Jamie Thingelstad

I’ve been using Butt Rub for a number of years, but made my first direct purchase from their website and got this awesome t-shirt as a free gift! Great rub, great name, great shirt! 🐖🔥😍

Happy Birthday America! 🇺🇸🎉🎆

In just over a week we head to Switzerland for our hiking trip. I wanted to get a longer and harder hike in before we left so this morning Tammy and I got up early, let the kids sleep in, and went to Murphy-Hanrehan Park Reserve for a 5.3 mile hike with about 900 ft of elevation gain. It took us 2h 8m to finish. My shirt was like I had wore it in a shower when we got done. I brought my poles and was initially feeling silly, but after a couple of miles the trail started going up and down more and I was happy to have them. 😅 Also on Strava.

Enjoying this Athletic Brewing Apricot Farmhouse. Refreshing and crisp flavor. 🍻

Thanks to very detailed directions from Matt Langford (@mtt) I was able to add NIP-05 Verification to my micro.blog hosted site with a custom plugin to create the nostr.json link.

Current POV.

I love watching the Damselflies hover and cling to the Big Bluestem in the morning.

I’ve been having more fun on micro.blog lately in large part to the excellent work of Matt Langford and his delightful Tiny Theme for Micro.blog.

When I saw Tiny Theme I instantly appreciated the design and support for all the capabilities that micro.blog provides. I liked how Matt had built in support for some of the most popular plug-ins, including Sven Dahlstrand’s great collection. Plus Tiny Theme is super fast. I switched my site to it and have been having a great time.

Matt has pushed new features and improvements on a weekly basis (or more) since release. It has been fun to see the continued improvements. He recently started integrating Tinylytics, a new service by Vincent Ritter, and Matt’s enthusiasm for the service, and built-in support coming in Tiny Theme, was enough to get me to sign up for a paid account.

Great blogging platforms have these wonderful developer communities that form around them. I’ve hosted my blog on several different technologies, and the one thing I miss about WordPress is the massive (almost too massive) community of themes and plugins built around it.

But no blogging platform has developed an economically supported ecosystem around it. I think that is an opportunity.

Matt has a PayPal link in his Tiny Theme documentation which I was happy to see and use to send a Thank You. That is fine, but it is hardly the way to support an on-going effort like maintaining a theme.

The introduction of Tiny Theme added a lot of value to my micro.blog experience. Not just for the service directly, but also for other plugin developers too. I’d love to support a Community Fund to continue to support the development of additional themes and plugins.

Could we have a micro.blog Community Fund? Micro.blog already has different tiers of service. Imagine if I could “upgrade” with a $50/year “Community Fund” add-on. Those funds would go to micro.blog, and then be distributed to theme and plugin developers to help make the ecosystem even better.

Distribution of funds would need some thought, and should be more editorial and algorithmic. You would not want to game a system of plugin developers seeking installs to drive funding. And you would want to fund things that have no usage yet. But creating an economic system to drive community innovation would be a great step to a sustainable, independent, and thriving platform still at human scale.

Maybe Micro.blog creator Manton will find this intriguing. 😎

I’m trying some changes to my feeds. I’ve been a happy user of Feedbin for years and am going to give the Feedbin app a go on my phone instead of Unread. I’m also trying the newest Airshow which is also by Feedbin and syncs with the reader instead of Overcast.

Cigar time. 🔥

The ice cream truck always brings a smile, no matter what your age. 🍦

Another bumblebee busy collecting pollen.

Bevcomm is the Internet provider for our cabin and I met with the tech yesterday to help with the site assessment for installing fiber! It is likely still a year away, but we will be getting a massive jump from DSL with speed choices up to 1 Gbps! I’ll be upgrading the network in preparation. ⚡️

Wild milestone.

Apple, an American tech giant, surpassed $3trn in market value for the first time since January 2022, when it briefly became the first publicly listed company to do so. Shares in the iPhone-maker subsequently slipped back, but they have increased in value by almost 50% this year, despite two consecutive quarters of declining revenues. The firm is now worth $500bn more than Microsoft, a tech rival. — Economist Espresso, July 1, 2023

$3 trillion? 💰💰💰

Bumble Bee busy harvesting pollen in the yard this morning. 🐝

This video short from Minneapolis artist Matt Semke (catswilleatyou) is incredible. The music is haunting.