Tammy and I went to the newly opened Dario for dinner tonight. The meal, wine, ambiance, and service were fantastic. We had the Gem Lettuces followed by the Fall Vegetable Salad and the Spicy Rigatoni alla Vodka for pasta. Dessert was Cake & Ice Cream. The pasta blew me away with the flavors!
We had a nice afternoon bowling at Elsie’s in Northeast. We got almost 19 frames in for a total of Tyler 161, Tammy 119, and me at 228. š³
After two attempts for dinner we finally made it to Mothership Pizza Paradise for lunch today. Started with Arancini and Woodfired Veggies (Carrots) and then Kay (margarita) and Kathy (pepperoni) pizzas with a hot honey dipping sauce. Finished with M&M Cookies and Milk. Was great!
micro.one making blogging more accessible!
Congratulations to Manton on the launch of micro.one! I have been a happy customer of micro.blog since launch and I love this new simplified version that makes blogging even more accessible at a super low $10 a year!
Living inside the little box that a social media platforms give you, in exchange for your personal data, is oppressive. Having a voice on the web means having your own domain. Even the simple act of formatting with bold, italics, and using hyperlinks freely can only be achieved on your own blog. Take a moment to consider that. Using these massive surveillance systems is fundamentally curtailing your ability to express yourself. In return for what? Being fed an algorithmic stream of garbage to addict you?
Having your own website has never been easier. And it isn’t free which is also how you know it is honest! My Grandpa, and probably yours too, taught me there was no free lunch. $10 a year to be able to express yourself on the web? So cheap. There is no way I know of to take a photo, attach a few sentences, and put them on the web better or easier than this.
In celebration of the launch I would love to sponsor some micro.one users. Email me if you’d like to get your own blog but the $10 is a barrier… it is an extension of my Weekly Thing Christmas Blogs!
There are organizations that I think are making the web better every day: Wikimedia, Let’s Encrypt, Internet Archive, Creative Commons. I think I need to add micro.blog to that list!
Little Snitch is a great app to protect your privacy. It is also incredible to use your computer for average stuff and see that you are connecting with systems all around the world. I’m even running 1Blocker in my browser which stops some things before they even get to the network layer!
Payloads for RSS, aka Podcasts!
24 years ago today Dave Winer introduced Payloads for RSS ā which became the structure of the entire podcasting world. If you listen to a podcast, you are using RSS with enclosures. I love the backstory that he disagreed with the premise but Adam Curry “persisted” and convinced him of the value.
RSS already does most of what we want. With the addition of the <enclosure> sub-element of <item> any RSS element can describe a video or audio file (actually any type of file).
<enclosure> has three attributes: url says where the file is located, length says how big it is, and type says what its type is. This way a workstation or aggregator can know in advance, without having to do any communication, what it’s going to get, and apply scheduling and filtering rules.
This is another great example of the power of open protocols and the open web! šŖ
Micro.blog Collections Shortcuts
I’ve gone “all in” on Micro.blog’s photo collection feature. I’ve created 64 collections so far which if Iām reading id numbers right means 17% of all collections on micro.blog are ones I made. š¤
I needed some tooling in order to migrate to collections and use them the way that I want to. Iām sharing here the three shortcuts that I’ve created to do this: Creator, Copier, and Viewer.
Requirements to be aware of:
- You will need an App Token for these Shortcuts. Create one on your apps screen.
- These shortcuts, like most of my more complicated shortcuts, all use Logger for Shortcuts. Make sure to install that on your devices. It is free and a great utility. I debated removing the logging methods to avoid this dependency but these shortcuts can run for 20 or 30 seconds and it is very helpful to be able to see the logging output while it is running.
Collection Creator
I’ve updated my original Collection Creator shortcut through my own use. Most of my collections have been populated with this Shortcut. I’ve found it even more useful than I thought to be able to take a clipboard full of URLs and create a collection out of the linked images. I’ve used it for posts, for pages, and even some cases where I just grabbed a bunch of image links and create a collection.
Improvements since the first release:
- Improved confirmation prompts for clarity.
- Improved logging to be more useful and include progress indicators like “1 of n” to each item. 1
- After completing create the shortcode for the collection and put in the clipboard so ready to use.
- Minimal monitoring of API failure. 2
Add Micro.blog Collection Creator Shortcut
Collection Copier
Iām not sure how common this will be, but at times I want to include all the photos from one collection into another collection. For example:
- Blog post about a day of hiking in Switzerland uses a collection for that post.
- Page about that overall trip has a collection of photos for that trip.
- A photo page that contains all photos I’ve taken in Switzerland.
In this case these photos are in three collections. The easiest way to populate the aggregated collections would be to copy all photos from individual collections to them. It would be nice to “Add all photos from Collection X to Collection Y”. That is what this Shortcut does.
Add Micro.blog Collection Copier Shortcut
Collection Viewer
The viewer collection I don’t use a ton because it doesn’t do anything different than just looking at the collection on micro.blog. But I do like having the ability to quickly index into a collection and just verify what is in there so Iām keeping it around too. It was also the first Shortcut I wrote for this to figure out how to get into the API and see the responses.
Add Micro.blog Collection Viewer Shortcut
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The API method to add images to a collection was made much faster but it still takes about a second per image. This gives you a better indicator of where you are in the process. Think of it like a status bar. ↩︎
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I find it odd that in Shortcuts I cannot seem to retrieve the HTTP status code for an API call. I can access the body of the response, but not the status code. I now have the shortcut check the body of the API call to add the image to a collection and if there is any content there log a warning. I wish I could check for a 200 but it doesn’t seem possible. ↩︎
Podcast trends for 2024. 75 fewer hours of listening versus 2023. Pivot still my drive time podcast commuting to work. Subscribe to Making Sense and The Drive, but surprisingly low listen time with Attia. Mostly I listen to two, maybe three, podcasts.
Colorado Avalanche v Minnesota Wild tonight. Hockey is such a great live game. Fresh snow made it super difficult to get here - missed the first period. 3-1 with Colorado in the lead. š¬š
Threads Moderation Changes
There has been a lot of noise today about Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement on Threads about their moderation policies. My position is unchanged ā private companies can choose their policies and along the lines of the law they can do what they wish. I don’t think it is even right to call it censorship. Am I being censored if I get kicked out of a mall for being a jerk? Nope.
I did find it wild that he posted this all exactly four years to the day from when he blocked Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram:
We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great. Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.
I actually temporarily disabled my blocker so I could access this. Text of Zuckerberg’s statement today, in normal text instead of a “Thread-storm”. Seriously people, blogs exist and you can type more than a sentence in a post. How about fixing that?
It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here’s what we’re going to do:
- Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US.
- Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.
- Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.
- Bring back civic content. We’re getting feedback that people want to see this content again, so we’ll phase it back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
- Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
- Work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.
It’ll take time to get this all right and these are complex systems so they’ll never be perfect. But this is an important step forward and l’m looking forward to this next chapter!
