our landlords — at the creations beyond. We can periodically smuggle seeds and plant cuttings beyond the walls, ensuring that if the proprietors decide to evict us, our gardens will live on.
Like most articles that remember the old days of the web, Molly recounts some of the history and how we got to today. She remains optimistic that the internet has no borders and we can all build whatever and however we’d like outside of the predominant platforms.
She makes this point but I want to double down on it; the open, connected, and niche part of the web never went anywhere. Perhaps it has ebbed and flowed, but for those of us paying attention and seeking it out, it never went away. And it certainly seems to be flowing yet again.
Chicago snaps part 2: A few Tri-X photos from walking around downtown Chicago in mid-March. The worm-like aberrations seen on the images is because I didn’t pay close enough attention to temperature while I developed this roll. Live and learn. See also part 1.
Keith Taylor is a photographer and printmaker with over 40 years of experience in the darkroom. His personal work includes multiple darkroom mediums including gelatin silver, platinum palladium, and his passion polymer photogravure.
In mid-March we hopped on Zoom for a 1-hour conversation. This isn’t an interview. It does not have planned questions. It is a conversation between myself (with just 5 years of limited darkroom printing experience) and Mr. Taylor who has decades of experience. Most of the topics we cover are linked below the video. I hope you find it interesting.
Recorded March 19, 2024Topics:
- Keith Taylor: Personal website | Studio website
- Dan Weldon
- Polymer Photogravure
- Platinum Palladium
- Gelatin Silver
- Nick Carver’s video about his exhibition (there are multiple parts)
- Greig Fraser‘s Dune book: Limited edition | Hardcover
- Digital negatives
- Alfred Stieglitz
- Paul Strand
- Oyvind Hjelmen
- Nancy Rexroth
- Thomas Joshua Cooper
- Jay DeFeo
- Todd Hido
- Smarter Everyday’s Kodak Tour (there are multiple parts)
- Lodima Paper | Video
Note to members: I don’t have a way to publish videos privately behind my membership login yet. Thank you for helping to make this conversation possible.
If you want to help give this conversation a boost please share it as well as going over to YouTube and hitting like. Thanks.
Diversions is the central hub for news about my website’s membership, behind-the-scenes details of my personal projects, as well as a wide variety of links to people, places, and things that inspire me. It is free to sign up (or, you can choose to support my work financially).
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Back in early February I submitted the Favorite Toots WordPress plugin I had been toying with on my own website to the WordPress plugin directory. Starting today, it is available publicly there and people can search for it from their own WordPress Admins.
The source code is available on GitHub if you’d like to contribute a bug fix or feature. However, if you’d like to install it on your website I recommend using the version that is available on the plugin directory.
Submitting a plugin for review is a valuable process and it benefits everyone in the WordPress ecosystem. If you’re in a hurry, it might be a little frustrating to get through review, but I believe the process is vital to keeping the plugin directory as safe as possible. Yes, issues still arise from time to time, but I’m glad there is a review process to at least make sure a plugin is ready to be released.
Here are some things the reviewers suggested prior to making the Favorite Toots plugin on the directory:
- Rename the plugin from Mastodon Favorites – This makes total sense as I do not own the copyright to Mastodon and I wouldn’t want to take a name they may end up using themselves someday.
- Fix some potential security vulnerabilities – I had written this plugin for my own website, from code I wrote a long time ago, and so I didn’t escape or sanitize a few things. I’m glad the review team caught these.
- A misspelled function! – I don’t even know how the plugin was working! I’m very glad they caught this one.
- Adding some security around direct file access – Honestly, I can’t believe I forgot this.
All of these were issues I should have caught on my own. But, in my own haste, I submitted code that wasn’t ready. And I’m positive the plugin needs even more attention than I have time to give it. But I’m thankful the review process is in place to catch things like this.
Updates to Hubbub Lite (which is also available on the WordPress plugin directory) and Hubbub Pro (which is deployed directly to customers) are reviewed by the team at NerdPress prior to being deployed. Most companies have a code review. It just makes sense. So having a code review for new plugins on the WordPress plugin directory is a reasonable and needed process.
In addition to the above code edits, there are a few other requirements and nice-to-haves for plugins on the directory. I wrote a readme file that follows the conventions of the directory, created some images to showcase what the plugin does (the directory calls these screenshots, but they can be anything), and designed an icon and a banner image.
I’m glad the plugin is now available to all WordPress websites. I have no aspirations that very many people will want to use it. But if even one or two people end up showing off their favorite toots publicly on their website it will be fun to see. (If you end up doing so, please let me know!) And, going through the process reminded me of the requirements and steps needed to publish a new WordPress plugin on the directory.
I interviewed Manton Reece about his journey with Micro.blog in 2018 and again in 2019. They’ve been fun to look back on as the service matures, grows, and changes. I’m a big fan of Micro.blog and the community there (follow me there, if you’d like) and Manton was very gracious to agree to be interviewed once again.
If you’re unfamiliar with Micro.blog their homepage and Welcome areas are a good place to start.
Two quick notes before we jump into the interview:
- All links in Manton’s answers were chosen by me. It is my hope that the links provide some context and make it easy for people to learn more on their own.
- Both Manton and I keep up with what each social networking platform offers, the decisions they make, the mistakes they’ve made, and their policies. Both of us work in the social networking / blogging market as our day jobs. So some of our discussion is fairly “inside baseball”. If you’d like context on anything discussed, feel free to reach out to me or him.
Thank you for doing this interview again. Hard to believe how much time has passed since our previous interviews.
How is Micro.blog going?
It’s going well! We’ve seen a lot of steady growth since you and I talked last. We’ve rolled out new features and apps. I’m really happy with where the platform is right now, but of course there’s always more to improve.
I’m glad to hear it is going well. In our 2019 interview I asked you about how you prioritize your time working on so many projects with such a small team. You have multiple apps, the website, support, servers to administer, etc. And it has only grown since then. Back then you said “I think good things can come from trying to do a little too much, but it’s not usually sustainable. Eventually it catches up with you and you have to simplify and wrap up or delegate some tasks.” How are you doing on that?
It hasn’t caught up with me quite yet, and I think over the last couple of years I’ve done a better job of focusing on the most important parts of Micro.blog — the core platform that affects everything from the web interface, to blog publishing, to federation with other services. It feels less stressful as we mature as a company. And now Vincent Ritter is helping with both server code and the native apps, including the bulk of our new app Strata for notes. That is a huge difference, not needing to do everything myself.
I’m glad that the number of projects you have going at once hasn’t overwhelmed you. I have noticed though, from time-to-time, Micro.blog may have some downtime. Or, syndication to other services isn’t so reliable. Of course, this type of issue plagues any growing platform. But I’m wondering, if you didn’t have so many codebases to manage, would the core product benefit from your entire focus? Or, have these issues been mostly one-off issues?
After some downtime last year, I took a fresh look at our servers and what upgrades we could do. Luckily the last few months have been really solid. There were some growing pains for us when Mastodon got popular too, because extra traffic from all the new users on the fediverse might reveal performance problems that were never a problem before. Of course, we should’ve caught that in testing, but some things are difficult to plan for until you see how it works in the real world. I expect this is partly why Meta is adding ActivityPub support in phases to Threads.
For distractions on the core Micro.blog features, the problem is everyone has a different view of what is core. Micro.blog has a lot of features. If we paired that down to the absolute minimum and only focused on that, those features could be as reliable and fast as possible. But then the product might not be as valuable or interesting, and we’d have fewer customers, and maybe not even enough customers to have a business that could sustain itself. There is always the balance of fixing bugs and taking care of the basics while also expanding what it can do.
Have there been any interesting or unexpected uses of Micro.blog that have surprised you?
Not exactly surprising, but it has been interesting to see how people use the various pieces that we’ve built, often beyond how I use the features myself. For example, using email newsletters to connect with their readers and wanting more control over how that works. Or using our external feeds support to plug in services like Letterboxd so their movie reviews show up on their own blog. Or taking the Hugo themes and customizing a bunch of the built-in assumptions in Micro.blog’s templates.
The citizenry of the social web are a passionate bunch. I consider myself among them! All social networks experience some turmoil based on the decisions of those leading them. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, WordPress, Mastodon have all had their share. Is this something you worry about with Micro.blog? Do you have a decision making process that can help you to avoid a mutiny or revolt?
We don’t have a formal process for handling a potential mutiny, but it is something I think about whenever there is a heated discussion about the direction of Micro.blog. Because we are small, a few loud voices that get traction could have a real impact on our business. Thankfully that is very rare. I remind myself not to take it personally because Micro.blog has always attracted people who have very high expectations. They want something different, more open, more civil, just better, otherwise they’d stay on Twitter or Reddit. If we fall short, I want to know about it, and most people are patient if we mess something up, as long as it’s fixed quickly.
I also often see the other side of this as we welcome new customers who have been frustrated elsewhere. Recent examples just in the last couple of months include Substack and even Automattic, because of controversy with selling user data to AI companies. When a company burns goodwill, it is really hard to get it back.
How do you see the future of AI and Micro.blog playing out over the next few years? Both in terms of how it might be implemented into features and whether or not the data on the platform should be included in these datasets.
I’m fascinated by AI. We’ve added two AI features to our Micro.blog Premium subscription plan: podcast transcription and summarizing web pages that you’ve bookmarked. I love the summarization feature, because I’m bookmarking pages often but maybe don’t read them right away. Now I can tell at a glance what the basic idea of the article was, then read it later. Micro.blog is about personal blogs and human-generated content, though. We’re never going to have AI features that write blog posts for you.
For how content is available to companies like OpenAI and others crawling the web, we will never sell user data. When we were working on our terms of service, I made sure that we spelled out that all content is owned by users, not us. We have no rights to that content beyond being able to display it in Micro.blog. I believe the web should be open by default and personally for my own blog, I’m fine if AI bots crawl it, but there should be easy ways to opt-out. There are a couple of Micro.blog plug-ins to exclude OpenAI, so it’s essentially just a couple clicks to set that up.
Micro.blog has intentionally omitted some social features that are commonplace on other platforms; such as likes and boosts. I know for me personally, I occasionally wish I could easily boost a post to help someone get a bit more exposure. Have you ever regretted omitting those features? Is there any consideration to adding them someday?
I try to reevaluate these decisions occasionally, but no regrets. For everyone who wishes Micro.blog worked a little more like Twitter or Mastodon, I think there are other users who would be disappointed if we changed it. The goal was to minimize a lot of the noise, judgement, and outrage in other platforms that are partially given fuel by public likes and boosts, especially when combined with algorithmic timelines and trends. Micro.blog can also work as a companion to other networks, so if someone wants those features they can can use Mastodon or Threads for the social aspect, and use Micro.blog more for traditional blogging, or for handling cross-posting.
Speaking of cross posting, Micro.blog supports a nice range of services and protocols. Do you have a favorite? Or a protocol that you think may stand the test of time and be here 40 years from now?
40 years is a long time! The oldest formats that Micro.blog supports are probably RSS and the MetaWeblog API, and those are “only” a little over 20 years old. For cross-posting, a lot of it has to use proprietary APIs that I do not expect to be around forever. Posting to services like Tumblr, Medium, or LinkedIn is not based on standards. I like the IndieWeb’s Micropub and Webmention APIs. I also expect ActivityPub to be with us for a long time. Those are all W3C Recommendations.
HTTP will turn 40 in just 5 short years. We are old men Manton! Thank you for taking the time for this interview. I really enjoy catching up. I think Micro.blog is a bright spot of the open web. Is there anything you would like people that are new to Micro.blog to check out or anything new for existing members to look forward to?
Thanks! Great talking to you again. For anyone new to Micro.blog, the platform isn’t just one thing: it’s a social network with fediverse compatibility so people on Mastodon can follow and reply to your posts, but it’s also a full blogging platform, similar to what you might have with WordPress. We are always making it better… I’m currently working on improvements to our web post editor and support for Threads. It’s going to be an exciting year for the open web.
My thanks to Manton for taking the time to do this interview. I hope we do it again in a year or so.
Elliot Jay Stocks:
When I first decided to start a newsletter, I’d assumed it’d be just like publishing a blog, but with a different delivery method — but I was completely wrong. Although I do see blog posts as quite personal outputs, a newsletter is just different somehow. It’s hard to say exactly why, but I suspect it’s something to do with the fact that people have opted in to receive your updates. Sure, you could say the same of those who subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed, but publishing something that lands in a person’s inbox just feels inherently more intimate, and I’ve personally been surprised at how writing and publishing a newsletter has felt very different to writing and publishing a blog.
I completely agree. I’ve published a fair number of newsletter editions professionally but zero personally. That is, until I’ve begun Diversions. Though I haven’t yet published an edition of Diversions that lands in someone’s Inbox (that is coming soon), I can already feel a difference in publishing posts for members. It just feels different. Writing Diversions or recording voice memos, just feels different than even this post. It gets the juices flowing.
I’m really liking the feeling. The response to the membership has been incredible. I’m still just figuring things out. I’m still getting things set up. I’m just getting started and there is already a slew of posts in the hopper. It has been a lot of fun.
This post details a Mac app that recreates Little Arc in Safari. The post and source code are available for members only until April 3rd. Sign up to access the post and code or wait until it is published publicly.
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Chicago snaps part 1: A few iPhone captures from last week’s trip to Chicago with the NerdPress team to sponsor the Tastemaker Conference. Hubbub had its own booth while NerdPress had a large lounge with an impressive view. A fantastic work trip.
Lake MichiganSueChicago StyleFoggy Lake MichiganThe BeanThe L
In this voice memo I chat a little bit about how I’ve tried to think about my follow count, my blog’s statistics, likes, and other metrics. As the internet begins to divide into smaller groups once again, this perspective may become more important than ever.
Voice Memos #1 is 7m54s.
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This is the first edition of an all-new series of posts and future email newsletter that will be part of a new membership on my personal website.
Diversions will the central hub for news about the membership, behind-the-scenes details of my personal projects, as well as a wide variety of links to people, places, and things that inspire me.
It is free to join with an optional paid membership. You can read a little bit more about the membership at cdevroe.com/join. It is very early days, I hope you’ll come along for the ride as I continue to learn film photography, darkroom printing, art curation, writing software, and a myriad of other topics that my divert my mind and keep me creatively inspired.
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I’m trying Safari for the rest of this week in place of Arc. I’m not revolting against them, I just feel as though our values are no longer aligned. They’ve shifted from trying to build a really great web browser (which they’ve already done, imo) to chasing AI venture dollars. I don’t blame them. I’m sure their overhead would make me sweat.
So far I’ve been able to replicate some of the features that made me so productive in Arc. I can sort of make vertical tabs and their grouping work similarly by adding two tab groups to each of my Safari Profiles: Favorites and Today. What I haven’t been able to replicate is Little Arc (and its ability to send a link to a specific Space/Profile) and the ability to quickly move a tab from one Space/Profile to another (though, dragging works for Safari).
I will say I’m a bit surprised at the bugginess of Safari. I was an avid Safari on Desktop user for many years and I can’t remember a time it has ever been so buggy. I’ll give you one example; Safari has an option to always open pages (or, links you’ve clicked from other apps like Mail or Ivory) in a tab rather than in a new window. This simply does not work consistently. Because it is so easily replicated I’m going to submit a Feedback (though we all know how those go).
Update March 20: Meet Switcheroo!
Sometime near 1948 Fiore Cerra took an aerial photograph of Carbondale, Pennsylvania that captured how very different a place it was just 75 years ago or so. I live near Carbondale and the moment I saw Cerra’s aerial I knew I wanted to try to recreate it. Well, in early 2023 I did and I uploaded a quick comparison of the two images to Instagram at the time.
Recently, however, after talking with Cody Gonsauls – the founder of the Carbondale Township Historical Society – I knew I wanted to revisit this data and see if I could make it easier to compare the two images. This morning I uploaded a 12s video to YouTube that helps do just that. I also emailed Cody a bunch of comparison images for the society’s digital archives. Here are some of them.
1948 Aerial credit Fiore Cerra (source)2023 Aerial made by me (perspective adjusted to match 1948 aerial)Cropped 2023 aerial to 1948 aerial’s dimensions1948 aerial overlayed on 2023 aerial
A few snaps with my phone while browsing a few local antique shops and garden center last weekend.
Korczak Ziolkowski wakes up early on a bitter cold winter’s morning – the same way he has for several decades – after breakfasting and a few mugs of the hottest coffee his palette can stand, he shoulders his tool belt and trods his way in knee-high snow to the eastern wall of the Crazy Horse Memorial… his lifelong unfinished masterpiece.
I like to think that working on one’s own personal website is a lot like Korczak Ziolkowski’s pursuit of progress on the ambitious mountain-sized memorial he started in the late-1940s. He knew he’d never complete the work in his lifetime. He knew that each day’s progress would be measured in inches and pounds and that, only after a generation’s worth of effort, would he be able to look back and see that what he had begun to make was worth it.
In late-November 2023, I changed jobs from VP of Marketing to Senior Product Manager (and lead developer) of Hubbub. When I was working in marketing I needed technical side projects to scratch that particular itch I’ve always had. But now that I spend some amount of time every workday programming – I don’t need to be working on side projects as often. And I certainly don’t need to be building my own static site generator anymore. But I do need a better playground to test and improve Hubbub. So I’ve switched back to WordPress to power my blog.
If you were following along on my journey to build Tuff, the static site generator that powered my site for well over a year, you might be wondering whether I’m upset that I’m replacing it. Wasn’t it a waste of my time? I think it was a valuable project for me to work on.
Martiijn Doolaard, a web designer, musician, cyclist, and now successful YouTuber rebuilding stone animal structures in the alps (who I watch every Sunday with Eliza) recently had a similar reaction to one of his projects. Doolaard had spent a great deal of time building a crane to move large heavy stones on the roofs of his buildings. He spent several weeks honing the tool to work for his needs – only to set it aside when the day came to use it. He answered some questions about whether or not he felt that was wasted time and he said (I’m summarizing) that it wasn’t a waste of time because he enjoyed building the crane.
I enjoyed building Tuff. And that should be enough to consider it time well spent. Tuff is still currently powering a few of my other websites (though, I plan to move them all to WordPress over the course of this year). Imagine building something from scratch that you were able to use for more than a year on multiple websites? That isn’t wasted time. I learned a bunch, used my brain, and honed some of my skills that I use everyday.
In order to improve a software product, I need to be one of its most active users. We acquired Hubbub in December 2023 and for the last few months we’ve had a roadmap of low hanging fruit updates. We’ve fixed some bugs, patched some potential (albeit mild) security vulnerabilities, and added some new features. But our best work is definitely ahead of us. We’re now up-to-speed on the codebase, the issues, the customers, etc. and we’re in the phase where I’m using the product everyday. I’m beginning to have ideas of how the product can be much better, more capable, and more valuable for customers. It is also more likely that I will run into an issue by using the product daily so that I can fix the issue before customers even notice it.
My website is a child theme of the Twenty Twenty Four theme. When I set out to begin this rebuild my goal was to use WordPress’ full site editor (FSE) to complete my entire site with writing as little code as possible. I thought it would be a worthy exercise to help me understand the state of this part of the WordPress ecosystem.
The full site editor in WordPress has really improved a lot and at a fairly rapid pace. While I wasn’t able to complete my entire site without any code, it may not be long before I’ll be able to do so. I’ve seen a lot of complaints in the community about the direction that WordPress is taking with Gutenberg and the FSE. Alternative forks are being worked on. My opinion is that the FSE is the right direction to go, especially to enable non-technical users to build their own websites. I have a lot more to say about this but overall I’m bullish on the FSE.
My site uses a child theme so that I can enable custom post types, add custom styles, a Query Loop Block variation that adds custom taxonomies as filters, adds a template part for my new logo, enables some meta boxes for the metadata on portfolio items, adds support for the aside Post Format, and manipulates the guid in the database. A few of these features could have been done another way (perhaps by someone with more experience than me). I’m hoping that future versions of WordPress will allow me to remove code rather than add it.
Based on my experience rebuilding my website, I may write a separate post about some features that WordPress should have out-of-the-box that it currently does not. Maybe some of them are already underway.
My personal website is not as ambitious a project as Ziolkowski’s memorial of the Lokatan war leader, but I’m fairly certain that my website will never be truly finished. I’m glad that I spent the time to get to where it is today. There is a lot of work yet to be done (especially on mobile and the archive) but I’m excited to be publishing new stuff again. Recently I published a new portfolio piece, a podcast appearance, a new open source plugin, and some photos into my new snaps area.
Much more to come. Stay subscribed.
One of the primary ways I find new accounts to follow on social media is by eavesdropping on other people’s favorites. Many social networks make each account’s favorites public but Mastodon does not (yet?). So I wanted a way to show my favorites publicly so that others can look through them. And I’m hoping others make theirs available too.
The Mastodon Favorites WordPress Plugin (now renamed to Favorite Toots) adds an Editor Block so that you can easily add it to you website. It has been submitted to the WordPress Plugin Directory (currently in review) and have I released the code on GitHub.
You can view 50 of my most recent favorites.
This plugin should be considered beta. There is a lot I’d like to improve when I have the time. Perhaps if you would like to contribute to improving the plugin you can fork the code on GitHub and submit a Pull Request. I’ll be keeping the list of Issues up-to-date as best as I can.
If you have any general feedback, send me a mention @cdevroe@mastodon.social
Favorite Toots available on WordPress Plugin Directory
I’ve had my favorite toots displaying on my website for over a year. When I built Tuff, my static site generator, I had built a small Tuff plugin (the first!) to fetch my favorite toots and build them into the HTML. However, that meant that the list was out of date. With this update, the oldest my list will be is 6-hours old.
Update March 21, 2024: This post and its links have been updated. The plugin has been renamed to Favorite Toots. It is still in review but should be released soon.
Update March 29, 2024: It is now available!
I’m excited to finally share a portrait I made of S. Robert Powell Ph.D., the President of the Carbondale Historical Society, back in April 2023. I’m donating the prints and images to the society for their archives.
Washing prints
Last year my mother-in-law gifted Eliza and I with a train ride to Jim Thorpe for our anniversary. I managed to snap a few color film photos along the way.
My thanks to Nathan Wrigley for having me as a guest on This Week in WordPress #285. (YouTube/Apple Podcasts)
Show notesThere are a few links on the WP Builds website for this episode but I thought I’d share some of the links I mentioned in the episode as well.
My first use of Meetup.com – 2006 Blogger meetup and WordPress meetup My first use of Meetup.com – 2006 Blogger meetup and WordPress meetup My first use of Meetup.com – 2006 Blogger meetup and WordPress meetup * Hubbub – Of course, we mentioned Hubbub, the best social sharing plugin for WordPress. By the team at NerdPress. * WordPress Trac Ticket #60398 – We discussed this ticket, which describes an issue installing or updating plugins or themes on WordPress environments with older copies of libzip installed which was introduced with the security release WordPress 6.4.3. Thankfully, a fix is imminent. * We mentioned Meetup and how I may always have a soft spot in my heart for it. I went digging in my Meetup account and it appears that my first use of it was for a blogger meetup in Philadelphia in 2006 (see screenshot). Of course, I wrote about it. * Somehow, I mentioned Richard Stallman’s rider. * State of the Word 2023 – I mentioned Matt Mullenweg’s vision for using AI to build websites eventually. * Own Your Web – A newsletter by Matthias Ott where he highlights a personal site of the week.
It was a lot of fun to chat with Nathan, Michelle, and Marc.
If you’re seeing this post that means that my website is once again powered by WordPress. Yay! The site doesn’t look so nice on mobile devices, the feed is broken in a few ways, and I need to get the database load under control… you know, a typical website launch.
In 1991, Geoffrey A. Moore described the challenges of introducing new technology products as Crossing the Chasm. The chasm is this very real gap between the earliest adopters and the early majority adopters of any new technology. By crossing the chasm, the momentum gained usually enables the technology to find market fit.
Most protocols, standards, products and services experience this gap in adoption. Even the internet followed the lifecycle described by Moore. I think it can be said that ActivityPub, though fairly well implemented in a variety of services for several years now, is about to cross that chasm in 2024.
Moore’s book explains that for a technology to cross that chasm it must provide a “whole product concept”. Protocols alone do not provide a whole product concept – they are but the foundation upon which many things can be built. Most people wouldn’t be able to explain what ActivityPub is. But most can explain what social networking is. People can understand the whole product concept of a social network. In the near future, people won’t need to know that these services use ActivityPub – they’ll just browse around the web and follow whatever they want. I hope.
ActivityPub has momentum.
We’re beginning to see a bevy of uses of ActivityPub springing up. It isn’t just Mastodon. The momentum is such that in the coming year we will see many more, broader, interesting, and weirder uses than I or you can think of today. It is very exciting.
Just think of what we’ve seen just recently (in no particular order):
- Medium, a publishing platform that has been used by past Presidents, has its own Mastodon instance that is tied into their platform.
- Mozilla has their own Mastodon instance and has open sourced their contributions to many related projects.
- Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, acquired the ActivityPub plugin and is funding its development. They’ve already made the plugin available to WordPress.com members (millions of websites) and are working on making it available on Tumblr as well (millions more).
- Threads has been experimenting with ActivityPub in the open. Several Threads accounts can be followed on Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other services. The CEO of Instagram/Threads has detailed out their roadmap for 2024. Like Meta or not, they are a juggernaut and many people and companies will become aware of ActivityPub as a result of Threads’ implementation.
- Flipboard (millions of users) has recently announced that in the first-half of 2024 they will be making Flipboard fully ActivityPub compatible. This would allow people on other platforms to follow Flipboard content, and for Flipboard users to do likewise outside of the Flipboard platform.
- Discourse, a forum platform, has an interesting ActivityPub implementation that allows multiple Discourse instances (millions of users) to federate as well as to the wider fediverse. Cool.
- Publications (such as The Verge) are embracing ActivityPub, and other open web protocols and standards, directly on their own platforms. They are also using bridges like Flipboard to help. See this post from Flipboard CEO Mike McCue on the number of day one partners Flipboard has helped bring to the fediverse.
This list isn’t exhaustive and yet it represents hundreds of millions of ActivityPub-enabled accounts, publications, websites, people, organizations, and platforms that will be federating their content both into and out of their own platforms in 2024.
There is still some hesitancy apparent in some of these implementations. For example, Threads has said federation will likely be opt-in. WordPress’ and Discourse’s implementation is still a “just a plugin” (albeit first party ones). But that is how these things start.
Will we see ActivityPub be built into the core of more products in 2024? Will it no longer be a plugin or option? Will platforms that choose not to federate be left out in the cold? What will social networking look like in 12 months? Time will tell.
No protocols are perfect, but there is a lot to love about ActivityPub and the platforms that choose to embrace it. Yes, a lot of this could have been handled with existing protocols. The same could have been said about many technologies over the years.
Often it isn’t the best technology that wins. It is the one that crosses the chasm.
The greatest productivity hack of all time is working less.
Slack recently published new research into desk worker productivity. It is a worthy read – however, it sheds light on something that most desk workers already inherently know: longer hours do not mean greater productivity.
I have put a lot of personal focus on trying to be a productive person. I wish to use my time wisely. Working occasional long days is a unavoidable reality. However, the greatest boon to my personal productivity has been to forcefully create relatively short periods of intense work and ending the workday on time. Ben Franklin did it. Today, some would call it the Pomodoro Technique.
Using a modified version of the Pomodoro Technique triggers me into an intense work session but has the added benefit of also breaking me out of it. I can easily forget to eat lunch or take breaks if I’m not reminded to do so. Having a timer that gets me focused on a specific task and also forces me out of that task has helped me a lot. I’m more productive and less anxious. A win win.
I’ve found a variety of ways to do this over the years from bullet journaling to setting reminders and timers to blocking out times on a calendar. These days, I’m using an app called Structured – at the beginning of each day I create general blocks of time within the app for each activity I need to do. I use generic names like Code, Break, Support Emails, Lunch, Documentation, etc. Structured isn’t my to-do list, it is a when-to-do-what list.
I don’t always stay perfectly on schedule and sometimes I do a little more than the timer wants. But overall it forces me into and out of intensely productive work sessions.
This candence of work, break, working again, and ultimately stopping work has easily been the number one productivity hack of my career. When measured over the long term, rather than day-to-day, I can say that I’m far more productive now in my career than I was when I was younger and working far longer hours.
This includes personal projects too. Creating self-imposed deadlines and giving myself only small windows of time in which to reach them, forces me to be incredibly productive.
In fact, 2023 has been my most productive year professionally by far. And I’m confident that 2024 will be also.
Slack’s Workforce Index research tells us a lot of things we already know; working long hours and having too many meetings decreases productivity. Taking care of ourselves, making time for breaks throughout the day, and spending time away from work actually leads to more productive outcomes when measured over time.
After a few extremely busy weeks full of rewarding and fast paced work, I’m happy to announce that I’m joining NerdPress as Senior Product Manager. We’ve acquired Grow Social from Mediavine, renamed it Hubbub, and we plan to invest in improving this popular WordPress plugin.
The Hubbub logoHubbub comes in two flavors; Lite and Pro. Hubbub Lite is available via the WordPress Plugin Directory and Hubbub Pro is available via our website.
Both variations of the plugin offer a suite of tools for making it easy for website visitors to share your website’s content on their favorite social networks. The Pro version of the plugin extends that featureset by including a few additional networks and also pulling in some statistics to let you know how your content is doing across the web.
We plan on expanding the current set of features in both Lite and Pro and I’m very excited to say that we’ll be adding platforms on the open web as well.
We have a lot of plans and a lot of work to do. I’m very grateful to Andrew Wilder and the entire NerdPress team for welcoming me into their super awesome company to spearhead this effort. Follow along!
You can follow Hubbub across the web: @morehubbub@mastodon.social, @morehubbub on X, @morehubbub on Facebook, etc.
I do not intentionally block ads. I do, however, intentionally block ad tracking. And I think this distinction is important.
This morning I read Manuel Moreale’s recent post On Ad Blockers wherein they struggle to find an argument against blocking all ads on the web.
“Every time I stumble on a discussion about blocking ads on the web I ask myself if there even is a compelling argument against it.”
I understand the struggle because the web is so much nicer without ads. And I almost never click on ads so of what value are they? It could be argued, and Manuel argues this exactly, that ad revenue is wasted on me because I simply will not click on an ad.
So let’s briefly look at both of these points; the web is nicer without ads and that ad revenue is wasted on those of us that do not click on ads.
This cannot be overstated: on many websites ads are hideous, obtrusive, scandalous, tawdry, repugnant, and uninteresting. They make an otherwise very lovely webpage about lovely things well, not lovely at all. The tactics that publishers sometimes are forced to employ result in a rather ugly web.
However, if it weren’t for advertising the web wouldn’t be 1/10th the size it is today. So much of the information I’ve consumed since I dialed into the web in the 1990s has been funded by advertising dollars.
Back in August I responded to an article by Robin Rendle with a post titled How to fix the web and I wrote this similar sentiment:
“But I’m also a realist and I understand that without advertising so much of the stuff I find useful, entertaining, and valuable on the web simply wouldn’t exist.”
So, to point one, yes ads are oftentimes rather repulsive and downright bleh… but, would the website you’re viewing even exist if it weren’t for those ads?
A bit more on what we might be able to do personally to change this reality after we cover point two.
Ad views are not wasted on you simply because you do not click on them. In the ad world these views are called impressions. A term that sort of holds a double meaning. Yes, the ad is loaded and thus is counted as an impression. But the ad should also impress something upon the viewer. If you see an ad enough times you’ll remember it. And if you remember it at the time you need the thing advertised, that is very valuable indeed.
The reality is that most people do not click ads and most do not purchase a product the first time they see the ad for it. And it turns out advertisers are well aware of this.
In 1885, 1885!, Thomas Smith published a guide titled Successful Advertising and his theory was that it took 20 times for a customer to see an ad or brand before they might commit to a purchase. This longstanding controversial topic is called effective frequency.
Pay-per-click is a modern invention that is of incredible value. Intent driven marketing was an absolute boon for small businesses being able to spend their advertising budget directly on their potential customers.
However, it is also a model that is slowly being retired.
Dan Taylor, VP of Global Ads at Google Adsense, recently announced that Adsense is shifting to an all impression based model.
“AdSense will soon transition from primarily paying publishers per click to the display industry standard of paying per impression.”
The world’s largest advertising platform wouldn’t likely make this big of a shift if the true value wasn’t in the impression.
The modern web is fueld by advertising and I see no end in sight for that reality. So, I do not block ads. I simply want advertising platforms to be forced to focus on displaying well designed, relevant, and privacy focused ads. How?
To reiterate my piece from August in brief:
- We all need to hold bad actors in the advertising space accountable both for privacy invading practices and for downright disgusting ads by blocking tracking not ads.
- We can kindly and constantly remind publishers they can do better by designing sane ad layouts, screening their ads, and standing their ground when it comes to bottom-of-the-barrel advertisers. We do this primarily by choosing what publisher’s websites to visit.
- Visit webpages that take privacy seriously and strive to display ads pleasantly.
- Do not visit webpages that employ trackers and litter their layouts with meretricious ads.
The sad reality is that the vast majority of the world’s population rather thoughtlessly browses the web without much regard for what ads are showing, what data is being tracked about them, and how those pageviews are empowering an industry rife with bad practices. So it is up to the platforms (browsers) and the publishers (web developers?) and the rest of us to do our part in keeping them in check.
When my blog goes quiet you know I’m very busy. I’m looking forward to announcing some personal news in early December. This morning I’ve made what is likely to be my final update to my personal website until 2024 (I added my projects to my homepage).
I discovered a small bug with GUID in my RSS feed that likely existed for an entire year. Of course I fixed it. But that also means if you’re subscribed you very likely received all of my posts in your feed reader again. My appologies. I really do try to avoid such things.
Yesterday, by pure chance, I met local photographer Rolfe Ross – whose work I’ve followed on Flickr for many years. It turns out his photos were being exhibited in the same venue as Eugene Lucas, whose photos I was there to see.
I took some very hasty photographs of the exhibit – which I shared on my Instagram Story if you’re interested. I also managed to take two color film photographs of Mr. Ross (with zero expectation of them turning out since we were in a dark, cooly lit basement). Mr. Ross agreed to sit for a portrait in the future.
If you’re reading this that means that Tuff, my now 1-year old static site generator that I’ve been rewriting from scratch for about a month, works. I’m going to write a detailed post about this rewrite but for now – if you see anything amiss on my site please do let me know.
This evening I fixed a few longstanding CSS issues on my website. Many more to go.
Back in April I built my own light box thingy for my portfolio images. Example. I’d like something more comprehensive, but I want to keep it light weight. Would it be terribly difficult to build something like the JPL uses?
For many years now Eliza and I have preferred to slow down and take our time on road trips rather than feeling rushed to get to our destination. We like to visit tucked away places. Do a little shopping. Or enjoy a drink. This usually adds about a day of traveltime to any of our trips.
On a wet, cool February day in 2020, while making our way home from visiting friends in the state of Georgia, we stopped into Chisholm Vineyards in rural Virginia.
Chisholm Vineyards, Canon AE-1 ProgramOne of the advantages of visiting these places on odd travel days is we usually arrive just after they open or during a non peak business hour. This means we often speak to the proprietor, learn the story about the business, and get a bit more service than the average customer. This was the case with these vineyards.
Based on Chisholm Vineyard’s Instagram account I can see that their grounds are far more photogenic in the summer months. We’ll have to make a point to stop there again soon.
Colin Walker, on his personal blog (which is looking sharp as ever) about what he gets from blogging in public:
“I feel compelled to write, to share, and there is an intense satisfaction in doing so. The sharing is a secondary but essential aspect; while journalling is a rewarding process it doesn’t fill the same emotional gap as writing in public – at least for me.”
If you’re a blogger or microblogger of any kind it is worth taking the time to read his entire post. I mean… “I feel that when you have your own blog there is an innate curiosity, a pull to find others, and a desire to read the words of interesting people that goes beyond any other offline behaviour.” … YES.
See also
In January 2021 I posted my typical day which resulted in some fun people following suit on their own blogs.
Lately, my typical day is less than typical. I’ve been on a tear for about 12 months with side projects. This means that my day is jammed. But here is a glimpse…
- 5-6:00am – wake up, shower, daily scripture.
- 6-7:30am – Work on side projects: Stripe Transfer customer projects, coding, photography, or CCBUILT episode editing.
- 7:30am – drive to work, listen to podcast via Apple Podcasts.
- 8am – Prep for the day at work.
- 10am – On Monday and Wednesday I have a rather lengthy reoccuring meeting. My stance on meetings hasn’t really changed – however, I’m trying to be a good colleague. On Tuesday and Thursday I’m working and on Friday I’m conducting a Bible study.
- 12pm – Lunch. Usually I try to catch up on the now distributed social web – NetNewswire, Mastodon, Threads, Instagram – in that order.
- 1-4pm – Monday through Thursday I try to fill this with work as much as possible. On Friday’s we’re working on a car for CCBUILT (which also including recording video and taking photographs).
- 5-10pm – Sometimes side projects, in the winter darkroom printing, a lot of YouTube (I’m now paying for Premium because I watch so much YouTube).
I accomplish an incredible amount in my side project time in the early morning. I’m definitely a morning person. Having that time be compressed has served me very well. I’m far less productive in the evening after working about 11 hours. Almost daily I wish I did more at night.
My current pace feels untenable. I’ve never been this busy. I’m hoping something changes soon.
I haven’t shared new photographic work in a while. I’ve been struggling to find the time – even though it is easily my favorite hobby. To help unclog my creative pipes, I’m slowly releasing unfinished work.
Here is a new photo series, Where I – a collection of images of specific locations based on vivid childhood memories.
Starting in December 2022 I began capturing these locations digitally. I will return to photograph them on black and white film before making darkroom prints.
Mandy Brown, on two modes of thinking and how we should all try to practice both to be useful to our colleagues:
“Talkers need to recognize that not everyone loves to think out loud, and that giving space for writing is part of what it means to make use of the best brains around you. Writers need to remember that writing isn’t some perfected ideal of thinking and that making space for the messy, chaotic, and improvisational work of talking things out is often exactly what a team needs to create change. Whichever mode you prefer, it’s not feasible to abstain from the other; doing good, collaborative work requires that you practice both modes.”
Her post really reasonated with me as I feel as though I’m a writer in a talker-leaning organization currently. It was a good reminder for me to practice more of the talking side of things but also – I hope – a reminder to my colleagues about the usefulness of writing. I’ve sent it to my team.
I’ve written several times about mixed reality experiences over the last 6 or 7 years here on my blog. I recently went back and looked at some of those posts and so I thought I’d sum up my thinking as it stands today, as well as detail what I hope to see from Apple’s headset.
For quick context, VR means that you can only see the virtual world, AR means that you can see some amount of the real world in addition to virtual elements, and MR refers to the broader landscape of experiences that blend any amount of those two.
My main interest has been in seeing a well executed AR experience primarily because I haven’t seen a great VR one yet. Some VR experiences are fun but none of them are very productive.
What do I mean by productive?
Using a Mac on a large screen with a good keyboard and mouse is arguably the most productive set of tools ever devised for the human mind. Information and creation I/O out the wazoo. For the last several decades no one, including Apple, has made a more productive platform. While the iPhone and iPad are very useful platforms that I use every single day, they simply are no where near as productive (yet?) as the desktop computer paradigm. So far my use of any MR experience has felt super unproductive. Doing something as simple as browsing the web in a VR experience has been a slow and clunky experience.
In my personal life experience, here are my most productive platforms in order of how much I can get done while using them:
- A Mac laptop plugged into a large screen with a good keyboard and mouse
- iPad with a keyboard
- iPhone (especially with voice recording, camera’s ability to scan documents, etc.)
- A good notebook and pen
Of course, this list needs a big “it depends on what I’m doing” asterisk. There are some tasks, like scanning in handwritten notes, that the iPhone has jumped way way ahead on over the last few years. Or other tasks, like sketching out ideas for my garden, that pen and paper are simply far better suited for. But overall, for the work that I do the Mac reigns supreme.
For my use, I’d love an augmented experience that enhances my productivity not one that encumbers it. I have no interest in using a platform that makes me less productive simply because it looks cool.
OK, so that is where my thoughts are today on MR.
On the cusp of Apple’s headset, which seems very likely to be previewed at this year’s WWDC, I’m looking forward to where they’ve settled on this. Will it be a platform built for fully immersed fun experiences like Ready Player One? Or, will it be a productive augmented version of what we have now like Minority Report?
It is my hope that within 3 or 4 versions of Apple’s headset - say, by 2026 or so - that using an Apple headset for productive work will be as good or better than using an iPad with a keyboard. If they've somehow figured out how to be more productive than using a Mac then they've shot the stars.
If those are my hopes what are my worries?
Apple hasn’t shown itself to be good at creating a virtual assistant and I think the headset would likely require one. Siri is the worst virtual assistant currently on the market. Last night, I asked Siri “How many inches is 500 millimeters of rain?” and it replied with a link to the web to figure it out on my own. I rephrased my question “How many inches is 500 millimeters?” and it replied accurately. I confused it because I said the word rain? Using Siri today while at the same time using ChatGPT or Bard or the like really shows the gap Apple has to make up.
But perhaps they’ve been working as hard on Siri as they have on the headset and they’ve waited to debut the two together? An all new Siri 2.0 that is available on all devices including Apple’s new headset? Given Siri’s reputation in the market I imagine they will have to touch on how they’ve improved it dramatically for this new device.
Another worry I have is how uncomfortable and draining using most headsets are. Use any MR device on the market for a few hours and you’ll see what I mean. The devices themselves feel like a lunchbox on your face and your eyes, ears, neck, etc. are all knackered when you’re done.
One last note regarding price: I think the first version being $3,000 is totally plausible. Perhaps Apple will have a $3,000 build just for developers that they can then return for Apple credit like they did with the Apple silicon transition. If the device is great and makes me as productive as using an iPad or better than $3,000 sounds good to me. I'm sure the price could come down slightly over time.
I'm very hyped that Apple is entering this market. I genuinely hope they have something special to offer. If the headset isn't meant for me but is more geared towards people that play games or will watch movies on the device that is fine too. But I'll be looking for something that enhances my productivity.
My approach to building Tuff, my static site generator that I began working on last November, was to jump in as quickly as possible by publishing my personal website publicly very early in the development process. Doing so forced me to make rapid improvements and to focus on the most important features.
By spending 5am to 7am most weekday mornings I was able to publish my entire website publicly within 14 days of starting to code and I wrote a short blurb on how Tuff works within 30. Considering that my personal site has a portfolio, podcast, and thousands of blog posts I was surprised by that timeline.
As a quick aside, this 5am to 7am time slot for coding personal projects did not appear on my typical day post from January 2021 because I wasn't doing it then. As I get older I find myself waking earlier and earlier. Rather than blow all of that time on YouTube (I love my YouTube) I decided, just a few weeks after that post, to begin working on personal projects instead. I've done a lot of programming, photography, and side hustle business during these early morning sessions over the last two years and I hope to continue. Waking early and being productive feels like a super power.
Development on Tuff has not stopped. I've been chipping away at improvements to this website, the efficiency of the build process, and adding the capability to build multiple websites. As you can see in the changelog, each release brings a few small improvements but they begin to add up over time.
One feature that I've missed the most since switching to Tuff for my personal website has been search, which I finished a first version of yesterday.
In very early January, just a month or so into development, I added a local command line search command to Tuff to help me find posts in my archive. It works pretty well and I continue to use this to help me find older posts. But I knew I needed to add on site search so that visitors to my site could do some basic searching. I wasn't sure how I was going to go about it statically. Should I build a client side search forcing the visitor of the site to download some large index? Should I use a third party tool? Should I do what many have done and push people to a search engine?
I thought, don't be dogmatic about building static. Most modern content management systems are full of bloat, load too much unnecessary junk on the page, and have far more features than most people need for a personal site. It is why I decided to build Tuff to begin with. But that doesn't mean I have to get all self righteous about server-side code and only publish HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I can sprinkle in some server-side code where it makes sense.
That is why I'm now calling Tuff a Static+ Site Generator. S+SG. Is this a thing? I don't know. Don't forget, in my original building Tuff post I mentioned that I never looked at other static site generators. And I still haven't. I'm oblivious to best practices.
As of today, I use Tuff to build three sites; this site you're reading now, a private local network website that showcases over 100,000 of our family photos by date, and a new static site for The Watercolor Gallery that I hope to finish before the end of the year. In addition to that I'd like to begin working on publishing Stripe Transfer, Stupid, and at least three other websites that I've yet to debut with it.
Tuff is now a tool I plan to use for the rest of my computing life (see also). I love it.
John Gruber on Humane's recent demo at TED:
"So far, it feels like Humane’s entire premise is founded on that same mistake: building a new device intended to replace our phones, without that new device being able to do any of the dozens of things we love to do on our phones that require a display."
As I tooted over the weekend, Humane is starting to smell a lot like Magic Leap. They are building hype with their promotional videos and product demos - that, do seem impressive in some ways - only to raise hundreds of millions of dollars rather than shipping products.
In 2018 I wrote how Magic Leap was actually hurting themselves by building hype they couldn't possibly deliver on.
"While this release is for developers to get their hands on the devices, I believe the hype this company has built around itself has hurt them. No matter what they showed in this first version it would have been disappointing to many."
And that turned out to be true. We all read quotes from various people that saw the Magic Leap technology and they all proclaimed it was world changing stuff. As a result Magic Leap raised billions of dollars. That is billions, with a B. But the actual devices turned out to be lackluster and, in fact, never really shipped to the consumer.
Have you ever seen a Magic Leap device? Will you ever see a Humane device?
See also: Magic Leap of faith.
Over the last few weeks I’ve begun using the recent crop of AI-powered services in my daily work and I’ve found them to be an enormous boost to my productivity and fun to play with. I do not know if these human-like chat services will end up causing great harm to the earth’s population or not — but as of today, I think they can be both useful and entertaining.
I’d like to start off this post by describing what I think AI is. Not because I think there is any confusion on the matter but because I want a definition I can point people to. A service that uses a bunch of learned prompts and responses to use various APIs to present you information in a human readable or audio format are not what I would consider AI. Think Siri. Siri, while it may very well have portions of it that are using AI-data sets, I do not consider AI. Siri feels much more to me like a gargantuan list of IF THEN statements.
IF you ask Siri for anything relating at all to the weather THEN it will pretend to be a human and answer in a human way. “Hey Sir, will it rain today?” “Yes, there is a 70% chance it will rain today.” is a good answer but far from being an intelligent one. If you ask “Hey Siri, what time will the rain start and stop today?” it will almost certainly fall on its face. In fact, Siri falls on its face more often than not.
IF you ask Google's assistant a similar question it does a far better job of trying to deliver you the answer you want. For instance, you can “OK Google” a fairly complex mathematics query and, in my experience, it does a good job. Where Siri is like a very young child trying to respond to adult questions, Google is somewhere in the teenager area. But a teenager that does not know how to use Google, read the first few links, and summarize an answer.
I’ve heard that Alexa is even better than Google but I have almost no experience using Alexa personally.
Siri, Google, and Alexa are not even close to what I would consider AI.
ChatGPT, which is the AI-powered chat service I’ve been using the most, is most definitely intelligent. And it is improving rapidly. My guess is that in a few years ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 will feel like Siri does today. Which is a little mind blowing to be honest.
I have a few ways in which I’m describing ChatGPT in conversation with those that do not understand large language models, data corpuses, neural nets, or RLHF. To be clear, I do not understand those things either. But I can at least navigate their broad concepts. I think. Maybe I should ask ChatGPT about that? Anyway, here are the analogies I’m currently using.
- Imagine doing a Google search (or, Duck.com because you’re a sane person) and you read the first 1,000 links in totality. And then you distill what you’ve learned into a single paragraph. In 5 seconds.
- Imagine you could ask someone with 25-years of experience in a given field (programming, music, etc.) a question or to do a task for you and they were able to complete it in a few seconds.
If computers are a bicycle for the mind, AI is an e-bike for the work you do on that computer. (I’m not settled on this metaphor. It’s a WIP.)
I’m using ChatGPT, DALL•E and their ilk for a variety of my daily tasks. It takes a little while to retrain my muscle memory to start at ChatGPT and go from there, rather than starting from scratch, but I’m slowly getting there.
I’d like to describe just one use case from this past week where I used ChatGPT alongside my manual process and the obvious benefits it would have on my work. This isn’t a use case you haven’t heard of as many, many others are doing the same. But I will say it impressed me nonetheless. I used ChatGPT to write some JavaScript and it did remarkably well.
At work we offer our customers something we call company stores. A company store is very much like an e-commerce store - only we have most or all of their inventory in our warehouse and we can deliver it to their locations the next day. Anyway, on many of these stores there is a large rotating banner area on the homepage. We wanted to hide this rotating banner on all other pages. Since the software we use wouldn’t allow us to do this on the server side, we are left with the choice of doing it client side. This means that I was going to write a simple bit of JavaScript to 1) determine whether or not the current page was the homepage, and 2) if it was not the homepage, hide the rotating banner.
This isn’t a difficult piece of code. Anyone with any amount of JavaScript experience could write this code in a few minutes. But that is just it. You can't copy and paste this specific code from a random result from a search engine. You need experience and then you need to write this code. I started this project from scratch and it took me about 15 minutes or so to write code that worked for our purposes. I would call the code OK not great.
I then asked ChatGPT to write the code for me. My prompt was “In Javascript hide a section element that has a data attribute of data-name if the URL is anything other than XXX” (where XXX is the URL of the homepage). The code it returned was better than my code. The way I would describe it is, if I had 2 hours to refine the code that I wrote in 15 minutes, I would have written the same code that ChatGPT wrote the first time in a matter of seconds. I did have to make one very small tweak to the code to run it on production - but it was a tweak there was no way ChatGPT would know to make.
It felt like writing code without using your hands. More often than not, the code I’m about to write is fully realized in my brain and I just need to type out the characters onto my computer. I may make a few mistakes along the way, or need to search for a specific syntax that I had forgotten about, but the rest of the code is menial work to type out. But if I start out with the idea of the code using a detailed prompt to ChatGPT I don’t need to use my hands to write the code. I save a huge amount of time.
This experience and many others (which lead to hours being saved not just minutes) leads me to believe that for many things that I do day-to-day; write, interpolate data, program, etc. I should be using ChatGPT as an accelerator.
My initial optimism for crypto, which has all but completely faded away (the entire industry feels like a squandered opportunity at this point), has me reticent to excitement about AI. And I do not know how to predict the next several years of “improvements” to this technology. But as of today, it certainly feels both useful and fun and I plan on continuing to use it to get work done faster.
Over the weekend I finished Looking At Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski. Szarkowski is, as of this moment, my favorite photographic writer and curator.
For the past few days I've been testing out Wavelength - a group messaging app that is currently only available on Apple's platforms. It reminds me a lot of Quill, the former messaging app that was swallowed whole by Twitter just prior to ... you know.
Why use Wavelength? It is tailor made for group messaging. Focusing on starting asynchronous conversations rather than realtime chats. While it is possible to have a one-on-one direct message with someone or to host thousands of people - it is very clearly made for a relatively small group of people to have a private discussion.
John Gruber, adviser to the Wavelength team, provides this analogy:
"Wavelength is designed for the area between those extremes. Think: groups that could fit in a bus, or even an airplane."
Out of the gate Wavelength is platform native, encrypted, thoughtfully designed, has no ads, doesn't collect personal information, and isn't owned by a tech giant.
So far my use of the app has been limited since I do not know very many people that have it yet. To fix that I started a Wavelength chat for darkroom printers (you can join it too by clicking that link). The number of darkroom printers in the world is dwindling and finding one another proves to be a challenge. So this chat is a good way to share tips and stories, ask questions of others with more experience, and to test out Wavelength.
I don't know if my darkroom printers group chat is best served via Wavelength longterm. Personally, I prefer knowledge share like this to happen in public so that others can benefit from it. But it has been a great way to test out this app.
If you find yourself in need of a group messaging app that fits these criteria give Wavelength a shot. And be sure to send them feedback as well, it seems they are paying close attention and making adjustments.
Yesterday I finished reading Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford and Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. I'd recommend both. Chiang is great. I think I need to read more by him.
Wind, stirs the dust
This is it. The final WIS link list post. This series of posts has spanned 10 years.
I'm happy that I published 99 lists of links and that thousands of people have clicked on them to enjoy the interesting, creative, useful, and fun webpages I stumbled upon over the last decade. I'm saddened, however, that so many of the links I've shared no longer work.
I suppose that is the state of things. Websites that feel permanent are anything but. And while The Internet Archive is a true treasure, it is most definitely incomplete. Most of the websites archived into The Wayback Machine are but shadows of that which they represent.
When I started putting this list, the one hundredth, together I began at #1 and slowly started moving forward through time. I was trying my best to find the most interesting links that are still active. After going through many, many links I found that the vast majority of them were dead, not found, or changed altogether.
Blah.
So rather than share a "best of" list made up of all the previous lists, I've decided to publish a new fresh and final list.
There is nothing overtly special about the following links. They are simply more of the same, amazing, inspiring, and funky things I've found recently while browsing the web. I do hope you enjoyed this series. I'm looking forward to my next series which I'm still working on the format of.
Enjoy!
- Video: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed - An upcoming HBO documentary chronicling the photographic and activist work of Nan Goldin.
- IG Video: Stanley Tucci makes a martini - Somehow I missed this when it originally went viral during the pandemic. He makes a good martini. And I believe this video turned into an awful lot of work for Tucci. Consider me a member of the Tucci gang.
- Simon Collison on Apple Music - I've been really digging into the Apple Music library. I'm coming at it in a variety of ways by using Shazam, finding obscure music blogs, and by following curators like Simon.
- Videos: DIRT by Huckberry - This video series that encourages you to explore locally by Huckberry is very well made. I'm really enjoying it.
- HTML Energy - Handwritten HTML gives these people all the feels.
- Monty Don's tips & advice - I've probably linked to this tons of times. It doesn't matter. It deserves a relink. Each month Monty publishes a blog post with tips for the month.
- How the ring got good - Robin Sloan shows us that even J.R.R. Tolkien needs to iterate a lot on an idea.
- My Girl with a Pearl - When Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring goes out on loan, the museum gets creative with some fan generated content.
- Novella - "thoughtful films for creative people".
- Smartless - A podcast co-hosted by Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes.
- Quanta - An app that allows you to broadcast your vinyl records via Airplay while at the same time showing you album art and lyrics.
Thank you for looking at these links. If you don't already, please consider subscribing to my blog to see what is coming next. And also follow me on Mastodon!
The ease of Ivory on Mastodon has me sharing a lot more than I had been over the last few years. Ivory is on my phone, tablet, and my laptop. It is very easy to write a post, share an image, boost someone else's post, link to a good blog post, etc.
My homegrown static site generator Tuff is super simple to publish with too. It is far easier than WordPress was towards the end of my use with it. However, Ivory on Mastodon is even easier than Tuff. When publishing is frictionless I'm more likely to share.
Because of this ease of publishing, I've been posting far more on Mastodon than here on my blog. At least, more of the shorter titleless posts. And because Mastodon is an open platform, supports RSS, etc. I don't feel as though I'm publishing for someone else's benefit. I don't feel as though I'm lobbing stones into a volcano like I would if I was tweeting.
I've decided to double down on Mastodon. I plan to publish more there, not less. I've added my Mastodon RSS feed to my Micro.blog account. And I plan to structure my posts far more like I would structure my posts here on my blog. I'm treating my Mastodon account not as just another social media account, but as a first class publishing platform for my content.
I'm planning on moving my accounts to my own instance on my own domain. The Mastodon project has gotten a lot of attention over the last several months and that has had some benefits on the underlying code. The recent releases have really improved the application, its storage and process needs, etc. And I can only imagine that will continue. It is my hope that by the time I set up my own instance the project will have gotten a lot of great updates that I'll benefit from.
One side benefit of publishing to Mastodon rather than my blog is the ease that others have of sharing my content. Engagement on Mastodon is rather high. Look at Cabel Sasser's findings. Some of my posts have gotten a fair number of boosts. This one had over 400 boosts. I have several with more than 100. If you've read my blog for any length of time you know I don't collect nor care about statistics -- but these numbers do tell a story. The microblogosphere is alive and well. People can publish their thoughts and be heard. They aren't being hidden behind some algorithm that is optimized for ad revenue.
It is a very exciting time and I'm happy to be part of it.
As for my blog here. I still plan on publishing blog posts, entries into my portfolio of crazy projects and more podcast episodes. I may even build a way to bring some of the content I publish on Mastodon back onto this site in some way. The future looks fun!
Side note: I hope that Tapbots or Iconfactory end up building an all-in-one app that plugs into the fediverse but also lets you publish content on your own domain either via Micro.blog, WordPress, or some other platform that has ActivityPub built in. Or, perhaps any platform that has ActivityPub. The pieces all certainly seem to be there. And at least Iconfactory seems to be toying with the idea. How cool!
Tuff, my static site builder, can build a simple directory for me to view my entire photo library. It creates views for each year and month and also checks various backups - both local and cloud - to make sure the files are properly backed up. It warns me if a file isn't backed up.
The entire process takes 3.328 seconds and I have 153,000+ photos and videos in four locations.
Thank you modern computer.
Perhaps you’ve had this experience… you walk into a place of business and see the computer and software they use to do their scheduling, billing, and ordering and you notice they are decades old. But, have you seen how productive they are? More often than not they are so fast that the computer has a hard time keeping up with their inputs.
This idea keeps rolling around in my head that I could purposely construct a similar situation for myself on my personal computer.
Could my next Mac be the last Mac I ever need to buy? And can I run the same software on it for decades allowing me to become even more productive than I am today? What would I gain? What would I lose?
On average I buy a new Mac every 5 years or so. Each time I’ve upgraded to a new Mac I keep the old Mac around for at least an additional 5 years. The laptop my wife currently uses for Zoom is a Mac from 2012 and we see no reason to replace it anytime soon.
Macs last. And the technology inside is so capable these days - especially the M series chips - that I’m beginning to wonder if I will ever need to upgrade after I purchase my next Mac. And that sort of excites me.
I currently use a 2019 16” MacBook Pro. It has an 8-core 2.4 GHz i9 Intel processor with 64GB of DDR4 RAM and an 8GB Radeon Pro 5500M graphics chip. It also has a terabyte of flash storage. In 2019 this Mac cost $4,200. I am very happy with this computer. For my day-to-day work I have more than enough resources. There is very little reason to upgrade this computer for many, many years to come.
Though, having the M-series all day battery life, rather than the dismal 2 hours I get now, is a huge temptation.
Battery life aside, though, I could conceivably use this computer until 2024 (which would be my average) or even 2029 which would be my stretch goal.
So, let’s say I keep my average streak going and I buy a new Mac in 2024 or 2025. That would mean I’ll likely end up with an M3 or M4 series chip from Apple. I like the idea of that because those chips will be multiple iterations in on their already well regarded chipset. And some of the M1 series chips will be nearly 5 years old at that time so we will see if they have similar longevity to the Intel chips. If I were able to hold out until 2029 the benefits would be even greater. If I plan to spend a similar amount of money on my next Mac, is there a possibility I can plan on keeping it for the rest of my life?
Why would I want to do that? I’m only 42 and I plan on trying to live at least 4 more decades. Could I possibly have a Mac that would run for 40 years?
Let’s talk about the current trajectory of software.
I’m a little worried about software these days. The best software ever written may already be in our past. Modern day app frameworks that are full of bloat, the overwhelming demand for cloud-first apps that barely work without an internet connection, and the ability to create truly great user interfaces seems to be dying — all of these factors add up to an uncertain future in software from my point of view.
The rapid march of software progress can be an exhausting thing as you get older. What if I was to just stop updating my software? As it stands today, I really love my Mac. macOS Catalina (I haven't updated to Ventura yet) is pretty good — arguably not the best it has ever been, but certainly very good — and many of the apps I use day to day allow me to be very productive. I feel superhuman on my Mac with the current software it is running. And the programming languages I use; PHP, JavaScript, a bit of AppleScript or Swift, work amazingly well on my Mac.
To illustrate this point, in just about a month of early weekday mornings I wrote my own static site generator in PHP from scratch to build this site you’re reading now. It works remarkably well. It builds tens of thousands of files in just seconds. And my code isn’t very good. How much more productive do I need to get?
I could lose this superpower. Software will change. macOS is likely to become more restrictive. Programming languages will be deprecated. The keyboard and mouse may be replaced with gestures, voice, and eye movements. Which is all well and good for the next generation of users. In order to stay productive in my work and hobbies (photography, software development, and blogging) I think having a platform that stays in relative stasis over the next 4 decades could be an incredible asset.
I also think about large data sets like my photo library. Each time Apple releases an update of macOS I feel a pit in my stomach that they may change something that will completely blow away years of my cataloging work. They’ve done it before and I’d be naive to think it couldn’t happen again. Which is why I’ve developed my own workflow. I want my photo library to work until I die. And I don’t want to spend another minute redoing it.
The prospect of possibly having a computing platform that stays relatively the same for the rest of my life and prioritizes good usability, speed, reliability, and saving data locally to disk is very exciting. And it may just be that the only way I can ensure that I will have that is by stopping time and refusing to keep up with the latest technology.
--
It appears I'm not alone. While I've been thinking about this topic over the last several weeks, I've noticed others expressing similar sentiments in a variety of ways. I've only made note of a few of them. Such as Ev Williams wants to keep his small phone, Paul Stamatiou would like an old Powerbook to write on, Dan Rubin and Joe Van Cleave use typewriters every day, Jeremy Keith has expressed opinions about frontend web development getting out of hand. None of these people are saying exactly what I'm saying. But all of them are sort of part of the same milieu - people that have been around in computing for a long time sort of wishing for how we used to do things. In 5 or 10 more years perhaps we will long for how we did things today.
Simon Reynolds, in December, marking the 20th anniversary of Blissblog:
I honestly can't see that anyone has invented a better format than the blog, at least for what I want to do.
Simon's entire post is dripping with flattering remarks about how enjoyable and rewarding blogging is.
Those of us in the 20+ year blogging club obviously love it - why else would we continue to do it? It isn't because it is the best way to reach the most people. Simon writes:
Blogging is effectively narrowcast, but it retains an aura of broadcast, the tantalizing possibility of reaching more than the pre-converted, the already tuned-in. (In that sense, not unlike the terrestrial broadcast pirate radio station).
I love the idea of a blog being like a pirate radio station. Consider my flag flying proudly! Arrr!
The entire post is a must-read for bloggers.
/via Michael Donaldson on Mastodon.
I'm refactoring Tuff - my static site builder - to support multiple websites so I've been posting more on Mastodon than here the last week or so. That should change now as Tuff is able build 3 very different websites. Lots more to do but I see the light.
Recently finished reading Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ Copious detail. Fast read if not for the length. Author a bit gushy.
I'm continuing to whittle away at my to do list for Tuff - my static site builder. Every few days I'm able to check off a task. Lots of small improvements add up over time.
I'm putting the finishing touches on a presentation of my portrait The Engineer that I'll be recording for my YouTube channel.
I'm hoping to record better audio without spending too much money. Each presentation I make I want to improve.
There have been several waves of activity on Mastodon since I signed up in 2017. Those waves have increased in frequency and intensity. Admittedly, while I did put in some effort early on, I wasn’t really part of that first wave. I rode in on a much later wave in mid-2022 and haven’t looked back since.
Waves, as waves do, flow in and ebb. Each time I witnessed a wave of new users on Mastodon it was almost immediately followed by those same users floating back out to sea.
The most recent wave has proven to be different. People are sticking around on the beach. Setting down their blankets, getting their umbrellas firmly planted in the sand, and… OK I’ve pushed this metaphor far enough.
The point is that the latest surge to Mastodon seems to have people sticking around and using the service. Apps are being built. Connections are being made. Thousands of instances are being spun up. And tons of platforms are working hard to join the fediverse via ActivityPub.
So, if you and I are not building an app, running a large Mastodon instance, or working on the Mastodon code, how can we help Mastodon and the larger fediverse? Here are a few humble suggestions and things that I am already doing or plan to do in the near future.
- Consider donating regularly to the Mastodon instance you use, the Mastodon project, and pay for the apps that you use. Doing so will ensure all of these projects have the resources they need to continue improving the service, keeping the instances reliable, and improving the apps.
- Really move to Mastodon. If you are sitting on the fence by publishing to Twitter and simply lurking on Mastodon, give some consideration to moving the bulk if not all of your publishing to Mastodon. (Please read the note at the end of this post)
- Ask friends to try Mastodon. If you see a friend that may not know about Mastodon, take the time to let them know how it works, why you like it, etc.
- Help organizations to move. If you manage social media accounts for your own projects, for your business, for the company you work for, etc. take the time to set up Mastodon accounts for them and move the bulk of their publishing to Mastodon as well. Perhaps even give consideration to creating an instance for the organization.
- If you have a blog, consider linking to Mastodon posts as cited sources. Perhaps even going out of your way to work a link to a Mastodon post in your future posts. This will create more links to Mastodon content as well as expose your readers to the resource.
One last suggestion, and it is a big one. Set up an instance. If you have the needs that having an instance would accomodate and you can afford it, consider creating an instance. Who needs an instance? If you work at an organization that will need multiple accounts, you have multiple commercial projects that each have their own account, or you just love to tinker and own your portion of the web, consider creating an instance. Be sure to plan to invest enough to keep it around for many years to come. Creating an instance will help in a variety of ways.
By creating more instances we spread out the load on the existing instances. Yes, I realize it doesn’t fully remove the load since all instances need to interact each other. But, we all can’t be and don’t want to be on the same few instances. We don’t want any instances that get ridiculously large. Some of them are already too large, in my opinion. We don't want to simply recreate Twitter. Having an instance can also help to provide better feedback and data to the main Mastodon project on how instances work, how efficient they are, and how easy they are to set up.
There are so many organizations that I hope spin up their own instances; news outlets, NASA, federal, state, and local government organizations, libraries, etc. The Internet Archive's Mastodon instance is such a great example to show people and organizations how it could work.
Just a side note: Twitter doesn't have to lose for the fediverse to win. In reality, if Twitter ever decided to add ActivityPub and join the fediverse it would be good for everyone involved. My main reason for recommending using Mastodon over Twitter is the amount of control you then get over your own content and audience. On Twitter, you have very little to no control over that, on Mastodon you have nearly total control. It is simply a better option that may end up with more reach than Twitter in the coming years.
--
In 2017 I wrote a similar post How to support Mastodon. There are a few more notes there as well.
We had a possible fireball explosion tens of thousands of feet above us in Pennsylvania. Shook our house pretty good at 10:49am Eastern.
Now I'm looking for how to properly document it with NASA.
I figured this worthy of jotting down on the weblog.
This antique store was... different
This is the penultimate WIS link list. The final list, number 100, shall reprise all previous link lists and come sometime in February. I'm looking forward to crafting a new link list reborn in a new style and with other themes. Doing anything 100 times isn't easy so I'm proud of this little series of blog posts I've made.
Onto the links!
- Life inside seawater - Photographer Angel Fitor captures some amazing living things in seawater.
- Video: Apollo 11 Animation - C-bass Productions on YouTube created a rather stunning animation timed perfectly to audio from the Apollo 11 moon landing. Riveting stuff.
- Closed on Sunday - Lofi jams from Star Wars.
- Sony Walkman - Sony is still designing and making what look like great products.
- Lightning maps - The amount of lightning happening globally at any given time is impressive.
- Sea surface temperature maps - There is so much data at our fingertips any time we need it. Fascinating.
- The sounds of atoms - Researchers are turning the Periodic Table into sounds.
- Soderberg's media diet - He consumes more media in a single day than I do in a month.
- Video: 133 Days on the Sun - Stunning timelapse of half a year or so of the Sun. A violent place.
- Alphaputt - Incredibly designed miniature golf game played on the letters of the alphabet.
- Shottr - A great free screenshot app.
- Me on Mastodon - Shameless plug here but I'm sharing a lot on Mastodon these days. If you are there and we haven't connected there please follow!
Zero inside knowledge here; but my guess is an Apple Event in February announcing Apple VR dev kits that cost $3,000 that come with a headset + Mac mini. With the device shipping at least 6-9 months later for less than that.
A very dead bird, October 2010, Plymouth, Mass. iPhone 4
Last night I revisited Simon Collison's post from early December 2022 Farewell, Twitter. I had read it shortly after he published it and while I agreed with what he wrote, it didn't hit me as hard as it did last night.
Simon claims that "others have articulated the situation better", however, last night I realized how well he managed to capture my own thinking on "the Twitter situation".
I'll be quoting several portions of his post below, but I urge you to go over to his website and read the entire thing and then come back here to read my bits.
Simon calls what is happening at Twitter "unnecessary chaos and destruction". Exactly. Ironically, I think if I wrote down on paper what I would have done to correct the business side of Twitter I would have deployed many of the same strategies that Elon Musk did. I would have reduced staff, shrunk footprint, revisited every policy and contract, etc. I would have tried to make Twitter as lean as possible as quickly as I could.
On the face of it, that is what Musk did. Except he did it in the polar opposite way of how I would hope I would have done so. I would hope that I would have been able to right the ship without throwing the passengers (both employees and users) overboard directly into the mouth's of hungry sharks.
I deleted the Twitter app and removed all bookmarks and shortcuts. I no longer go there for trends or live reactions (a real test when, for example, I want to check the vibe around this bonkers World Cup, itself a problematic yet addictive drug). No, I’m out.
During my recent break at the end of the year I had deleted the Twitter app as well as all other social apps. I like to do that when I'm on vacation, traveling, etc. It really helps me to be present. Of course, I've since reinstalled the apps and I check them fairly regularly. I've only posted on Twitter a handful of times since October of last year, but I like to use Twitter to get NBA scores, see what is happening during a news event, etc. I'm going to try to find alternative ways to get this information or simply do without it. As of today, like Simon, I've deleted the Twitter app from my phone.
I may occasionally exploit Twitter’s reach with a promo tweet, like each time I release music or cast my net wide in the search for new work. But otherwise, I’ll be absent.
I so appreciate Simon's honesty here. I've seen many people write scathing remarks about Twitter about how we should all jump over to Mastodon or our blogs, only to see them still active on Twitter. I believe the dopamine hit from posting to Twitter's large audience is addictive and very difficult to put down. And for some people, like Simon, they consider their Twitter audience vital to their work.
Fortunately, I do not care about my audience size. I never have. My blog here has always been my primary way to promote what I'm working on. And it has served me extremely well. I have a relatively small audience but I'm very thankful that small audience has a rather large reach.
His last paragraph is a bullet aimed straight at the vital organs. No doubt cathartic. Similar to Craig Hockenberry's recent diatribe - sometimes you just need to let it out!
Other tidbits and notes related to this topic:
- A short Twitter wish list - I wrote this post in April of 2022 describing what I would do on the product side of things at Twitter. I wish I had written a post about what I would have done on the business side of things.
- I believe I stated somewhere publicly that I thought Elon Musk's idea to make an X app that has similar features to China's WeChat - chat, payments, video, etc. - was a good idea. I thought Twitter was so stagnant over the last few years that a bold vision like that would help breathe life back into the platform. I still think an app like that could exist, but I no longer think Twitter would be the right foundation for it. It is clear that millions of people enjoy simple microblogging just the way that it is.
- Twitter isn't going anywhere - In 2019 I argued that no matter how terribly Twitter is run, it would survive. And somehow I still believe that. Although it is looking like Elon is going to have to sell everything he owns in order to keep it running for the next few years.
Oh man am I happy! People that hadn't written on their blog in a long time are blogging again. Websites that hadn't been updated in many years, some over a decade, are being spruced up and published to again. And popular news outlets are publishing articles about blogging.
Of course, those of us that have kept our focus on blogging know that blogging never died. The activity of publishing just moved around from platform to platform. In some cases behind a wall like on Facebook and Instagram, in others, into data silos where the content couldn't flow out onto the open web like Twitter.
Perhaps you're reading this and you totally ignored blogging over the last few decades or you're a young person just starting to venture into the blogging world. I won't cover the entire history of blogging but let me sum up what happened in just one paragraph.
The weblog exploded onto the scene in the early 2000s. Many websites were being frequently updated prior to that, but the blog format really jumped into the mainstream during that time. There were millions of active blogs. Then, social networks sprang up to help make publishing on the web easier or more approachable. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram - all of these began to see enormous growth in popularity and the amount of content that is published on them. Today, hundreds of millions of posts (which, are not unlike blog posts) are published on these three platforms daily. So, in a way, blogging is more popular than ever. The thing that changed was where people published.
And, that was a shame for a variety of reasons.
Having your own personal website is still not as easy as signing up to Instagram. And the fear of publishing to a blog paralyzes some people. However, the advantages to having your own website are myriad. You own it. The content that is on it can be visible to everyone on the web. The fate of your blog isn't tied to the fate of a public or venture backed company. Etc.
I think the resurgence we are seeing has been caused by many variables. Two primary drivers over the last few months has been the upheaval caused by unhinged billionaires and privacy invasive business models. But I think there are other factors at play too.
One possibility is that the same people that desired a much more simple publishing tool in the early 2000s are now older, wiser, more patient and desire more control, ownership, and features. When I started publishing on the web I was 15 years old. I'm 42 now. I've changed a lot over that time period. So, some of the recent surge may be that people are willing to put in the time to have a home on the web they can be proud of and that scratches their particular itches.
Then there are those that already had blogs that laid dormant for a few years. They found their audiences on Twitter and so they saw far more engagement there. And, for those willing to admit it, they became addicted to the feedback loop of having large followings on social media platforms. When they publish to their blog it sort of feels like throwing a ball into a black hole. But publishing onto social media, when you have tens of thousands of followers, feels like playing table tennis. Even with that addiction to engagement, they desire to own their audience rather than build one for a tech giant. And so they reach for their blogs hoping to bring that audience from social media onto their own platform.
Some of them will succeed. Some of them will crawl back to social media once the dust settles over the protest du jour.
Whether or not blogging is alive or dead is not a new topic of discussion. It is a topic that reoccurs every few years. I've written about it dozens of times. But the current push seems slightly different. I believe we will see many more people blogging again or, at the very least, publishing on a platform that compliments the web rather than chafe at it.
Ten years ago, I wrote:
A set of protocols or standards will need to come along to help connect all publishing platforms together. The incredibly useful features we find inside of networks like Twitter will need to find their way out onto the world wide web. This means bringing actions like following or subscribing, mentioning, citing, link previewing, etc. to the independent web and have them be completely separate from any single service.
The IndieWeb set the standards for some of the tools and protocols we now see finding footing. ActivityPub has been a boon for modern day platforms, like Mastodon, to give people the best of both worlds -- you can have your ease of publishing and be web friendly too. I hope we see a lot more platforms built from the priciples of the IndieWeb so that people don't need to think about federation, microformats, syndication feeds, webmentions, etc. People do not care about these things. Developers need to.
I'm so very happy that blogging is getting a shot in the arm.
Here are a few links worth looking at:
- The Year of the Personal Website - Matthias Ott
- Bring back personal blogging - Monique Judge for The Verge
- Personalsit.es - By Andy Bell, a showcase of personal websites
- Ooh.directory - By Phil Gyford, a directory of blogs
After a 3 week break from blogging and social media (more like 2 weeks completely, 1 week just reading and replying), I'm ready to jump back in. I have lots of plans for 2023 for my website and personal projects.
I spent January 1 in the darkroom making prints from a 35mm roll of Tri-X that I finished over the last few months.
Last day of work done. Just deleted all social apps from my phone. Going to put my nose in a book, some food, and some bourbon. 👋
Just about a month ago, for some unknown and undoubtedly a sleep deprived reason, I began building my own static site generator (SSG).
And I did it entirely wrong. This is that story.
A sensible person would have first looked at the available static site generators and tried them first. I didn't. In fact, I have only a limited amount of experience with a few SSGs. That same sensible person should have made a comprehensive feature matrix to figure out what these products offered and, perhaps, pick out the features I would need. I didn't do that either.
Instead, I wanted to see how I would solve the problem rather than looking at prior art. By doing so, perhaps I would come up with some different (and, maybe, better?) ways of doing some of the things that SSGs do. Now that I'm about a month into development I'm ready to share what I've accomplished so far. Spoiler: I don't think I came up with anything new or better. But I have had fun.
I named my SSG Tuff, the type of rock formed from volcanic ash. My mind is like a volcano spewing nonsense and Tuff is what puts it all together.
Here is how Tuff works today.
The directory structure so far:
- _lib - For external code libraries.
- dist - For the output that is the website itself
- website
- website/assets (multiple directories for images, css)
- website/content - for markdown files
- website/content/blog - blog posts (directories by YYYY/MM)
- website/content/pages - pages e.g. about
- website/content/podcast - podcast episodes
- website/content/portfolio - portfolio entries
- website/content/blog.md
- website/content/home.md
- website/content/podcast.md
- website/content/portfolio.md
- website/feeds - templates for syndication feeds
- website/layouts - HTML template files
My main objective with Tuff was to avoid a complicated technology stack and keep dependencies to a minimum. As it stands, there is but 1 code dependency and that is Parsedown. I wasn't about to rebuild a Markdown parser in PHP. Parsedown is extensible with add-ons but I don't currently use any.
Other dependencies related to the stack are that you need to be able to run PHP. I'm currently using PHP 8.1 on my Mac to run Tuff locally.
There is no magic to how Tuff works. I've set up various commands that will chew through the markdown files and spew the content out combined with the HTML in the layouts folder. Each section of the site is able to be built on its own.
For example, to build the entire website I run tuff build all from the command line. This deletes the previous build of the site and rebuilds it from scratch. Now that my website has reached a point of some sort of solid footing, I shouldn't need to rebuild the entire site very often. Most of the pages on the site do not change often so there is no need to rebuild them. However, whenever I make a change to one of the core layout files (like, say, the footer) I need to. Rebuilding the entire website, with over 15,000 files, takes less than 10 seconds. This has nothing to do with my skills as an efficient programmer and more to do with the awesome raw power under our fingertips with computers.
Other commands I have include tuff build recent which only builds the most recent posts, tuff build portfolio which rebuilds the portfolio. Of course, other commands include building the podcast pages, the other pages like the about page, etc. And, I have a command to move assets (images, CSS files) around.
I plan to make Tuff's build routine even more efficient over time. I do not agonize over every millisecond of build time, but I like the idea of touching just the files that are necessary. By doing so it will keep things like file created dates and modified times more accurate.
The built website is able to be viewed on my local computer and network so that I can test the site on other devices. For this I'm using Docker, though on a Mac I obviously don't need to do that. I just to like Docker Compose. I'm using a dead simple Apache container and that's it.
Once I've verified that my updated content has been built correctly, it is time to deploy the changes to the public site.
To deploy Tuff uses rsync. This has proven to be extremely fast. I can first request a "dry run" deploy which lists the files that will be updated during a real live deploy. I sometimes do this if I'm curious how many files will be impacted. But most often I just shoot from the hip. The deploy routine can be broken apart into smaller chunks to just deploy things like assets. I plan to break this part even more to conincide with Tuff's other build commands. This way I can deploy just a single page, just a single blog post, etc.
Backing up my website's content has never been easier. In fact, I currently have 4 copies of my website's content that are fairly up-to-date. Tuff's built-in backup command will take the local copy and push it out to OneDrive and local hard drives. This too I would like to improve to daisy chain commands together so that I don't need to run this manually. I'd also like to set up a Shortcut on macOS to either alert me when a backup is out of date or run the routine when it is.
Tuff's current featureset includes, but is not limited to:
- Home page
- Pages like about or projects
- Blog index, and pagination, posts, titleless posts
- Blog post tag indexes, examples photography, wis
- Blog date indexes, example January 2018
- Portfolio index and entries
- Podcast index and entries
- Mastodon favorites (gathers Mastodon faves at build time)
- RSS feed
- Social media redirects, example cdevroe.com/yt redirects to YouTube
- Featured images for portfolio and podcast post types, including image counts
- And text files. Each page or post has a corresponding text file. Here is the one for this post. Append .text to most URLs and you'll find the content. I stole this idea from Daring Fireball.
Of course, there is still much to do. I'd like to make it easier to share a photo from my phone to my website. Right now there are a number of steps to do so. Most of those steps can be eliminated with a few Shortcuts automations. I'd also like to bring back the comments that had been left on my site over the decades. I have a lot of server maintenance to do to pair down the services that run there that I no longer need (such as mySQL). I'm also going to take that opportunity to upgrade a bunch of the software there. And of course, just improvements overall.
My website has never been faster or used less compute cycles to deliver a page. I'm super happy with how things are today and I'm looking forward to continuing to whittle away at making more improvements to Tuff. And I may end up using it to rebuild all of my other websites including The Watercolor Gallery.
My website has supported dark mode based on the user's system preferences. But now, those among you that prefer to toggle it on a per-website basis can do so.
There are options for On, System, or Off. I keep my preference at System but choose whichever option works best for you!
I'll be improving the UI of the toggle widget at some point.
Thanks to Sara Soueidan for spurring me to add this option.
I've just added a new watercolor sketch of a landscape in China to my portfolio. My grandmother photographed the scene in 1987.
Rewrote most of my static site generator over the last few days. Cut the build time in half at the same time as doubling the number of files it deals with. The latest update adds monthly blog post indexes.
The sleeping Atlantic
I have decided that #100 in this series of link lists will be the last "What I saw somewhat recently". Today's list is #98. I'll try to get #99 out sometime in January and #100 will be a look back through all of the previous links.
- M.C. Escher - Journey to Infinity - An excellent documentary on the artist, narrated by Stephen Fry.
- Roy Tang's website - I just think Roy's website is super cool.
- Raw data from airplanes - Charlie Gerard shows us how to use a radio antenna to pull down raw data from airplanes overhead.
- ooh.directory - If you're a blogger you've likely already seen this. A collection of blogs. Mine isn't listed yet. Fun to click around.
- Ban Ban Ton Ton - "A music website / blog run out of rural Japan".
- WHCC - Reportedly makes good quality photo prints.
- China's Van Goghs - Hundreds of oil painters churning out souveiner masterpieces.
- Gabriel Rivera - A nice profile of Gabriel by Ilford.
I'm trying to decide which text editor I want to write my blog posts in.
Left to right: Sublime Text, MacDown, VS Code
I don't understand the push towards self-driving cars? Do you really think a robot can merge onto a highway while eating a bowl of breakfast cereal and putting on eyeliner? I don’t think so!
Over many years of watching YouTube videos something has become clear to me; quite often, the fewer views a video has the more information I seem to glean from it.
A 3-hour presentation on fine art photography from many years ago? 55 views? <3
A poorly lit, hard to hear, video of some guy in his basement darkroom? 7 views? <3
By opening Slack, Teams, and Discord on your computer at the same time you’re running all of the JavaScript ever written since the time of the Egyptian pyramids.
This weekend Eliza and I tried some experiments in the darkroom with paper negatives that failed completely. It is good to be humbled from time-to-time.
Making backups of my site's content is easier than ever. Just like my photo library I now have 4 complete back ups that will seldom be very far out of date.
Developed two rolls of Tri-X last night. One I have no idea where it came from - and it looks like the camera had a light leak (selective memory?). But the other looks terrific. I can't wait to spend some time in the darkroom.
For the past several years I've been POSSE-ing. In Indieweb terms that means to publish content on my own site and syndicate it to other platforms. I've decided I'm going to discontinue using automation in favor of manually writing posts for each of the platforms I want to post to.
I'm doing this for 3 primary reasons.
- POSSE-ing to other platforms is a messy business. And I'm persnickety.
- Most communities on these platforms would prefer you do not cross post.
- I believe I can better engage if I do this manually.
Thanks to Micro.blog, syndicating my posts from my blog to Micro.blog, Mastodon, and Tumblr has been very easy. Micro.blog also supports syndicating to Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, and Flickr. Of any service I've tested, Micro.blog is by far the most thoughtful and well considered way to POSSE.
However, it isn't perfect. Many of my notes have multiple links in them. Like this one. Micro.blog supports multiple inline links but syndicating to Mastodon does not. So I lose a link! I do not know if this is a limitation of Mastodon's API or of Micro.blog's implementation -- but regardless, I cannot lose a link!
That is but one of likely a few dozen idiosyncratic niggles that I have with how POSSE-ing works and that is just for one platform. I'd like to syndicate to more platforms and each of those have their own look, feel, and community driven norms. As just one more example, hashtags. Micro.blog does not support hashtags whereas on Mastodon and Twitter they are first class citizens. By POSSE-ing via this method I lose out on all of that. And #believeinfilm is becoming a community I interact with often.
Please know that I'm not picking on Micro.blog. I don't think it is possible to build and maintain a syndication service that works exactly how I would prefer it to work. I've tried several different solutions over the last nearly 10 years to get this right. None of them will satisify my neurosis. If it wasn't for Micro.blog I would have given up trying long ago.
As the great Twitter exodus of 2022 was happening, and some people were flocking to Mastodon, the community there made it clear that they do not appreciate cross posting. Specifically, they discouraged people from setting up a Twitter to Mastodon cross posting service - but I believe they discourage cross posting all the same. And the more I think about it the more I get it. As I've written in the past, my mental model for each of these platforms are bars or cafes. If I ran down the street shouting into bars and cafes, people would think me weird. Perhaps I'm stretching the analogy too far but I understand why people would prefer direct engagement on the platform.
Photographers are all too aware of the need to tailor content for each use. Let's say I took a photo of a cat. If a magazine editor wanted to use the image for the cover or for an article within, that photo would have to be manipulated to their specifications for each of those uses. If I share a photo on my blog, Flickr, or Instagram - I create a different file for each of those because they require different specifications. It is why you see so many bounding boxes on photographer's Instagrams. They want to crop the photo to their liking not based on Instagram's constraints.
This leads me to believe that I should do the same for my text. I've been inspired by how Sara Soueidan constructs her posts for Twitter and Mastodon. Each post seems thoughtfully composed for each platform she publishes to. I would prefer to model after that.
This isn't to say that one couldn't spend time to get POSSE working mostly right. Or, that I couldn't build my own solution that might adjust my main quibbles with how Micro.blog syndicates content. Jeremy Keith is a great example of this. His posts are thoughtfully shared to each platform even if they are done so by a robot of his creation. He recently added Mastodon. I'm simply unwilling to take on the task of building and maintaining a robot to post to each platform based on their own particular set of requirements.
For the time being, I'll be syndicating to Micro.blog via Manton's very well built robot RSS feed eater, but for all other platforms I'll be taking the time to share each post that I consider worthy of the time.
Spent some time this morning making adjustments to dates in RSS feeds. I think they should be accurate now. Sorry to all subscribers for the odd RSS behaviour the last few days.
Zhenyi Tan, who I linked to back in April about his app History Book (which I still use), is on a bit of a tear. Just take a look at Tan's website post archive and count the number of times you see the word "Launch".
His most recent projects; a Time Machine inspired UI ontop of the Wayback Machine, an expense tracker, a music player, and several clever Safari Extensions - have all been released in just the last few months.
His prolificacy reminds me of _DavidSmith.
I'm going into year 3 of learning film photography and darkroom printing. One thing is abundantly clear, both of these disciplines are wholly separate. If you find yourself good at one and struggle with the other, do not feel bad. Both require skill. Both can be raised to the level of art. It is OK to focus on one of them.
Added a changelog to keep track of updates to this site, Tuff, and my overall workflow.
What is Apple's policy for updating things like rsync on macOS? The preinstalled version is very old.
Learning more about rsync this morning so that I can develop a few rolls of 35mm film this evening. As one does.
If you're subscribed to my RSS feed (first, thank you!) you might notice the feed will refresh. That is because as of this morning my personal website is no longer running on WordPress. Eeek!
iCloud+ email sometimes misclassifies replies as junk mail. I would think that my having emailed the person first would be enough for Apple to know the email isn't Junk?
I'm getting dangerously close to switching away from WordPress and onto Tuff - my personal static site generator. Like any well tended garden, I'll need to pick weeds and cast seed, but the important bits are done.
You could say that I’ve made a lot of progress on Tuff – my static site generator. Here is some example output. There is still much to do but I think I now need to start thinking about how and where to deploy this.
Back in 2012, Tapbots – the makers of Tweetbot and the forthcoming Ivory for Mastodon – released an app for App.net called Netbot. Twitter was squeezing developers and forcing them out. It totally makes sense for Tapbots to rebuild their excellent apps for Mastodon.
For the record, I am not OK with The NY Times hiring an editor for Wordle. I’ll continue to play, of course, but my fandom has decreased slightly. Reminder: my completely free word game Stupid does not have a human editor. You’re welcome.
I’ve made meaningful progress on my homegrown static site generator. I’ve named it Tuff – after the rock that forms from consolidating volcanic ash. It is my hope that I’ll use it to build my personal site but I doubt the code will ever see the light of day.
Spent about 90-minutes in the darkroom making this print. It is an 11×14 print from a 6×6 neg taken in 2020 at Keuka lake in New York State.
Yesterday I took a stranger’s portrait. It was quick, likely poor lighting, and may not turn out at all. But I’m super happy that I worked up the courage to ask.
My favorite ways to view photographs, in order: books, iPad (someone’s website, or in Flickr app), YouTube on TV.
On vacation days I spend a lot of time on my iPad rather than my Mac. Which limits me on what I share – particularly photographic work. I need to create a better workflow for publishing from iPad.
Jeremy Keith’s post about Twitter from two days ago caused me look up the first time I mentioned Twitter here on my blog. It turns out is was exactly one day after Jeremy did on his blog – 16 years ago yesterday. I have been subscribed to Jeremy’s blog this entire time so I likely […]
WSL is no longer in preview mode. I wrote about WSL for a few years. It is an amazing addition to Windows and the team should be very proud for how good it is.
Brent Sticher, who writes a lot about my favorite programming language PHP (don’t @ me), writes about the history of his personal blog and Twitter account and how he now owns his audience. The entire post is worth a quick read. I wanted to back him on on this bit: I’ve managed to build a […]
I don’t know if this collage by Mark Clennon of Mike Tyson is actually a film contact sheet or was a composite made in Photoshop to look like it is… I don’t care. It is awesome.
There aren’t enough links in the world to describe the amount of information I’ve been ingesting lately. The Twitter takeover, the FTX fraud, the hacking of FTX, and the crypto winter. All while maintaining my steady diet of whacky ephemera and art inspiration topped with a dose of Mastodon and the indieweb. Phew.
There is a lot being written about Mastodon lately. And it isn’t just being published on Mastodon. Both Time and Wired have published about Mastodon and its creator within the last week. I wanted to post my current thoughts about the platform to capture the moment. Things are changing rapidly. A lot of things are […]
My Mastodon favorites script got a fair bit of traffic over the last day or so. So today I added a very simple cache (I want to be very nice to Mastodon’s servers!), some updated styling, and an indicator to show there are images in the post. More to come!
I’m committing to no longer asking for boosts. My intent was to bring attention to Mastodon features I thought useful. But it comes across as gross and a ploy to gain reach. Sorry about that y’all.
Imagine owning a domain name. Imagine you syndicate when appropriate to various other communities. Imagine being stress free about whether you should use Twitter, Tumblr, Mastodon, or something else. That is what it is like having your own blog.
Work-in-progress: I’ve created a page to show my most recent 50 favorites on Mastodon. Mastodon doesn’t currently allow a public favorites page, so I built my own. I’ll be slowly working on the script, caching, and styling. Feedback welcome as always.
The above series of images were made on a recent trip to Ocean City Maryland and are very likely the reason why my iPhone became what is known as a brick. Let me back up. I’ve used my iPhones underwater ever since Apple said they were IP-rated for a reasonable amount of water resistance. I’ve […]
TIL Vivaldi, in addition to building a browser chocked full of features like email, to do lists, contact management, and note taking, also has a blogging service and now a hosted Mastodon instance. Productive team!
Poll, of sorts: How do you balance creation vs consumption? I often wrestle with myself on how much I read or watch compared to how much I write or make or create. My desired ratio is 90/10. Unfortunately it is more like 10/90.
I’m at the age where I totally understand why Mister Rogers changed his sweater and shoes when entering his home.
I wish Apple would transition away from using photos from Yelp in Maps. First, license the photos in such a way that we no longer need to navigate out of the Maps app. Allow people to submit their own photos to locations. Slowly remove Yelp altogether.
I have to admit, I’m surprised that just a few tens of thousands of new users can make Mastodon underperform. It isn’t exactly a new codebase and much of the work is spread out across many instances. I wonder what the biggest bottleneck is currently.
Fall texture dreams – a new set of images I made while in a dreamlike state recovering from COVID-19.
Andy Baio reflects on his decision to shutdown the quirky and cool Skittish: I always knew there would be risk building something like this during the pandemic. Fortunately, I built it in a way where nobody would be burned: we fully honored the terms of our grant funding, it never had investors, never took on […]
Matthias Ott: Longtime readers will recall Stop worrying, hit publish. Ott’s post is a great example of the point he is trying to make. In the post he is simply relaying a story he heard on a podcast. Of what value could that be? By sharing how that story moved him, he moved several others. […]
Wordle is showing a full cover nag screen and The NY Times is advertising the official board game in pre-roll ads on Twitter. They must be having trouble making that milly back.
Any tips to achieve better focus when using a lens adapter? I picked up an adapter to use FD mounts on my 90D. The results are dreamy! But, I wouldn’t mind the ability to dial in focus.
People seem to retweet things they disagree with, or they think is downright false, thus amplifying that which they think is wrong. 🤔
If Apple ships Stage Manager for iPadOS on Monday they have become Microsoft of the 2000s; Too big to ship good software at scale and no longer willing to say “no” when they must. They’d still be the best software design company in the world so that tells you something.
Pre-ordered the new Apple TV 4K on Tuesday. We haven’t had an Apple TV for a long time.
If I were to direct a documentary about YouTube I would title it “Added to Watch Later”.
If I were counting time based on the British Summer Time zone then it could be said that I go to bed quite late and have no trouble sleeping in at all.
I wonder if people that are banned on a social network know that they don’t have to spend millions or billions on acquiring a competitive social network — they can just start a blog for free. shrugs
Stupid now supports Dark Mode. It automatically switches with your device settings. Keen eyes may notice a few accurate constellations fly by. Also, a new featured artist Daniel Howden.
If you use Apple’s Podcasts app, be sure to check the Downloads section. You may have a ton of episodes downloaded unintentionally. And they take up space.
I’ve published an article on Medium called How to migrate Stripe accounts, customers, products and subscriptions from one account to another. Why? Because Medium has become the largest organic referrer for new customers. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
Tolkien did an awful lot of work to create the world of middle-earth and its histories, peoples, languages, etc. And yet he kept the month names from the Gregorian calendar?
LOL at Joey Sneddon’s write-up on Vivaldi. “Furthering its unstated, but much evident ambitions to replicate absolutely everything in existence inside itself, the latest version of the Vivaldi web browser comes with a new productivity feature.”
Why are email templates still so archaic? Most are still table based! The most popular email clients are controlled by companies that also own modern web browser stacks. Outlook, Gmail, Apple’s Mail (iOS/Mac). Email rendering needs a reset.
I’m starting to like Elon’s plan for Twitter more and more. Just get it over with already.
Slowly, over the last decade, I’ve been pulling myself away from using Google services. Over 10 years ago I tried Duck.com instead of Google Search. It took a few years, but once it stuck, I haven’t turned back. I bet the number of searches I make on Google per month is in the single digits. […]
I would like about 50% more money per year. I don’t need it. And, if I had that, I worry I’d want 50% more.
An upcoming addition to my photographic portfolio spans nearly 20 years of time. It is a simple project, and one that many other photographers have done, but I’m looking forward to putting mine out there.
NASA’s DART Mission was fun to watch last night. Waking up to impact observations from around the globe. So fun. Space stuff happens often now. It is great.
Unmark is now $10/year (down from $55/year). All current customers will be automatically adjusted. I want more people to be able to use it. If there are enough upgrades, I’m going to consider rebuilding it from scratch on a modern framework.
I’m imaging the slide decks of cryptocurrency-related startups. Slide 1: Not a scam. Slide 2: Not hacked. Slide 3: Web3. Slide 4: Profit!
The One Drive app eats a lot of resources and I don’t like that it can update itself without warning. If it wasn’t for work I think I’d switch off of One Drive completely.
Looking for something to read, watch, or listen to? Need inspiration? Don’t forget, I have 96 lists of awesome links. You’re sure to find something in there.
As usual, Austin Mann’s review of the latest iPhone camera system is excellent. Be sure to give it a read. In the review, he mentions something I’ve been wanting on iPhone for a long time; Night mode. Night mode with all-red display: After seeing the all-red Night mode on the new Apple Watch Ultra, I […]
I keep jotting down notes to give an update on my thoughts on NFTs, Ethereum’s merge, and cryptocurrency in general only to save them as drafts or delete them. Not because my current opinions aren’t clearly defined, but more so because I’m having trouble making them coherent and concise.
Switching Stripe Transfer‘s email services from Hover to iCloud+. Too many messages ending up in spam folders using Hover.
Listening to a proper football (soccer) game live while at work. My grandfather would be proud.
These “Week Notes” posts I see here and there are interesting. I wonder how everyone keeps track during the week.
Robin Rendle: There will be lonely, barren years of no one looking at your work. There will be blog posts that you adore that no one reads and there’ll be blog posts you spit out in ten minutes that take the internet by storm. Checks out. I blog a lot. I’ve blogged for decades. And […]
Released an update to Stupid – my free daily word scramble game – this weekend. It now remembers the letters you’ve backspaced. A few other nips and tucks as well. This being about the 30th release of Stupid in 2022.
I’m looking forward to iOS 16’s new Focus features (where it is switchable with home screen/Lock Screen). But I think I’ll be waiting for a dot release before upgrading. Also, when macOS Ventura ships I’ll likely wait for – the very least – two dot releases.
Three months is a long time to go, even for me, without publishing a post in this series of links. But this summer has been extraordinarily busy at work – in a way that consumed a lot of my creative and just overall energies. But of course, I’ve managed to scrawl a note here and […]
Robin Sloan: What follows is a narrative description of a protocol that I believe might open up some interesting new possibilities on the internet. My goal here isn’t to “sell you” on its design; rather, I just want to lay out my thinking as clearly as I can. I’m long, long overdue on reading Sloan’s proposal for a […]
Have you ever scrolled down to the bottom of an article on a local news website? Thar be dragons!
My Canon EF-S 18-55mm lens, the kit lens that came with my original Canon DSLR from eons ago, finally gave up. The aperture is kaput. If anyone has one of these lenses just lying around and you no longer will ever use it, I’d be happy to take it off your hands.
One year ago I wrote Glass observations, a post wherein I wrote about the state of sharing photos on the web, and what I thought about the photo sharing app Glass. This morning I read that post anew to see if my opinion still stands – it does. So if you missed it and were […]
Montaigne: Build a website, blog, or portfolio using nothing but Apple Notes. Pretty cool.
Accidentally wrote some code that did 360 billion lookups against a database. Oops. My Mac processed it in 7 seconds. Computers are amazing.
Apple One’s Family Plan should have more storage options. Currently you can purchase 200GB of extra storage for the entire family. Optionally, you can add additional iCloud+ Drive space for $9.99/month but that makes it more expensive than Apple One’s Premier Plan. 200GB for a family was enough in 2005. Today plans should start at […]
Moved all of my accounts from 1Password to, iCloud Passwords (is that what it is called? it isn’t KeyChain, is it?). Now to move Eliza’s and we’ll be done.
Does anyone use iCloud Drive exclusively? I’m currently using One Drive and it is… ok. But why pay for both? Considering moving to iCloud Drive.
This isn’t a “the sky is falling” post. However, photographers that use WordPress should be well aware of upcoming changes regarding image file formats. Sarah Gooding, writing for WP Tavern: WebP, an image format developed by Google, which is intended to replace JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats, will soon be generated by default for […]
Paul Von Schrottky on the Make WordPress Mobile blog: Over the years, the WordPress app has evolved to meet a diverse range of site administration needs and use cases. Features like Stats, Reader, and Notifications were introduced with the hope of meeting some of these needs. However, these features require the Jetpack plugin or a […]
I haven’t set aside time exclusively to take photographs since April. I need to shake things up and get back to it.
Trying to use PHP’s in_array() on ~300,000 elements. Where I would expect there to be a huge number of elements found, I’m getting none. Is it just choking? Anyone have experience with this size of a lookup?
I haven’t been blogging much. Work is super, super busy and that will likely continue through mid-August. And Stripe Transfer is busier than ever. No complaints! But I do miss my blog, shooting photographs, and making new projects. I shall return!
I’m in a phase where I have an absolute ton of work to do and everything is working great on my computer. So, I don’t want any software to be updated for 60 days or so. I seem to hit this sweet spot about once a year.
I’ve been using Raindrop for several months. It is very good, aside from a glaring omission. But I think I’m going to export my bookmarks and go back to Unmark and start putting some time back into that project. I think I need to rebuild it from scratch though, the codebase is already 10 years […]
Sarah Gooding, writing for WP Tavern: WordPress theme author Anders Norén has remade his popular Davis theme to support full-site editing. The new theme, Davis Blocks, is sporting the same clean design as its predecessor, and can be used as a starter theme or a lightweight blog theme. I used Davis, Anders original theme for WordPress, for […]
Microsoft Teams has few laudable features but being able to pause animated GIFs is one of them.
Haruki Murakami is incredible. I finished Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and, although I have no clue how to rate the book, I can’t wait to start another Murakami book.
Old man peeve: when posts begin “this is going to be a long one” (or, similar) and are only a few short paragraphs. A Tolstoy novel is “a long one”. A blog post is probably not.
Matt @ Webcurios, describing my game Stupid: Sent to me by Curios reader Colin Devroe, who also created it, this is a nice twist on the Wordle format (I promised I wouldn’t keep including Wordle riffs, but I will make exceptions for ones that are fun or which are accompanied by a polite email) which […]
Kevin Kelly: Humans are born to make stuff. We almost can’t help it. Place us in an empty flat plain and we’ll start building things. Put us on a dried lake bed in the middle of the desert and we’ll build things, take them down and build different stuff next year. We make tools, which make other tools, […]
I just added the generative art music project I’ve been working off and on for 6 months – Infinite Posters – to my portfolio. I’ll continue to add to it as the project progresses and I’m planning a behind-the-scenes blog post soon.
I recently set my iPhone, iPad, and Mac to automatically switch to Dark Mode at sunset. Digging it so far. As a result, I’ve created a dark version of my website. So you Dark Mode people needn’t fear blindness visiting any longer. More updates as I have time.
Like like: A tool for wandering through Twitter. A pro tip that I often recommend for any social media platform is to browse through your followers likes. It is, in my opinion, one of the very best ways to find some of the best content. For instance: My Twitter likes The Watercolor Gallery’s Twitter likes […]
It has been over a month since I posted a list of a links. I’ve been very busy lately. In some ways that’s good, in other ways not so good. But, do you know what is always good? Links! High school Yearbooks – Curated by Veronica Kraus. You Are Here – Cinemagraph-esque animations by Molly […]
Spring 2022: I’m super busy at the day job, six active customers for the side gig, a freelance project that could start any day, a ton of personal projects that I’d love to spend time on, our garden!, and a (much needed) short vacation coming up.
Deleting git repos on external USB hard drives via Finder… do not recommend. Use command line.
Daily Stupid players will be happy to know an all-new wordlist is being deployed for tomorrow’s game! Thank you for your patience and for playing!
Sometimes I wish I had unlimited time to work on my personal projects – but then I realize that by limiting my time to an hour here and an hour there it forces me to be super productive.
Trying to make my switch to Apple Maps result in better experience for all. So I’m jotting down notes to send to Apple. Adjusting locations and I sent in Feedback (née, Radar) FB10127605. Sharing a single location from a Guide results in sending the entire Guide.
I’m considering the switch from Google Maps to Apple Maps. It looks like I found an iOS Shortcut to move my Saved Places (from a Google Takeout JSON), though it is going to take a considerable amount of time to do it.
It saddens me when I find a great personal blog that has been abandoned only to find that the person has moved all their publishing onto a social media platform. Go back to your blog! Syndicate your posts!
May have found a Finder bug in macOS 12.4. I use the bulk renaming feature a lot. And recently doing so restarts Finder. Unsure how to submit this bug though.
Deployed a few small updates to Stupid this morning. Letters are now the same width, now 💯 SVG, and a few others. A new featured artist will be coming soon.
Wish list of improvements to macOS/iOS Passwords: shared list, multiple URLs, auto-fill hotkey for apps other than Safari, Watch authentication in clamshell mode, optional titles for entries.
Chris Coyier: I don’t think there is any computer science concept that distinguishes the terms scripts, templates, and programs in any real sense. Like Chris, I too find it difficult to put place some of my coding projects into a category. I write a lot of code to run on the command line. Some of […]
Developing a few rolls of color and black and white film in the darkroom. Good way to spend a rainy day.
Would you like to know how many people found your blog from Mastodon? How about how many people find your YouTube channel via TikTok? Back in my day, when someone clicked on a link from one website to another, the destination site could easily tell where the traffic was coming from. It was called the […]
I recently ordered some replacement parts for our pool. Now the manufacturer is asking me to review those parts. How does one review a drain valve o-ring gasket? “Doesn’t leak. 5-stars” or, “My pool didn’t get any bigger. 1-star”?
Zhenyi Tan, announcing History Book: History Book automatically saves the content of your browsing history for searching. And it does it in a privacy-friendly way. Instant buy.
DeFi, Crypto, and NFT related podcasts seem to be publishing less frequently lately. Gee, I wonder why.
Molly White: Crypto, when it comes down to it, relies on greater fools. As assets without any intrinsic value, the way to make money from crypto is to find a greater fool who will buy your assets from you at a higher price. Molly White (who I’ve linked to before) has been on a crusade against […]
Apple VR headset wish list: The same as it was in 2019. I just want to have unlimited screens of any size at any time any where. All powered by my iPhone.
Pushed an update to Stupid with several bug fixes and enhancements. Thanks to all the daily players and their feedback!
The Attach of the Clones trailer uses music from Return of the Jedi (starting at 31:27) that never made it onto the soundtrack. Does anyone else know this? The internet doesn’t seem to. Now it does.
In 2020 Thomas Brand wrote a blog post about finding a YouTube’s channel RSS feed by appending the channel’s “Channel ID” onto a feed URL. Thomas Brand: In 2020 I am watching less stupid on YouTube by skipping the algorithm. Instead of letting the YouTube decide which videos it wants to show me, I am […]
Stupid tagline ideas: Don’t be an idiot. Not nearly as fun as most games. Smartness not required. Irritating, frustrating, humiliating.
Poll: (be honest!) how often do you check… Email RSS Micro.blog Mastodon Twitter Facebook TikTok ___________ Responses and boosts appreciated.
I have written code that has saved my employer thousands of human hours and countless dollars. I wasn’t hired as a programmer. You don’t have to be a programmer to write code. Everyone should consider learning to code.
The weather this week is just 👌 I’ve come to realize that the links I share here in this series are but a very small fraction of the incredible things I find while navigating mankind’s collective of digital content. My best guesstimate would be that I post maybe 5% of what I come across that […]
I’ve added Stupid to my portfolio. I’ll be updating it as I release new featured artists designs. I’ll be writing a blog post about its inception, development, and release soon. If you have any questions, please let me know!
I would like to connect with more people that make stuff. Software, art, gadgets, blankets, music, it doesn’t matter. Please recommend RSS feeds, Twitter, Mastodon, Flickr, YouTube, anything.
I know James Cameron hasn’t uploaded a video to YouTube for 10 years but didn’t anyone tell him that he can upload in better quality than 1080p? All kidding aside, looks like the facial capture (among other things) is taking a huge leap.
Developers: I hate apps that use Electron. Also developers: Opens Slack, Discord, VS Code, Teams, Trello, Obsidian, 1Password, Spotify, WhatsApp at the same time.
Tulips bloomed a few weeks later this year. We are going to move these to a new spot for next year.
Nyasha Green recently published a post that covers a few issues she’s seeing within the WordPress community and offers solutions on how to fix those issues. One issue she calls out is that the community relies on free labor: Paying people for their labor is simply not what the spirit of the WordPress community stands […]
Helpful article to take advantage of 1Password’s app autofill on Mac. Also great they are providing support via Twitter. I love when companies do that rather than email. Also, I like paying for software! Because you get support!
Just upgraded to the new 1Password for Mac. Excellent upgrade experience. I’m a happy 1Password customer.
Jeremy Keith recently wrote about Bugblogging: Bugblogging doesn’t need to involve a solution. Just documenting a bug is a good thing to do. I wonder what Germanic compound word Jeremy would come up with to describe blogging about a web API that your favorite browser doesn’t support? Safari does not support navigator.requestMIDIAccess. I dug around […]
Stupid tip: Use backspaces first. When you’ve used two backspaces, use your guesses. This way you get 4 attempts each game.
Working on a digital art project I started in December of 2021. Sometimes these things take time.
🔙🔙🟥🟥 Stupid 118 2/2/2 Even I fail. And I made the Stupid thing! Deployed several bug fixes this morning. Thanks to all for their feedback! Keep it coming.
Stupid has no server-side component. It does not store any data on the server. And, it has no tracking or analytics. I have no idea how many people are playing. And I like that.
I wonder how long before I see Stupid scores popping up on Twitter or in my RSS feed subscriptions? Will someone with a ton of followers post it somewhere and I’ll never know? So fun to wait and see.
You may think Stupid is a terrible name. It isn’t a terrible name, it is a stupid name.
OK. Here it is. Inspired by playing lots of Wordle, I built a word game. It is called Stupid. You can play it at stupidwordgame.com – I’ll write more about it soon. Official launch May 2nd. All stats start over then. Any problems please let me know.
Reminder: If you’ve subscribed / followed someone online for a while via RSS or a social service, consider taking a moment to stop by their website to see if they’ve put anything there that doesn’t end up in their feed.
OK, so Elon bought Twitter (subject to regulatory approval, of course). We can’t change what we can’t control. While I do not think it a great idea to have Elon be the sole owner of Twitter, is it any worse than Jack Dorsey or Ev Williams or anyone else for that matter? I suppose time […]
I’ve been spending a decent amount of time on a free word game (coming soon) and the redesign of my website. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t collected a cacophony of links for y’all. Jason Lee on The Nine Club – I find myself being pulled more and more into the world of skate. This […]
Added some art pieces to the new portfolio. I have many, many more art pieces, photography, and software projects to add. It is going to take me a long time to get everything online.
Found a beat up abandoned blind while on a hike. I am going to patch it up and see if I can use it to get a bit closer to wildlife.
Recorded April 2022. Yes, I bought a new digital camera. No, I’m not giving up on film. I explain in this episode of Photowalking with Colin – my intermittent podcast to which you should subscribe. On this hike I saw a sleeping porcupine, laid down on my belly to photograph a deer, and found my […]
I’m going to start sharing my art (mostly watercolor paintings) on my website now. :) Starting with this watercolor portrait of William Chickillo from 2021. I also photographed him on film.
I am so excited about how my redesigned site is coming together. I haven’t been this excited about my personal website in a long time. I have so much work to publish in this new format. Still much to do.
I have lots of content to clean up, but the beta version of my site’s redesign is now live.
Rather than live stream the redesign of my site, I’m going to update the comments on this post regularly as I make progress. This will likely take several weeks. So check back often.
Just switched from the Apple Magic Keyboard to the Keychron K2 – my first mechanical keyboard since I was in grade school, I think?
I celebrated right along with Andy when Waxy.org turned 10 and I’m still here cheering him on as Waxy.org turns 20.
Andy Baio:
Ten years ago, I wrote a roundup of my favorite posts from my first decade of blogging, and I thought I’d do the same thing for 2012-2021. If you missed them the first time around, I hope you check them out this time. Looking back on the last ten years, I’m proud of so many of these pieces.
While Andy focuses on the main pieces he’s published to Waxy.org over the decades I can tell you that of equal import is his link list sidebar on his homepage. I have been made aware of many enjoyable internet things via Andy.
Thanks Andy. Onto the next 10 (I’ll beat you to 30, sort of).
I’m going to be redesigning and completely rebuilding my website this year. Cypress has served me very, very well. But I’m ready to expand beyond it.
I had a hard time deciding to spend money on a digital camera. Elon offers $43B in cash for Twitter.
After testing my fun little side project with 5 or 6 family and friends, I’ll be inviting more beta testers in the next two days or so. I’m hoping for more feedback and bug fixes.
🎉 NetNewsWire 6.1 was just released and it includes a hidden preference just for me (but you can use it too)!
To turn off the feed pull that happens on start up:
defaults write com.ranchero.NetNewsWire-Evergreen DevroeSuppressSyncOnLaunch -bool true
👉 Andreas Jennische @ndreas:
Remember micro.blog is better the more you comment on other peoples posts.
DuckDuckGo:
So today we’re excited to announce the beta launch of DuckDuckGo for Mac, with DuckDuckGo for Windows coming soon. Like our mobile app, DuckDuckGo for Mac is an all-in-one privacy solution for everyday browsing with no complicated settings, just a seamless private experience. Plus, we’re excited to share some new features we think you’ll love.
This browser looks like a nice alternative to Brave.
My allegiance to any browser shifts as I get bored, or as one releases a build I do not like, or as I switch platforms. Currently, I’m back on Safari. It is fast, simple, and very integrated into macOS and iOS. I switched away from Brave mostly due to the number of ads it shows. Yes, I was earning BAT (a crypto token that Brave created to reward your attention) but it wasn’t enough to keep me in living in Adville.
For instance, using my phone I’d see an add about once every 10 minutes (I have no idea the actual amount of time between ads, but this is a guess). The ad displayed as if it were a text message. Which is very weird. You’re showing someone a website on your phone and a “text message”, that is really an ad for some obscure crypto wallet (or worse), shows up and you have to dismiss it by flicking up.
It began to feel icky. So I ditched it back to Safari.
I’ll wait for DuckDuckGo for Mac to enter public beta before I give it a spin. But, like Apple, DDG is a company I trust w/ my browser activity. So it could be a good alternative.
Can Apple just buy DuckDuckGo already?
Though we like to make our own BBQ – the place we found this weekend is a suitable backup option.
Don’t sleep on Tumblr. If you haven’t tried the app in a while it is worth a look. Lots of great content.
I might have a new coding project to release in about a week. I’ll want you all to try it.
Finally added Stripe as the default option to purchase things on my site (such as Cypress). PayPal is still an option. Apple Pay and Google Pay coming soon.
The tulips are on their way.
I’ve been very busy at work lately. Going through a software conversion there that will keep me busy well into summer. And, of course, Stripe Transfer is doing well.
Here are some links, I hope you enjoy them.
- Goosh – A Google terminal.
- Nanoglyph – An email newsletter – though I subscribe by RSS naturally – that I’ve been enjoying lately.
- Promotional video for Inkdrop – This video by Inkdrop’s developer Takuya Matsuyama is one of the best I’ve ever seen. Very well produced.
- Min – A minimal browser, great for screenshots or demo videos.
- J.R.R. Tolkien’s art – The Tolkien Estate has a new website and they’ve published a bunch of his art which includes paintings of Middle Earth locations as well as maps and other tidbits. Some are excellent.
- FilmMap on Tumblr – Locations on Google Maps based on movies.
- Steve Carty’s Worthy YouTube videos – Steve Carty, professional photographer that I hang with a bit on Twitch, has a YouTube playlist with 100+ videos of worthy photographic content. I’ll be going over these one-by-one.
That’s it for this one.
Any SEO experts reading this? Stripe Transfer seems to have slid off of page 1 on Google and all but disappeared for some searches. It was on the first page for a while. It is #1 result on Bing and Duck.com. Would really appreciate ideas.
We just launched Stripe Transfer for Developers – we’re offering a comprehensive document (coming soon), 1-hour video consultation, and a referral program for freelancers and agencies.
Christopher Parsons:
The Shortcut is pretty simple: when I run it, it maximizes the brightness of my iOS device and opens the Glass app. If you download the Shortcut it’s pretty easy to modify it to instead open a different application (e.g., Instagram, 500px, Flickr, etc). It’s definitely improved my experiences using the app and helped me to better appreciate the images that are shared by individuals on the platform.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen people using their phones with their brightness turned all the way down while looking at photos. It is bad enough that so many great photos are being viewed on such small screens, but it is downright criminal that they are viewed with such low brightness!
I’m going to take this shortcut and modify it for my needs. You should too! And give it to your dimly lit screen loving friends.
Fun Wordle method: Tell a bunch of friends to start with the same word. Levels the playing field and is a true competition for the day.
COMING SOON – Live stream tonight at 6pm. This stream will center on my photo series Culm Dunes (or, slag piles) which spans from 2019-2021.
Tonight on Twitch. Tomorrow on YouTube.
Can gamers also be productive? It is the #1 reason I haven’t played video games since my early 20s.
So cool that Kodak announced a “new” film stock today; Kodak Gold 200 in 120. I just wish I could buy some! Product announcements should always coincide with retailers being able to accept preorders.
I updated Stripe Transfer’s website with new testimonials and a downloadable PDF that provides a rough timeline for transferring accounts on Stripe.
When customers are in a time crunch, they generally ask you two questions; how long will this take? how much does it cost? We offer free estimates for Stripe Transfer since we cannot say precisely how much it will cost without a fair amount of information from the customer. However, we can tell you roughly how long each step typically takes.
I opened Illustrator and made this timeline to create a downloadable PDF. We also share it with every customer that reaches out to us to set expectations.
A Stripe Transfer Timeline With each and every customer we improve Stripe Transfer’s website, documentation, explanation to the customer, the process, and my code.
Recently, my wife Eliza was able to quit her job and join me in this side gig and she has already removed some of customer interaction, billing, scheduling, and other process points from me so that I can focus on the transfer and the code. She’s going to be a big help in how much better this process continues to get.
My next live stream and YouTube video will be on my culm dunes photo series. Should be fun.
I added a new portrait to my portfolio. The Engineer, photographed last September. Click the image to see more.
Terry Nguyen, for Vox:
One can even argue that we are witnessing the video essay’s golden era. Run times are longer than ever, while more and more creators are producing long-form videos. The growth of “creator economy” crowdfunding tools, especially during the pandemic, has allowed video essayists to take longer breaks between uploads while retaining their production quality.
Did I mention I’ve been uploading 30-60 minute videos about my photography to YouTube lately? Yes? I have? Well, allow me to mention it again.
Every now and then mysql halts on my Droplets at Digital Ocean and I have to log in and restart it. I should probably get to the bottom of that.
Reminder: I’ll be live streaming a photo presentation at 6 eastern on Twitch. I expect it to be very boring. So stop by!
At least 6 deer bedded in the backyard night before last. Greener days are ahead my woodland friends.
Join me on Twitch this Sunday, March 13 at 6PM Eastern for a live stream discussion of my photo series The Skateboarders.
Julia Evans:
So here are a few examples of small personal programming projects I’ve done. I’m not going to talk about “learning projects” where my goal was to learn something specific because I’ve already written a billion blog posts about that.
I’ve written countless tidbits of code to solve personal problems. Some of them end up becoming real projects that I publish publicly and others never see the light of day.
Julia and I share this project in common though…
When the second COVID vaccine doses opened up, all of the slots were full. It turned out that the website’s backend had an API, so I wrote a script to poll the API every 60 seconds or so and watch for cancellations and notify me so that I could get an earlier appointment.
I wrote a small app that ran on Eliza’s MacBook that would check for open vaccination slots at various locations in our area. When an open slot was detected it would sound an alarm in our house – even waking us (okay, it woke Eliza) up in the middle of the night – to make an appointment. It resulted in over 100 of our friends and family getting vaccinated.
Side note: After writing this app I had an uneasy feeling that I was somehow scamming the system. The app didn’t fulfill the appointment, just alert that there were slots available. Still. I heard of so many older people that were unable to get appointments because they couldn’t act quickly enough on their own. So I didn’t release this code for fear that it would totally soak up the queue. That being said, the vast majority of the people we got vaccination appointments were people that were not technically savvy enough on their own to get one. So that made me feel slightly better. But I still wrestle with whether or not I should have created this.
I love that Julia wrote a script to scan things with her scanner. Most scanning software, even the excellent Silverfast that I use, can be a pain. I’d love to write something simple on my own to speed up the process. So I’ll be looking into that maybe next winter.
The Mac Studio looks like a fantastic product at every level. Great name, super powerful, great design, great price. And the display! If I wasn’t a laptop person, I’d be buying both right now.
It has been really fun to slowly iterate on Stripe Transfer and grow the service, website, and process organically. I’m super happy that my wife Eliza is now joining me in helping customers navigate this critical process.
An LED light on a frozen pond I had a much longer list of links that I was going to share but I slowly pruned that list down to just a few. I’ve been very focused on gobbling up as much photography as I can lately. As spring breaks I’m very much looking forward to getting back out and shooting once again.
- Hosting a site on Pi, cellular, and solar – Jeff Geerling built a Raspberry Pi hosting setup that ran off of solar and cellular. And then put his personal site on it.
- Custom Wordle – There are a lot of Wordle clones, of course, but this one allows you to create your own word and send it to your friends. Could be useful to send surprise messages.
- River runner – Tap anywhere on the map, and River runner will show you how that raindrop would get to the ocean.
- Mavicazine – Photos that were taken by, and in some cases corrupted by, a Sony Mavic.
- The Last of the First Skiers – A photo series by Jonas Bendisken.
- Elif’in Hecesi – This YouTube channel showcases people playing different musical instruments from all around the world.
I’m selling two more cameras on the bay. These two are untested. But I don’t need them.
I just published Cypress 2022.1.0 to those that bought it. You should see a notification in your WordPress dashboard to update. This version mostly includes updates to the portfolio features as well as mobile fixes.
Discord and Slack are yet another silo. By all means have chats, but bring some of the content out to your blog!
After transferring tens of thousands of subscriptions in my side gig, StripeTransfer.com – which is a service that helps individuals and businesses transfer their Stripe subscriptions from one Stripe account to another – I’ve come across three main reasons this service is needed.
- Going through an acquisition
- Moving to a new country
- Consolidating subscription services
While there have been other reasons I’ve been asked to migrate or transfer subscriptions in Stripe, these are the top three use cases for the service that I provide. I’d like to take a moment to highlight a few aspects of each of these three use cases.
Going through an acquisition can be stressful. There is a lot of anxiety that comes along with selling a business – not the least of which is maintaining cashflow during the course of the due diligence process and the transaction. Business owners are typically hoping that every part of the process goes perfectly so as not to disrupt the potential sale. I do everything that I can to make sure the business owners, and the acquirers, feel very well taken care of and at ease during this process.
The best time for StripeTransfer to get involved when a company is going through an acquisition is, simply, as early as possible. Typically I can provide a quote for the work that can be used in negotiations for both the buyer and seller. And a fairly accurate timeline can be provided so that all parties have their expectations properly set. Many times both parties are willing to help fund the process.
Moving to a new country almost always forces the business owner to transfer to a new Stripe account. Stripe does not currently allow you to move the ownership of a Stripe account between parties, nor does it allow you to change its primary location from one country to another. So if you’re a solo-preneur that wants to switch living locations, a remote team that would like to incorporate in a new country, or a business that got acquired by an entity outside of your country – you will need to move your Stripe account to a brand-new account.
Consolidating subscription services often happens when a business has found itself with a complex or convoluted subscription structure. Perhaps they started out on one platform and moved to another, which resulted in them having some messy customer subscriptions. Or, they offered a wide variety of plans, products, discounts, and payment schedules over several years.
Cleaning up the back office, as it were, can help to reduce customer service tickets, confusion among your customers, and even provide a clearer upgrade path for your current customers. It also makes selling a business much smoother because it makes things easier to understand. Not to mention it is less expensive for me to do my work when things are simple and clear.
I’ve helped individuals and businesses facing each of these circumstances and others. In every situation, I’ve been able to move the entire transactional workflow from one country to the other – even switching currencies – without experiencing any interruptions in cashflow. And, if I’m involved early enough, I’ve been able to avoid any subscriptions signup downtime – to keep the growth curve in tact.
If you are in need of expert help in migrating Stripe accounts, please get in touch.
Tumblr:
As of today, you can set up ad-free browsing on your personal desktop computer, from anywhere in the world, and then enjoy the same effervescent Tumblr you know and love (yes, including mobile) without the interruption of ads. Scroll away.
$4.99 a month
If I was a daily Tumblr user, or if I powered my website or blog there, I’d rush to turn this on and support Tumblr sticking around well into the future.
This weekend I cooked a smoked barbecue dinner, painted, read, worked in the darkroom, shopped w/ Eliza, got in the hot tub, ice skated, etc. Guess what I didn’t do? Look at any social media. Over 60 days now. Feels good.
Recorded on February 18, 2022
Join me as I scan some photos and chat about starting things and finishing things. Are you dealing with the same thing? Write a comment!
Played around with Vivaldi on the Mac. Great browser. Tons of features and options. Almost too many? But without an iOS app I cannot use it as my daily browser.
Scripted a quick security cam process on the Ubuntu laptop for outdoor cameras I plan to setup. Takes a photo every few seconds from multiple cameras. Now to find some POE IP cameras.
Both Cypress and Red Oak are now available as Micro.blog plugins. I’m planning on updating both to work with WordPress 5.9’s new site editing feature in the near future.
I wonder how many Mac users, in 2022, know they are using a Unix-based OS – with all of the benefits of that – while at the same time benefiting from a best-in-class designed user interface and security features that also runs all of the major software available in the world?
Hello from Ubuntu on an early-2011 MacBook Pro 13-inch! I’d like to make a few tweaks to speed up Ubuntu’s boot on this device – but other than that, snappy.
I’m still experimenting with Ubuntu via a virtual machine. Unlike macOS, core OS updates are very quick to install. It is refreshing. I think I’m ready to install it on an old laptop and, maybe, use it for a week for fun.
Pocket Casts must have had a bad sync because all of my old subscriptions just popped back up. NO. GET OUT OF HERE POCKET CASTS!
Let’s try something fun. How about an AMA (Ask me anything) right here in my comments. Or, you can reply via Micro.blog or Mastodon. Why? I don’t know!
Penelope, January 2022 This week I feel like I’m at war with my photo library. I’m attempting to move files around, verify back ups, and generally do a clean up – and at every step I feel like the photo library is winning. I continue to wish this were easier.
Onto the links!
- MapOut – This app looks very useful.
- New England Forests – I’ve been fascinated by Tom Wessels’ forest forensics.
- Programmer blogs – I created a thread on Hacker News (no, I don’t know why) asking for blogs of programmers. I now have more than enough links to pick through.
- Aine Divine – I’m learning a lot from Aine. I enjoyed watching her on Portrait Artist of the Year.
- Flattened cans – I appreciate a good collection of inconsequential things.
- Root System Drawings – Incredible body of work.
Until next time. Oh! Before you go. I don’t follow nearly as many things online as I once did. As a result, I’m seeing less things online. Which I like. But, if you think I should see something be sure to reach out.
Tom MacWright:
There just aren’t as many active blogs as there were in the past. I think this has amplified the benefits of blogging: you can make more of an impact and create more of an identity with a blog than you can with Twitter or any siloed social network.
I was just having this discussion with someone. Now is the perfect time to start blogging.
No, this doesn’t have anything to do with blockchain.
Joel Spolsky writing about Block Protocol:
As a result of the non-standardization of blocks, our end-users suffer. If someone is using my blog engine, they can only use those blocks that I had time to implement. Those blocks may be pretty basic or incomplete. Users might want to use a fancier block that they saw in WordPress or Medium or Notion, but my editor doesn’t have it. Blocks can’t be shared or moved around very easily, and our users are limited to the features and capabilities that we had time to re-implement.
To fix this, we’re going to create a protocol called the Block Protocol.
It’s open, free, non-proprietary, we want it to be everywhere on the web.
This seems like an excellent idea. If I were still working on Barley I would have looked into implementing these as quickly as possible. Seems like good timing too.
Given Joel’s clout in the industry, I’m surprised there aren’t a few launch day partners – like Automattic, Squarespace, or Notion – to help ensure this gets traction. Perhaps they were approached and they didn’t go for it.
This morning I started a Hacker News thread asking for programmer blog recommendations. They are flooding in. If you have any feel free to let me know.
Photos for Mac tip: To delete auto-generated date folders in the source list drag them all into each other until they are all in one folder then delete that folder.
I’m selling my Mamiya M645 1000s with two viewfinders. If you’re interested, or know someone that might be.
All this hubbub around Spotify and podcasts reminded me to try out their app to see if they’ve improved since last year. They haven’t. It is still a terrible app to watch/listen to podcasts.
Nuked a Time Machine drive and started over completely. The backups were taking way too long or not finishing. Things seem to be back on track now.
For context, you may want to read my post from early January I am quitting social media.
There were two main actions I took when I decided to pull the plug on social media. First, I unsubscribed from all accounts in every platform. RSS feeds deleted. Twitter follows razed. Instagram follows flushed. YouTube subscriptions obliterated. All without any backup. Second, I removed the apps from my phone and tablet in an effort to block my habit of opening these apps several times a day.
It worked. I have not gone on any of these apps or websites to mindlessly scroll the feed once since I did this over 40 some odd days ago. And my habit of picking up my phone is steadily waning. My attention and focus seem to be returning. I’ve been able to do some painting, printing of postcards in the darkroom, reading, some journaling, and just overall have less topics on my mind in any given day. I’m also reading longer form articles without feeling the desire to stop reading halfway through. Of course, before this I was able to do these things but inevitably I’d be interrupted or distracted in the middle of them with something from social media. Now when I’m doing these things I’m just doing these things.
Deleting my subscriptions in RSS and Twitter was something I had done several times over the years. I can’t recommend doing this enough. Even if you don’t want to leave social media altogether like I did, I do recommend either taking a hatchet to what you take in or delete them completely. When I look through my YouTube history, my Pocket Cast listening history, or my browser history for this year it is far more varied, diverse and has many new sources of information than it did last year.
In fact, nearly all podcast episodes I’ve listened to this year has been from a new podcast that I had never listened to. New voices, new ideas, new information, new opinions. It is very refreshing. My RSS feeds are somewhat similar. I’m slowly adding new subscriptions and each time I do it is like meeting someone new and having them over for coffee.
I think the social echo chamber is a huge reason the world is so divided these days. Millions of people reading the same opinions every day and slowly being radicalized on just about every possible topic. From the most important topics of our day to even the most trivial. As much as I value the opinions of others, and look to mentors for inspiration, I do not want to be a mindless drone simply regurgitating what my echo chamber is telling me is true.
But there is still more work to do.
I notice my YouTube use hasn’t really decreased. Yes, I’m watching videos from all new channels on a variety of topics – but I’d like to do less of it. YouTube has filled in the boredom gap for me a bit. So I need to double down and put a limit on the amount of time I spend watching YouTube. I think this will also help me choose more judicially what I watch.
Leaving social media has done my brain a lot of good in a short period of time. I’m hoping that I continue to heal from the years and years of eating bite sized morsels of junk food. I’ll report back in a few months. Until then, I want to make some things. More on that soon.
I’m planning to write about how leaving social media has benefitted me, what I’ve done with that time, and further steps I’d like to take.
I’m looking forward to using the updated Apple Music app in macOS 12.2. I’ll likely update today.
Just purchased a lifetime license for DirEqual. I appreciate when developers offer a one-time price for utilities you only need from time-to-time.
I’ve decided not to buy the current crypto dip. I just don’t care about speculation anymore. I now own almost zero crypto, which I hope will help me to stay objective in my opinion of it.
cdevroe.com weighs in at approximately 5.3GB. Or, almost 1GB greater than March of last year.
Moxie Marlinspike*, ex-CEO of Signal, on Web3:
I decided to explore some of what has been happening in that space more thoroughly to see what I may be missing.
To explore Web3 he built a “distributed app” that tracked NFT derivatives and also minted an NFT that turned into a poop emoji once you added it to your wallet. This is max troll and I’m here for it.
His takeaways are worth a read.
- How is this a real name?
I’ve been meaning to link to Robin Sloan’s “counterweight to the growing hype” of Web3 for many weeks and forgotten. I think it pairs nicely with my link to Molly White’s Web3 hype damper.
Robin’s piece does more than simply attempt to squash the excitement of someone curious about Web3. It is a fair and balanced argument, showing why someone would be and could be excited about cryptocurrencies and how we’ve all been exhausted by our forfeiture of ownership in the big tech web silos.
If I could tease one tidbit out, that is altogether unrelated to Web3, but that I can’t help but comment on:
As a philosophy, Web 2.0’s success was incomplete, to say the least: there was a whole thick strand of ambition around the exchange of data in modular, permissive ways between platforms, which basically died — or was killed.
I totally agree that the potential of Web 2.0 was not fully realized. Both Twitter and Facebook pulled many people in under the promise of Web 2.0 but then yanked the rug out from under everyone. However, many amazing internet services were built expressly with data interoperability in mind. Just the fact that most of our data can be exported from any platform at all is a remnant of Web 2.0. It was a major factor in the growth of the web and why we ended up with great protocols and specifications such as RSS, OAuth, and many of the blocks of the Indie Web. I don’t think it is dead. In fact, the embers from Web 2.0 may be the very spark that will help create the flame of whatever comes after the flash-in-the-pan Web3*.
If you’re Web3 curious, go read the piece. And be sure to subscribe to Robin’s work. I first mentioned him in #75.
- I realize this is flippant. Web3 may not end up being a flash-in-the-pan. But I do hope some parts of it end up being so.
Readers of my blog may already be familiar with my thoughts on crypto and NFTs. To reiterate, in short; I’m bullish on blockchain, so-so on Bitcoin, looking closely at Ethereum, and skeptical about the longterm benefits of NFTs (though I think they could be a useful technology). If I had to summarize my opinion on the space in general I would still classify myself as mildly, yet cautiously optimistic here in early 2022. My feelings have certainly cooled over the last few years, but I don’t like where a lot of the effort is going currently.
All of that being said, I also feel it is important to balance the information I take in to make sure that I get a dose of both the optimistic and pessimistic sides of this debate. And I try hard to make sure the optimistic perspectives aren’t only voiced by those that stand to win financially if the price of any specific token spikes.
Molly White has put together a website titled “Web3 is going just great” wherein she collects the not-so-optimistic views of what many are unfortunately calling “Web3” – that is, blockchain, tokens, NFTs, DeFi, etc. She has also been blogging a bit on the topic as well.
I’ve put her feeds into my RSS reader.
An aside, if I may, regarding the use of the term “Web3”:
I find the use of this term unfortunate. There are so many parts to all of this that, of course, someone wanted a more approachable term to use, but I’d hate to think that it could ever be said that an entire “version of the web” was ever a scam. The web and Web 2.0, two eras that I lived through and am intimately familiar with, sort of felt like versions of the internet that we know. But Web3, or what is being called Web3, is far more complicated than that.
If Web3 were only a layer of ownership ontop of the independent, already decentralized, open source, owned-by-no one internet we already love – I’d be all for it. But when you lump it together with pump and dump tokens, out-of-this world prices for digital art that clearly show a bubble, and the toxic crypto-bro movement, then I feel like we need a different term.
The issue is that ship has already sailed. We’re stuck with it now. Blah.
I double checked my OneDrive photo library back up and realized it was missing about 10,000 files. So I’m redoing that entire backup from scratch.
Tomorrow marks three weeks off of social media. It has been fantastic. I plan on writing a post about the journey so far after a full month. If you have any questions, let me know.
I linked to photographer Luisa Dorr on January 6th, Kottke did on January 7th. Just sayin’.
Zoomed into this month’s Philly ‘burbs WordPress meetup. It was great to see some familiar faces.
At a recent distillery tasting Wow, 90 of these. I hope at or before 100 I go back through them all and pull forward some of my favorites. I hope most of these links still exist!
- Craig Pindell – I’ve been enjoying photos and the pages on his site.
- Unflinching Grace – A documentary about three women photojournalists.
- Egg Freckles – I dig this Newton styled website.
- CodePen’s podcast with Stephanie Eckles – Stephanie has a lot of irons in the fire. Reminds me of myself.
- Design Matters with Ethan Hawke – This one is going to stick with me for awhile. I’ve scribbled down a bunch of quotes from it. Here is one “Everything gets washed away like a sand castle anyway, so what do you want to do?”
- The work of Luisa Dorr – Amazing work. If I could make images 10% as good as Luisa I’d be happy. See also.
- Printing dryplates from the 1900s – I love this bit “how many more unknown female masters of photography were lost in time, still hiding in attics and cellars?”. Great question.
- Leo McGarry’s visual guide to The West Wing offices – I may have linked to this before but worth a re-link.
- A Cook’s Tour – Bourdain’s early series is available for free on YouTube.
You may see less of these types of posts since I’ve left social media behind and I think I’ll end up stumbling across only a fraction of the things I used to. But that will be a good thing. For both of us.
Should I continue my What I Saw series of posts? I love to look back at them. But I have no sense of whether or not anyone else values them. And they are a bit of work. I could spend that time this year coding instead. Opinions appreciated.
Another small update will be rolling out to the Cypress theme/plugin/thingy users on Micro.blog soon. Thanks to everyone that has reported issues on GitHub.
P. I. Moore in continuance of my quitting social media post writes:
This couldn’t resonate with me more. Through having my own plans and ambitions going forward to better both myself and my writing, the strive to regain control of what I let into my own mind—and draw from my focus—will be under vast scrutiny.
Mostly. And, for a year. Or more.
What started out as a routine flushing of my social media accounts, something I’ve done on more than one occasion in the past, has now turned into a strong desire to leave social media behind for good. And so I’m doing just that.
My main reasons for waiting to cut off from the feeds are my losing my ability to focus, my personal output, time, and the complete destruction of my mind.
I’ve been on Twitter since November 2006. It has been my main source of breaking news, inspiration, and entertainment ever since. I get an awful lot of value from Twitter. I painstakingly curate my experience there to engineer a positive outcome. But I also spend an inordinate amount of time scrolling tweets, clicking links, reading threads, and darting between subjects like a kitten chasing a laser.
I think the cumulative effect on my brain since 2006 has been that my ability to focus has been effected. Not that I can’t focus. I can sit down and get into flow on a programming project more often than not. But when I’m still, when I’m idle, when I feel like I could be bored at any moment I grab my phone and scroll through Twitter which sends my mind into overdrive on a million topics, timelines, thoughts, and emotions.
I don’t think this is good for the human brain. I know it isn’t good for my brain.
So, while I know I will miss the firehouse of data being directly injected into my consciousness, I’m giving it (and all other social media) up for 2022. And possibly beyond.
Mostly.
Here is my plan (as of this writing):
- I’m still going to write on my blog. And I’m still going to try to reply to all comments, webmentions, linkbacks, etc.
- I’m rebuilding my RSS feeds from scratch to mostly direct me towards longer form writing and less frequent updates. Web sites, both personal and professional, that foster inspiration, tinkering, making, etc. but with a focus on those that dive a bit deeper. Rather than a waterfall of fresh runoff, a stream of crystal clear spring water.
- I’m not going to read the Twitter feed, at all.
- I’m not going back on Instagram to view the feed, at all.
- I might load Micro.blog once or twice a week to catch up (same with Mastodon). I will also put a few users there into NetNewswire so I see all of their posts. The signal to noise ratio on both of these platforms is rather high. So if I limit my exposure, severely, I think I can come away without my mind turning to mush. By the way, I’m not comparing M.b or Mastodon to Twitter/FB because they are not the same thing. But, I followed tons and tons of accounts and so it was a barrage of information daily.
- I’m not going on Facebook at all. This should be very easy as I very rarely opened it.
- I am limiting YouTube viewing dramatically. Cherry picking a video or two watch rather than queuing up dozens at a time.
- I’m going to read books. I used to read 16-20 a year. I don’t anymore. In fact, since starting this journey just about two weeks ago now, I’ve finished two books and started another. I’m hoping this will help me to dive deep rather than go broad.
- I’ve deleted my podcasts and will instead cherry pick episodes here and there to listen to. And not for every commute. I will instead listen to some music, the Bible, or nothing at all.
- I’ve deleted all social media apps from my phone and tablet. But I am not deleting my accounts. Perhaps I will eventually.
- To fill the gaps of possible boredom I’m going to do what I used to do; study the Bible more, make things, get into the darkroom, play boardgames or card games with friends, sit in the yard or hot tub… but mostly make things.
Like I said, I’ve started this just a few weeks ago, and just yesterday I read an article on The Guardian titled Your attention didn’t collapse, it was stolen. It is a good read and I urge you to read it if this is a topic that interests you. It just reaffirmed to me why I’m doing this. Drastic? Yes. But I think it will help me.
Well over a decade ago you would have found me urging friends and family to get online and get onto social media so that we could share photos, tweets, links, etc. there. I regret ever doing that. I believe that social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok) has been a net negative for the world. It was a boon at its beginning but it spiraled out of control – and pushed towards lunacy by greed.
I’m already feeling better having made this decision. I know I’ll experience some FOMO. I realize I may not hear every bit of news or lose my finger on the pulse of the web (which I’ve maintained since getting online in 1994).
But I’m OK with that. I’d much rather have my mind back. I can’t wait to see what I do with it.
Cypress for Micro.blog has received a bug fix release (thanks Manton). If you’re using the theme you may want to make sure you’re using the latest version. More fixes coming for Cypress.
Made some postcards in the darkroom. Sent this one to a fellow film photographer and friend in Oregon.
Finished reading The Beatles: Unseen Archives. Great to see the timeline and old photographs.
Finished reading The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fischer. A very heartbroken Carrie, clearly.
Number of posts per month:
- January – 40
- February – 37
- March – 71
- April – 44
- May – 39
- June – 31
- July – 46
- August – 23
- September – 14
- October – 16
- November – 23
- December – 36 (including this post)
Total: 420
See 2020.
I posted more to my blog in 2021 than 2020. As I said in my review post, I need to sit down and give a hard think to what my goals for 2022 will be, but I do hope they include sharing more here on my blog.
This will be my last post for 2021. See you next year.
I thought it would be fun to review what has happened this past year on my blog, what I had set out to do, and what I’ve accomplished. I’m hoping that by writing this post it will give me some clarity on what I may want to try to do in 2022.
January In very early January, I published My typical day and tagged other bloggers to do the same. If I had stats on this blog I’m guessing it would show that this post was my most popular for the year. Bloggers from around the world chimed in. I don’t even know if I managed to capture them all. It was really great to read everyone’s daily routines.
Also in January I published my Best of 2020 post. I really hope I get 2021’s best of post finished in the same time frame this year.
And as the month ended I put a stake in the ground stating that I wanted to start getting some of my code out in the world.
A very quick overview of what I did in this regard in 2021:
I formalized some code I had written for a client a few years ago, launched StripeTransfer.com and have helped many companies in 2021 transfer subscriptions from one Stripe account to another. It has also generated tens of thousands of dollars of extra income for us. I’m super happy with this result.
I released two WordPress themes; Cypress and Red Oak that both are available for free via Micro.blog as well. And I’ve managed to get several releases of these out over the year. They’ve sold fairly well but not as well as I would have hoped. However, since Cypress also runs my personal site it was worth the effort.
I did not release any major updates to Unmark in 2021. Kyle and I are deciding the hosted version’s future. But it will always be available as open source.
I’ve written a lot of code in 2021 and I’m super happy about that. I’d like to write a lot more in 2022. But I’d like to focus my efforts a bit. More on this in the near future as I revisit this topic.
February Deep into winter, I was spending a lot of time in the darkroom and using the trail cam.
March This was the month with the greatest number of individual posts to the blog at 71. The vast majority of these posts were status updates. I wish I published this many posts more often. I’ve said this many times, but if posting to my own blog were much easier from my phone I would probably post at least twice as many posts. Perhaps if you’re reading this you’re happy I don’t!
I made a lot of progress on Cypress in late-February and early March and it launched on March 4.
It was also in March that I decided to share my thoughts on NFTs and energy use.
I published an episode of my podcast. I haven’t managed to publish any more this year for the podcast. Switching instead to posting YouTube videos. I don’t know what the future holds for my podcast. We will see.
I finally published my photo library management solution near the end of March. Something I had been wanting to do for months.
April In April I put out a wee bit of code in the HTML Family tree. I had built something for my family and so I decided to release it. I feel like this is something that should be iterated on. I don’t particularly have the passion for it – but I believe it could be useful. Someone should take what I’ve started and run with it.
In April I released Red Oak on Micro.blog first and then on WordPress.
I also drew an icon for my wife’s side hustle.
In mid-April I mentioned that I missed posting on The Watercolor Gallery so I started putting more effort into it. As a result, for the first year ever (11 years running) The Watercolor Gallery was profitable and I’m really enjoying what I’ve done over there.
May In May I released the Micro.blog bookmarklet. I do not know for sure, but it seems like a lot of people use this. I hope they do!
I also started painting more regularly in May. I find it very relaxing and should do more of it.
May is also when the garden exploded into life.
In May I created my Links page. I’ve found this to be super helpful page to have. I recommend making one yourself.
The Watercolor Gallery opened up for sponsorships in May. I started by asking a few online friends (like Micro.blog, Acorn, Exposure) to help out to get the ball rolling. I’ve managed to sell most months through 2020.
I published a fair number of my “What I saw” series of posts. I’m now up to #89 (as of this writing). They are my least popular posts (at least, as far as comments go) but they are a great resource to look back on.
Went lake trout fishing.
June Jeremy Brown drew me the avatar I’ve been using throughout 2021. It has served me well this year but I’m thinking of switching it up in 2022.
I published My current opinion of crypto.
StripeTransfer.com officially launched!
I built three garden beds using reclaimed wood from my mother-in-laws.
I published my portraits of William Chickillo. It is still my goal to do a lot more environmental portraiture – which means, photos of people in their environment – and I’ve been thinking about it every day since. I’ve managed to get a lot of photos out the door in 2021 but I wish I had done an awful lot more. I get turned down a lot when I ask people I’m interested in photographing to take their photo. I know all photographers deal with rejection. But it discourages me just enough not to push. I need to just get over and push harder.
July In July the garden beds started to take off. I published an interview with Shari Blaukopf. I also met someone via Flickr in my hometown that used to live in my house in the 1960s.
Oh, we made our first pizzas in our Roccbox. After a few tries we started to make some really great ones.
I did my first 50% off sale in July which generated some sales. I am also doing one now in December.
August We got Penelope! Eliza bought me AirPods Pro and I have used them every single day since. Here is my initial observations.
At the end of August we went on a trip through New York State and Vermont and I took a little social media break.
September I asked if anyone else was going to switch away from Google for email. It took a few months, but I have now fully switched away from Google and am using iCloud+ for email and I am so happy that I did it. See November.
October I wrote about photographing 40-foot falls after the remnants of a hurricane breezed through the area.
I also iterated on the copy on Stripe Transfer and managed to land the largest customer I’ve had to date – which I ended up doing while in the car using my mobile device for a connection. Definitely made me sweat a little.
I finished reading Project Hail Mary – probably my favorite book of 2021.
I went on vacation.
November Made the switch to iCloud+.
iCloud+ allows a few more junk emails through than Google did, however I’m far happier to not be using Google anymore.
This meant that I also deleted about 100,000 photos from Google Photos. This must be done individually because, well, Google is user hostile. So I sorted my files by size and deleted them that way to reduce the amount of space I used as quickly as I could. I’m now on Google’s free plan and I hope to remove the rest of my photos soon.
I published the Sandbridge Beach Houses series. I’ve seen made several postcard prints in the darkroom with these and have sent them to friends. I also uploaded a video to YouTube going through the entire set.
I published an interview on The Watercolor Gallery with an NFT artist.
December I uploaded a video to YouTube covering my quarantine project where I built a camera obscura out of our bedroom.
I published an update to Cypress and put my themes on sale for the remainder of the month.
I deleted my social media follows, subscriptions for RSS, podcasts, YouTube, newsletters, etc. Everything I could possibly find I deleted to start fresh. I’ve only followed a few accounts since. Trying to hold off until 2022 before I begin rebuilding my echo chamber – hopefully with all new sounds.
—
This is an incomplete overview of my year – but a fair overview of what I published to this blog. It doesn’t include many personal things and nothing about my day job – which was incredibly busy during 2021. Now that I’ve gotten all of this out of my brain I can move onto the task of deciding what my goals for 2022 will be. I’m very excited about what I might be able to spend my time on.
Please send wintertime hot tub energy usage tips. I feel like a crypto miner over here.
I have a few BAT. Rather than converting them to Doge or something I’d like to give them away. Is anyone accepting these little tokens on their site?
I wonder if anyone uses a Mastodon instance for internal / external company communication? Sort of like how P2 is used by Automattic.
Chris Hannah:
I’ve named it Pure, and that’s mainly because I wanted very minimal styling, and to have it be a pure version of a theme. For the benefit of it acting as a “starter” theme for people that want to maybe want to start tweaking a theme but don’t want to start from scratch. But also for people (like me) that sometimes just want a clean and simple blog.
Looks like a great starter theme.
Running Ubuntu via a VM in QEMU to play around with it. It is really nice. I’m having trouble installing it on the old MacBook though. The USB drive doesn’t seem to be recognized as a boot drive.
As I begin to rebuild my RSS subscriptions from scratch I’m starting all feeds in a “Trialing” folder in NetNewswire. After a few weeks they can move to “Subscribed” or will be deleted.
Back in the darkroom. Archiving negatives from the 40s from my grandparents and making prints and postcards.
So many dormant Mastodon accounts. It rivals Flickr in that way. Sometimes it feels like walking through a ghost town.
I have an old MacBook that I’d like to repurpose. It is pretty old so I’m thinking a Linux server or file server. Any suggestions?
90-days ago or so I postulated that Meta would fire Instagram’s CEO. That hasn’t happened, yet. So I was wrong.
Thanks to everyone who has purchased Cypress and Red Oak. Just a reminder, you can get 50% off until the end of the year using code dec21. Also thanks to anyone that has supported any of my side projects.