Over a year ago I proposed a new blog archive format. The idea was to have a better way to save the posts and photos in your blog, or move your blog to another platform. I’m happy to announce that Micro.blog can now export in this format.

Here’s how it works:

• Click Posts → Export → “Export in blog archive format”.
• Micro.blog will generate the archive, which is an HTML file with Microformats, a JSON Feed of all posts, and a folder of uploaded photos. The HTML file uses relative img references so you can open it directly without a server. The JSON Feed includes both HTML and Markdown. (Micro.blog actually uses Hugo to generate the HTML. I’ve made the theme available on GitHub.)
• The archive is zipped and renamed with the .bar file extension. When you download a .bar file, you can rename it .zip to open it, but having a new extension should make it more convenient to copy the file or import it into other apps.
• Micro.blog uploads the file to S3 and sends you an email when it’s available to download.

If you’ve uploaded a lot of photos, the archives can be fairly big. It’s working well for my blog and I’ll be monitoring it to see how well it works for other blogs. If you have a blog-related app that could import or export this format, let me know!

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There’s now an option to switch your subscription to be billed yearly instead of monthly. When you do, you’ll get a discount equivalent to 2 free months.

If you’re signed in to Micro.blog, click here to start switching your subscription. For now, new customers always start with monthly billing, but we’ll be expanding this in the future. (I talked through some of the complexity of this feature on the latest Core Intuition.)

Thanks for your support! If you notice any problems or have questions, please let me know: help@micro.blog.

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SXSW is underway in Austin, which means it’s time to mark the anniversary of my blog. 17 years ago today I started blogging on manton.org. Radio Userland → Movable Type → WordPress → Micro.blog. Still my favorite place to write.

I love this video from WordPress. Very similar in style to what I always imagined we could do for Micro.blog.

We just posted Core Intuition 363. This episode continues the big theme from the last few episodes as Daniel considers taking on extra work beyond Red Sweater. From the show notes:

Daniel reveals to Manton that he’s (on the verge of) taking a part-time job. They assess the likely impact on Red Sweater, and how it might affect Daniel’s self image as an “independent developer.” Manton talks about updates he’s making to Micro.blog’s billing infrastructure, and how small improvements can lead to recurring increases in revenues. Finally, Daniel reviews his plans for the upcoming 4.3 release, and questions whether having less time to work on Red Sweater might make the time he does spend on it more productive.

As part of the discussion around MarsEdit 4.3, I mention the new archive export feature in Micro.blog. That has now been rolled out. If you host your blog on Micro.blog, you can find it by clicking “Posts”, then “Export”.

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Brent Simmons has a good list of Marzipan questions. The one I’m slightly worried about is whether we can ship Marzipan apps outside the App Store. Other limitations will improve with time, but closing off distribution is a deal-breaker for me.

So many great podcasts. I’ve thrown out any structure in how I choose what to listen to. I just have a “Latest” playlist in Overcast with the recent episodes across all podcasts at the top. Tap on a few episodes that look good, depending on my mood.

Seems about once a year there’s a new story about the last Blockbuster. We loved visiting Bend a few years ago, but didn’t know about the Blockbuster. Fun that the store is becoming a sort of tourist attraction.

There’s no Homebrew Website Club in Austin tonight. We’ll regroup in April. (Thanks again to everyone who made it to IndieWebCamp Austin! Seeya next time.)

Some great basketball tonight: Spurs holding on with a 1-point win over the Nuggets. Pelicans close game in Utah. And still underway, the Lakers first of 2 must-win games against the Clippers. 🏀

Vincent Ritter has more iOS invites for his Micro.blog app. He’s also looking for Android testers.

I’m the guest on this week’s Micro Monday, answering questions about Micro.blog.

We just published episode 362 of Core Intuition. From the show notes:

Manton and Daniel talk about how IndieWebCamp Austin went, and reflect on the virtues of the diverse “open web” community. They react to a debate between Jeff Atwood & David Heinemeier Hansson about their purportedly different approaches to business. Finally, they talk about Daniel’s increasingly glum feelings about his business, Daniel makes some self-assessment of shortcomings, and the two of them talk about making small, productive tweaks to increase revenues.

You can subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Castro. Thanks for listening!

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Brad Frost shares a couple of stories about how people have remembered his writing because he has his own blog. He puts it very clearly:

Writing on your own website associates your thoughts and ideas with you as a person. Having a distinct website design helps strengthen that association.

This is why we encourage everyone to have their own blog and use their own domain name, and why Micro.blog-hosted blogs have multiple built-in designs as well as support for completely custom themes. I highlighted a few custom designs in the 12 days of microblogging series, and I recorded a YouTube screencast last month explaining how to import and customize new themes.

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I’ll be the guest in the next Micro Monday, catching up with @macgenie on recent Micro.blog improvements and answering your questions! Let us know if you have any questions or topics to cover.

I added a help page with an introduction to IndieAuth for Micro.blog developers. This is best for web apps and desktop apps where the user is often already signed in.

This week Jean published the 50th episode of Micro Monday! There are even more episodes than that if you count the bonus episodes. As she said on the show, it’s amazing what can happen when you’re consistent about recording every week.

The latest episode features Jonathan LaCour:

You know him best as @cleverdevil, the creator of utilities that enhance your microblog such as microgram (an Instagram-like photo grid page), and micromemories (a Facebook-like “On This Day” feature). We talk about the Indieweb and ditching Facebook with ditchbook. We even mention dogs and karaoke.

Thanks to all the guests over the last year, and to everyone who has listened. I’ve loved hearing the stories — putting voices to some of the profile photos in my timeline, and getting inspired each week to keep improving Micro.blog.

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Thinking about our Micro.blog APIs after IndieWebCamp Austin. There are a lot! Probably not even a complete list: RSS, JSON Feed, MetaWeblog, Micropub, ActivityPub, Microformats, WebSub, rssCloud, Webmention, IndieAuth, and now Microsub.

We had the 2nd IndieWebCamp Austin over the weekend. As I did after the 1st IndieWebCamp Austin, I’m going to summarize some of what I took away from the event.

Saturday morning started with my quick introduction to the IndieWeb, some thoughts from the perspective of Micro.blog, and then laying out the schedule for IndieWebCamp. Next up, Aaron Parecki gave a keynote on the state of social readers: how we can use apps to both read other people’s blogs and also reply to posts.

There was a time for personal site demos, where any attendee could show their web site and talk a little about what they’ve done with it recently or what improvements they might want to make. We then had a planning session, proposing ideas for sessions to organize the schedule for the afternoon. This is the un-conference style that I’m still getting used to, but which is really effective at shaping the conference for what attendees are actually interested in.

For the Sunday hack day, I focused on 2 things: experimenting with a Micro.blog export for the Blog Archive Format that I proposed here, and implementing the Microsub API in Micro.blog as a server. Along the way I also improved Micro.blog’s support for replies via Micropub.

Having everyone in the same room is a great chance to bounce ideas off one another or find and fix bugs. Cornelius Toole was also working on a script to create archive files, so we were able to work together and brainstorm on whether this could be used to transfer podcasts between providers. Aaron Parecki and I talked through a couple aspects of the Microsub and Micropub APIs that needed tweaking.

I’ll have more to share about the Blog Archive Format when it’s live on Micro.blog. I’ve been testing it this morning with a fix that wasn’t ready in time for my IndeWebCamp demo.

If you’re interested in attending an IndieWebCamp, there will be several more this year at cities from New Haven to Berlin, including IndieWeb Summit in Portland in June. I’m always inspired to see what people are working on, and it usually leads to new features in Micro.blog as well. Thanks again to everyone who made it to IndieWebCamp Austin!

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Wrapping up the first day of IndieWebCamp, Aaron Parecki is live-coding a simple blogging engine to demo social readers. Great example of the IndieWeb building blocks and interoperability between services.

Excited for IndieWebCamp tomorrow. If you’re disappointed in modern social networks and looking for what’s next on the open web, I hope you’ll join us at Capital Factory in Austin. More details and registration here.

First time at Capital Factory? Look for these doors tomorrow inside the building lobby. You can still register for IndieWebCamp here. $5 or free when you blog about the event!

IndieWebCamp starts tomorrow. I’m downtown this morning, heading over to Capital Factory to do a walk-through of the venue and make sure we’re all good for the weekend.

On the latest Core Intuition we covered this Bloomberg article from Mark Gurman about Marzipan. Many bloggers have written about it this week, skeptical that Marzipan will ever produce great Mac apps, but maybe we’re not giving enough credit to Apple’s strategy. Let’s start with this part of the article:

By 2021, developers will be able to merge iPhone, iPad, and Mac applications into one app or what is known as a “single binary.” This means developers won’t have to submit their work to different Apple App Stores, allowing iOS apps to be downloaded directly from Mac computers — effectively combining the stores.

Marzipan is a multi-year effort. It exists today mostly as a prototype, not meant for developers, with obvious limitations such as iOS-like controls and sheets poking through in the UI. The next phase will be much more mature. And then by 2021 we’ll have more polish and a consistent App Store submission experience across platforms.

What we can’t predict yet is how users will react to third-party apps. An assumption in the Mac developer community is that native, all-AppKit macOS apps will always be better than iOS apps ported with Marzipan. I believe that too. Apps originally designed for the Mac will have more thought put to the windows, controls, menus — everything that makes an app Mac-like.

But familiarity might be an advantage. What if users end up preferring Marzipan apps simply because they want their apps to work exactly the same across multiple platforms? What if Marzipan is more than “good enough”, but actually exactly what users are looking for, seeing their favorite iOS apps on macOS for the first time? (Again, not the Marzipan of today, which isn’t ready, but the Marzipan of a couple years from now.)

With a unified App Store in 2021, I think it’s likely that Apple will encourage universal apps that have a single price for running across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. While this seems unfair by traditional Mac development standards — when developing for AppKit could be a completely different codebase and depth of features, justifying a separate purchase — for Marzipan it seems reasonable to pay once and get the app everywhere.

Marzipan looks like a very different transition than what we went through with Carbon and Cocoa. As I blogged about in 2003, you could start using Cocoa windows and controls directly in a Carbon app. For Marzipan, it doesn’t appear that you can mix AppKit into a UIKit app. If this holds true, it will split Mac development into 2 paths.

I plan to keep Micro.blog using AppKit, for now. But I wouldn’t bet against Marzipan, and I’ll be looking for what Apple says at WWDC. Not what they say about Marzipan itself, but about AppKit. If the usual “What’s New in Cocoa” session at WWDC is missing or filled with very minor tweaks to AppKit, the writing will be on the wall that UIKit is where we should put all our attention, even on the Mac.

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Writing a post today that links back to one of my blog posts from 2003! Love it when that happens. You never know what ordinary blog posts today will take on new significance 15+ years from now.

This weekend is IndieWebCamp Austin, an event for bloggers, web developers, designers, and anyone who wants to create something for their own web site, or to build tools based on IndieWeb standards. You can register here. After my first IndieWebCamp, I wrote:

There’s nothing like meeting in person with other members of the community. I know this from attending Apple developer conferences, but the weekend in Austin only underscored that I should be more active in the larger web community as well.

It’s invaluable to chat with someone in person. This year, we’ll have IndieWeb co-founders Tantek Çelik and Aaron Parecki back in Austin. I’m looking forward to hearing how the IndieWeb has moved forward in the last year.

The first day of IndieWebCamp is for introductions and sessions. Topics for sessions are based on what attendees want to hear about, so the planning is done with sticky notes that can be rearranged to find a schedule that works for everyone. This is a photo I took from IndieWebCamp in 2017.

I look at IndieWebCamp as a way to take a break from the day-to-day routine and get inspired again — to improve my own web site or discover a new part of Micro.blog to work on. As I was talking about with Daniel on the latest Core Intuition, because the 2nd day of IndieWebCamp is a hack day, it’s also a great environment to work on something you’ve had trouble finishing… or starting! There are other people around to help answer questions, and a nice block of time to focus on one thing.

If you’re in the Austin area, hope to see you there on Saturday! You can learn more here.

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Doors open for IndieWebCamp Austin at 9am on Saturday. We’ll have coffee and breakfast tacos. Full schedule and registration details: 2019.indieweb.org/austin ☕

We just posted Core Intuition 361. Looking forward to IndieWebCamp Austin and talking about whether new Marzipan rumors will influence our plans this year.

Started the day with JuiceLand. Love these silly prints on the wall.

This week’s Micro Monday features Tom Cutting of Stickman Diaries. “One of the things I like about Micro.blog is that I don’t feel like I’m performing. If somebody likes it, they like it. I’m doing it really for myself, as a record of things.”

Got to see a few things in Fort Worth with family over the weekend. Great to have some time to explore instead of just driving through.

IndieWebCamp Austin is this weekend! You can still register here.

Just posted the new Core Intuition. More about WWDC travel, IndieWebCamp Austin, and Daniel considering dropping Blogger from MarsEdit.

IndieWebCamp Austin is coming up in a week at Capital Factory. Bunch of IndieWeb-related things I want to think about for Micro.blog that weekend. Everyone’s welcome!

I’ve been saying Apple’s 30% cut is too high for 10 years, so it won’t surprise anyone that I think a 50% cut for subscriptions in Apple News is also ridiculous. It’s completely out of line with the value Apple could provide to news organizations.

I was already making WWDC plans for June 3rd, so it’s nice to see MacRumors uncover clues that it’ll be that week. But Apple could minimize the chaos with hotels by announcing dates much earlier. There are a lot of wasted temporary reservations.

On the latest episode of Core Intuition, we talk about Daniel’s trip to Paris for dotSwift, the state of podcasting after the recent Spotify acquisitions, and then we close talking about Angela Ahrendts leaving Apple. Reflecting on the progress of the Apple Stores, I was thinking back to 11 years ago when I was waiting in line to buy the original iPhone. Here’s a photo of me from Damon Clinkscales while we waited in line.

Back in 2007 when that photo was taken, there were 2 Apple Stores in Austin. That was before the iPhone shipped. Today, after Apple now has 900 million iPhones in use, Austin still only has 2 Apple Stores. The stores are bigger and better than they were in 2007, but there’s no escaping the fact that you can’t scale to supporting so many millions of customers without adding new Apple Stores.

I have no major complaints with the Apple Store experience. It’s crowded, of course, and not everyone who works in retail has the right answer to every question, but they do a good job and I think most people leave the store happy. Getting support directly in person is a great perk of being an Apple customer.

But you can’t design your way out of this problem with more efficient stores or even bigger stores. At some point, Apple needs to add more stores. I doubt there’s a major city in the United States that wouldn’t provide a better experience by adding 1–2 stores.

Could they overdo it, weakening their reputation by opening too many stores of lower quality? Dominic Williams writes on his blog:

In my local city of Cardiff, they are placed directly in the middle of St David’s shopping centre. Short of repurposing Cardiff Castle, I couldn’t think of a better spot. They want their stores to be shining beacons in the cities they are in. Having one on every corner takes away their allure.

There’s a balance here. Apple Stores can be beautiful and practical without every store planned as an architectural marvel. Perfection on the design of each store might be holding them back from better serving customers.

Daniel and I go into more detail on this in the latest episode, with a discussion that eventually leads to answering the important question: why did Daniel go to a Starbucks in Paris? Enjoy!

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I added a new API endpoint to Micro.blog for getting recent photos for a user. This is something we’ve been wanting for Sunlit, and hopefully it will be useful for other developers as well. It works for any Micro.blog user, even if they are hosting their blog somewhere else. For example, a request to Micro.blog for my username would look like this:

GET /posts/manton/photos
  Authorization: Bearer ABCDEFG

The response is JSON Feed, and includes the photo thumbnail URL in addition to the HTML for the blog post and full-sized image. Here’s an abridged version of a response:

{
    "id": "12345",
    "content_html": "Test photo.<p><img src=\"…\">",
    "image": "[...](https://...)",
    "_microblog": {
      "thumbnail_url": "[photos.micro.blog/...](https://photos.micro.blog/...)"
    }
  }

For blogs hosted on Micro.blog, there’s also a feed of all your photos hosted at your own domain. Mine is here:

• [manton.org/photos/in...](https://manton.org/photos/index.json)

And there’s a special photos-only feed for the Discover section of Micro.blog. Here are a couple of the URLs:

• [micro.blog/feeds/pho...](https://micro.blog/feeds/photos.json) — good for showing thumbnails in a grid
• [micro.blog/posts/dis...](https://micro.blog/posts/discover/photos) — good for showing posts in a timeline

Basing our API on JSON Feed has helped keep Micro.blog open by default. The URLs that don’t require authentication can even be dropped in a reader like Feedbin to use outside of the Micro.blog apps.

We’re working on an updated version of Sunlit that will use this new photos endpoint. Anyone can join the beta on TestFlight here and you’ll be notified when the app is ready to test.

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Sorry @coreint was late this week! But there aren’t many tech podcasts on the weekend, so now there’s something to listen to. It’s a good one: Daniel’s trip to Paris, thinking about WWDC, Spotify acquisitions, podcasting, and crowded Apple Stores.

I heard back from Medium, and cross-posting from Micro.blog is now re-enabled on our developer account. But you’ll need to go into Account → Edit Feeds and add it again. Whew!

We released another major update to Micro.blog for macOS today: version 1.5. Here are the changes:

• Added support for Dark Mode on macOS Mojave.
• Added username auto-complete when composing a new post.
• Fixed crash when posting photos without accessibility text.
• Fixed crash if a photo could not be opened in a new window.
• Fixed incorrect width/height when posting photos to an external blog.

You can choose “Check for Updates” in the app or download the latest version here.

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Still can’t believe that pass interference no-call in the Saints game. Hard to imagine anything more obvious or more decisive on the outcome of a game. Disappointing. 🏈

Posted the latest Core Intuition with a discussion of Dark Mode, maps in DuckDuckGo, and some optimism for Apple expanding their web services.

I love having a business model for Micro.blog that means we can work with third-party developers instead of against them. True story from last week: I’m at dinner with family, and my kids were playing around with the Micro.blog iOS app. While we waited for our table at the restaurant, they were giving me all sorts of feedback, including that Micro.blog should have a tab bar on iOS instead a menu to switch between the timeline and mentions. (I like the current design because it lets the full height of the screen be used for reading posts, and you can swipe anywhere to go back, but that’s beside the point.)

“You should download the third-party app Icro,” I said to them. “It’s a beautiful app that has a tab bar.”

Everyone downloads Icro.

“Oh yeah, dad, Icro is much better than your app.” 🙂

And that’s fine. What we care about is whether more people are blogging, storing photos at their own domain name, and moving away from the massive ad-based social networks. There should be a variety of apps to accomplish that. I’m just happy that an increasing number of apps work so well with Micro.blog.

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It might surprise some developers to learn that the 4 official apps for Micro.blog — the iOS and macOS apps, Sunlit, and our microcasting app Wavelength — don’t actually share very much Objective-C or Swift code. To minimize dependencies and so that we could more easily develop each app quickly on its own schedule, in some cases we’ve duplicated similar networking or controller code between projects. Now that the apps are becoming more mature, we want to consolidate the Micro.blog API logic in a shared codebase.

Jonathan Hays has been developing a Swift-based framework and example app for the Micro.blog API. It has already been added to the next version of Sunlit, and the plan is to add it to the other apps as well. We’re making it available as open source for anyone who wants to use it as a starting point for their own apps. It supports iOS, macOS, and even tvOS. It’s still early, but we welcome any feedback or pull requests. Enjoy!

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Speaking of Android, I’ve added a link to Dialog from the Micro.blog “New Post” page. Plus new app icons!

Nice update from Vincent Ritter on his upcoming Android app for Micro.blog, Gluon. Looking good!

I wrote in a post last year — and in the companion podcast episode — that pushback against Instagram is coming. This week, John Gruber didn’t hold back on how much worse Instagram already is:

At the time Facebook acquired Instagram, Instagram was by far the nicest social media experience I’d seen. It is now quickly descending into a cesspool of crap. I fully expected Facebook to Facebook-ify Instagram, but it’s sad watching it happen. It seems to be accelerating in the wake of the departure of co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger — again, surprising no one.

The way forward is clear: post your photos to your own blog. Here’s a selection of recent photos on Micro.blog, all starting on someone’s blog.

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Basecamp has moved their blog Signal v Noise off Medium.com and back to their control. DHH’s post is so well aligned with what we believe in for Micro.blog that it almost reads like part of our mission statement:

Beyond that, though, we’ve grown ever more aware of the problems with centralizing the internet. Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.

Medium.com was swinging in the wrong direction, especially with the change last year to no longer allow custom domain names. I think 2019 is going to be a great year for blogging.

www.manton.org/2019/01/1...

We shipped version 1.4 of Micro.blog for macOS today. This update includes the following changes:

• Added clicking on a photo in the timeline to open it in a new window.
• Added setting alt text on photos for accessibility. Click the photo thumbnail before posting to your blog.
• Improved how the navigation animates when opening a conversation or user profile.

As part of preparing this release, I accidentally opted in to Dark Mode in macOS Mojave before Micro.blog was ready for it. I’ve released a 1.4.1 update to revert this. However, if you love Dark Mode and want to see the in-progress version of Micro.blog, you can download a beta of version 1.5 here. The timeline and posting screen still have a white background, so when those features are ready we’ll do a final 1.5 release.

www.manton.org/2019/01/1...

Very happy to see that Dialog is now out of beta! Dialog is the first Micro.blog app for Android available in Google Play. From the blog post announcement by Mike Haynes:

It is with great excitement that I announce Dialog is now officially out of beta. If you were a part of our public beta, there should be an update available soon — if there isn’t already — and new users can download the app now via the Play Store. We also encourage everyone to leave a review for the app there if they have the time.

Dialog is a full-featured Micro.blog app. Browse the timeline, Discover, favorites, view conversations, post to your blog, and send replies. I’ve also updated the Micro.blog help site to link to the new Dialog web site.

www.manton.org/2019/01/1...

Registration is open for IndieWebCamp Austin. February 23–24.

It’s become a tradition during WWDC that I always head out to the Presidio on Sunday to have lunch and visit the Walt Disney Family Museum. Looking forward to this exhibit of Mickey Mouse drawings curated by Andreas Deja.

We’ve got a new help site! Special thanks to @paulrobertlloyd for the redesign. Love the new search box.

What a game. Spurs get the win over the Thunder in 2 OTs. All sorts of records in this one. Spurs start with 14 3s in a row, then Aldridge finishes the game with 56 points. 🏀

On today’s Core Intuition — the tech and business podcast pretending to be a developer podcast — @danielpunkass and I talk about whether Apple is leaving their core values behind as they grow into services and media, plus an update on Black Ink for iOS.

Homebrew Website Club is tonight in Austin! 6:30pm at Mozart’s Coffee. Join us for a coffee and chat about the IndieWeb and plans for IndieWebCamp Austin. (Which will be February 23–24… Registration open soon.)

We’ve been playing Catan this weekend. I love the design and how balanced the game feels. Nice way to spend some time as the holiday break winds down for the kids.

For the first episode of 2019, we catch up a little on what Daniel has been coding on, then talk about our hopes for growing our businesses this year. From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton greet the New Year with a vague sense of optimism, as Daniel moves closer to serious iOS development, and Manton remains confident and focused on Micro.blog. They talk about finding a balance between optimistic enthusiasm and realism about chance of failure. Finally, Daniel talks about his shifting plans for Black Ink 2 and the possibility of co-launching it with an iOS version.

www.manton.org/2019/01/0...

DeRozan gets the first triple-double of his career against his old team. Kawhi gets boos. I had hoped the crowd would give him a warmer reception… But a great win. I love how well DeRozan fits on the Spurs. 🏀

We’ve extended our holiday giveaway through this weekend. If you invite someone to Micro.blog, they’ll get 3 free months of blog hosting.

Shawn Blanc on making small changes instead of big New Year’s resolutions:

I do not overhaul my life on January first. Instead, I pick a few things that I know I can stick with. The compounding impact of small routines done regularly is so much more powerful than that one giant event.

I started using Streaks on January 1st and put it on my home screen. I’ve added just a few tasks to it so far — fairly easy tasks, but things I want to do every day — and already it has made a big difference.

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Sorry for the late notice — no Homebrew Website Club in Austin tonight. Because of the holidays and weather, we’re pushing the meetup to next week. Jan 9th, 6:30pm at Mozart’s Coffee.

Dialog for M.b got a major update for the new year, including a new posting screen. Available as a public beta in Google Play.

Very cold and rainy day in Austin as it’s starting to feel like 2019 is really here. I’ve been wrapping up a new foundation for themes and customization on M.b that I can’t wait to share.

Walked by this abandoned toy store the other night. I guess they keep the lights on long after the place is empty and the letters removed.

After living here forever and visiting a new coffee shop every day for a month a couple years ago, it’s not often I find a new place… Working at Irie Bean Coffee Bar while in south Austin for a bit.

We really loved Mary Poppins Returns and Into the Spider-Verse. This Spider-Man is stunning — my favorite Marvel adaptation. And don’t miss the blog post about Mary Poppins from Floyd Norman, who worked on the original film 54 years ago.

For the last Micro Monday of the year, @macgenie edited together 10 clips from the previous 40+ episodes in 2018. This is a great intro to Micro.blog and the podcast.

Baylor at the Texas Bowl in Houston.

Worked on some performance improvements for external blogs this morning. RSS and connection errors are also now reported on the web to help troubleshoot feed problems.

Zilker tree. Another fun year at the Trail of Lights. 🎄

We wanted to do something special for the holidays. Starting today through January 2nd, if you invite a friend to Micro.blog they will get 3 months of free blog hosting. If you already have a paid account, you can optionally pay for their entire first year on Micro.blog.

Happy holidays! Thanks to everyone in the Micro.blog community who has been so supportive as we grow the platform. I can’t wait to share everything we have planned for 2019.

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Between 2005 and 2008, I published 4 episodes of a personal podcast, each episode about a different topic. When migrating my blog to Micro.blog this year, I accidentally broke the old podcast feed. I’ve just fixed it by uploading the MP3s to Micro.blog and updating the podcast feed URL in the Apple podcast directory.

Here are the 4 original posts with updated audio links:

• Trains (2005)
• Video Games (2006)
• San Francisco (2006)
• Hillary (2008)

These were all over 10 years ago and in that time I’ve co-hosted 350 episodes of Core Intuition and recorded over 100 episodes of my own new podcast Timetable. I’ve learned a lot since then, and if I was rewriting those old podcasts now I’d improve them. There’s a combination of embarrassment and pride for anything we create long ago. But I never have time for something like what I tried to do in those old podcasts — they include audio I recorded around Texas and California — so I love that they still exist.

www.manton.org/2018/12/2...

We just released version 1.4.1 of Micro.blog for iOS. Here are the changes:

• Improved sharing from Safari to include both the URL and selected text. Use the share button in the bottom toolbar.
• Improved text size to more closely match system defaults. The text in the timeline is slightly bigger now.
• Fixed accessibility when writing a new post so that VoiceOver can be used.
• Fixed sharing images from some apps.
• Fixed prompting for multiple blogs when posting to an external site.
• Fixed default size when scaling photos.
• Disabled username auto-complete on iOS 10 to work around crashes. This feature now requires iOS 11 or later.

You can download Micro.blog from the App Store. If you don’t see it in your Updates tab yet, it should be there soon.

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There’s another big story in The New York Times today about Facebook sharing personal data. You may also have heard that Walt Mossberg has stopped using Facebook and Instagram:

This is just a note to say I’ve decided to deactivate my Facebook and Facebook Messenger accounts around the end of the year. After that, I won’t be posting here, or reading what you post. I will be deleting the apps from my devices. I’ve already quit Facebook-owned Instagram and erased its app.

This is important. Many people have left Facebook but ignored that Instagram is owned by the same company. If you dislike what Facebook is doing, continuing to use Instagram only helps prop up Facebook’s business. As I wrote last month:

I think pushback against Instagram is coming, as more people who have already left Facebook also remember that Instagram has the same leadership, and the platform is far enough off track that even the founders have left. It’s a good time to be posting photos to your own blog instead of Instagram.

The pushback is accelerating. Basecamp started a Facebook Free campaign today to encourage other businesses to stop using Facebook and Instagram:

If Facebook’s endless privacy scandals have shown one thing, it’s that the company has far too much data on its users, and that they can’t be trusted not to sell, barter, or abuse that data whether for profit, growth, or negligence.

One of the reasons I remain so confident in Micro.blog is that it was built for moments like this, when public opinion shifts against the big social networks. I have a longer post here about finding our way to what’s needed next.

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Very nice design customization to the Kiko theme on Micro.blog by Kahlil Lechelt.

I woke up this morning, picked up my phone like I always do — to make sure that Micro.blog servers hadn’t quietly burned to the ground in the middle of the night — and the first thing I saw was a notification about Apple’s new campus in Austin. Here’s John Voorhees writing about it for MacStories:

At the center of the announcement though is a new facility that will be located in North Austin not far from Apple’s current Austin campus. The new office will cost over $1 billion to build and sit on a 133-acre site, 50 acres of which will be set aside for open space. Initially, the Austin campus will house 5,000 employees, with the ability to expand to as many as 15,000. The new complex will run on 100% renewable energy too.

I love the contrast to Amazon’s over-hyped search for a 2nd major campus. Apple made a decision and announced it, without leaving the world hanging for months. While Apple has always had other smaller offices outside Cupertino, it’s great to see such a significant new commitment in other parts of the country.

Does anyone know the location for the campus yet? Near the current campus in Austin there are huge stretches of undeveloped property — old ranches that you can see along Parmer Lane or from the other side when taking the train from Lakeline Station. For years I’ve dreamed that this area could be preserved somehow as a park, not just eventually overrun with condos and restaurants. I’m excited that Apple is setting aside 50 acres of the new campus for open space. I hope they consider expanding that even more.

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Icro is a beautiful third-party iPhone app for Micro.blog. Version 1.2 just shipped this week with new icons and other improvements. Here are a couple of screenshots from the updated Discover tab:

You can download Icro from the App Store.

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Upgraded from Ruby 2.3 to 2.5 this morning and it appears to have completely fixed some issues I was having with Sidekiq processes unexpectedly quitting.

On last week’s Core Intuition, Daniel and I talked more about WordPress 5.0 and the disruption that will be caused by the new block-based editor, Gutenberg. Daniel also addresses compatibility with MarsEdit in a blog post.

Meanwhile, WordCamp US was a few days ago in Nashville. WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg gave his State of the Word talk to wrap up the conference. The talk + Q&A is long, over 1.5 hours, but provides a detailed overview of Gutenberg and where WordPress is going.

There were a few things Matt said that stood out for me, all in response to the same question. Matt says:

I think our mistake — really the mistake of the past decade — is we didn’t do the work to create Gutenberg until 2 years ago. We didn’t start it. Because every time we’d start it, it got really controversial, or it got mired in technical details, or it was just too acrimonious. We’d be too worried about backwards compatibility or something to really take it to term, to fruition, to where it’s something we can actually take and present to the world.

And then:

Twitter used to be called microblogging, right? Many of them have these basic elements of publishing, embedding images, commenting, sorts of things. And you could actually build most of these services on a WordPress backbone. They weren’t because because we weren’t innovating enough on the user experience. I think we’re actually now leapfrogging.

And closing the answer with:

And this I think gives us an opportunity to capture the web that was. And whether we do so or not, though, depends 100% on the user experiences we create.

I love Matt’s answer to this question, and I think Matt’s right that Gutenberg is what WordPress needs to take it through the next 15 years. But I don’t think it’s great for short-form blogging. As WordPress becomes more sophisticated to meet the needs of web folks who want more advanced layout or CMS-like features, I want to make Micro.blog easier and faster for blogs.

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Love the way the Spurs finished this game against the Lakers tonight. First of 6 games at home, might be the turning point to climb back into the playoffs picture. 🏀

Speaking of tonight’s Homebrew Website Club, Tom Brown and I were guests on the Plutopia podcast that just posted this week, talking about the IndieWeb, posting to your own blog, and Micro.blog.

I misspoke at the beginning about the founding of the IndieWeb, incorrectly saying “Distributed Web Summit” when I meant “Federated Social Web Summit”. I actually interviewed Tantek and Aaron about those early days of the IndieWeb when I was in Portland this year, for my upcoming book Indie Microblogging. I’d love to get part of that transcript out soon since there’s a lot of good history in it.

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Good morning, Austin! Tonight is Homebrew Website Club, 6:30pm at Mozart’s Coffee. We’ll meet at a table outside to talk about the IndieWeb, plan for the upcoming IndieWebCamp Austin, or work on your own web site.

We released a new version of Micro.blog for iOS today with several new features and improvements:

• Added full-screen viewer for photos in the timeline.
• Added auto-complete of usernames when composing a new post.
• Added tapping on your blog hostname in the post screen to switch to a different blog if you have multiple Micro.blog-hosted blogs.
• Added option to set description on uploaded photos for better accessibility. Tap an attached photo thumbnail before posting to edit the text.
• Updated the following count in user profiles to show people you are not yet following to help you discover new people to follow.
• Fixed maximum size when scaling uploaded photos.
• Fixed potential crash when sharing photos from other iOS apps.
• Fixed layout issues on new bigger iPhones.
• Fixed sharing some web page titles.
• Improved accessibility of menus and buttons in the app.
• Improved showing push notifications in the app.

You can download Micro.blog version 1.4 from the iOS App Store.

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Some of y’all noticed that Micro.blog was slow or not responding this morning. Sorry! I explain why on today’s episode of Timetable.

Thanks everyone for the congrats and feedback about the last year of Micro.blog! Coming up today, another post in our 12 days of microblogging series. Also a chance that the new iOS version is approved.

Having fun wrapping up the next iOS version of Micro.blog with @cheesemaker 3–4 new features that add up to a very nice release. I’d love to ship it Monday for the official 1-year anniversary of the public launch of Micro.blog.

Great to see Apple Music coming to the Echo (noticed via MacStories). This is kind of an “iTunes on Windows” moment. Makes business sense, but still surprising.

With the midterms and now the near-daily Mueller investigation news, I’ve fallen back into reloading The New York Times home page throughout the day for no reason. Gotta stop this. I already see everything in my RSS reader or Micro.blog timeline.

Sunlit 2.3.1 is now available in the App Store. If you’re interested in posting more photos to your own blog, check it out. It’s a free app and works well with Micro.blog.

There’s a nice feature on RSS apps (best viewed on iOS) in the App Store today.

Posted a new Timetable with a few updates on Sunlit, the updated help.micro.blog home page, and when to upgrade servers.

Haven’t actively used EC2 in a while, but wanted to check out the pricing after this week’s announcement that Amazon is making their own CPUs. On first glance, the “a1” instances don’t look cheaper. Maybe it’s not right to compare them directly to comparable “t3” instances?

Hi Austin! NSDrinking is tonight, 8pm at Radio. Join us for a chat about Apple development over a coffee or beer. ☕🍻

Sent the latest Sunlit 2.3.1 build to beta testers. Anyone can now join the beta with this link.

There’s a really good follow-up about the App Store monopoly in today’s Stratechery daily update. Focusing on in-app purchase (digital goods) paints a very clear picture of why Apple’s rules need to change.

Good news for Sunlit users: @cheesemaker tracked down that crash that had been eluding us and we have a fix ready to go this week. Waiting for Apple to approve it.

I wish it wasn’t hosted on Medium, where you can’t even use your own domain name, but I’m glad to see some long-form posts from Beto O’Rourke after the election. It shouldn’t surprise anyone who has heard Beto speak that he is also a great blogger:

I walked over to the north wall and read Lincoln’s second inaugural address. My body warm, blood flowing through me, moving my legs as I read, the words so present in a way that I can’t describe or explain except that I’m so much more alive in the middle of a run, and so are the words I was reading.

In last week’s Pod Save America, the hosts talked about how there’s a window of time for some candidates to run for president. It might not come again. America deserves a president who can speak and write honestly, leading us past the Trump years.

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As I get ready to fly to Portland this morning for IndieWeb Summit, I wanted to give a quick preview video of the upcoming Sunlit 2.2 release. We are very excited about the new Timeline tab, which brings an Instagram-like experience to the app for the first time.

There is so much potential for photo blogging. As you watch the video, remember that all these posts are coming from someone’s blog, usually at their own domain name. There are no ads or gimmicks. Sunlit works with your Micro.blog account and the people you are already following on Micro.blog.

We’re not adding anyone else to the beta, but I’ll share more as we get closer to the release next month. Thanks for supporting Micro.blog!

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From the loop around Lake Charles, Louisiana on the drive home.

Road trip today. Crossing over some train tracks out in the country.

I’ll be in Portland next week for IndieWeb Summit. Marty McGuire has a nice overview and invitation for anyone to attend:

IWS kicks off with a pre-party on Monday evening at the Pine Street Market where you can enjoy some great handmade food and drinks. More importantly, you can meet and befriend some of the most earnest and clever folks I know when it comes to having fun being yourself on the web. You’re likely to share stories about how awful silos like Facebook and Twitter have become, get inspired to build things you didn’t even know you wanted to put on your website, and hatch schemes for what you’d love to learn, discuss, and build over the next two days.

Looking forward to seeing folks there. There’s a lot of interesting work being done in the IndieWeb community, and of course we want Micro.blog to be a great IndieWeb-friendly platform that can make independent blogging even easier. Jean MacDonald and I will be giving an update at IndieWeb Summit about the Micro.blog community and what we’ve learned trying to reach new users.

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On campus this morning. Texas Memorial Museum poking up through the trees.

I realized after flying back home that this was likely my 20th trip out to San Jose and San Francisco for WWDC. I certainly loved the early years, as well as the height of WWDC in San Francisco as the community was growing, but I’ve found the no-stress compromise of the last few years without a conference ticket to be some of the most enjoyable and productive.

This year I arrived Saturday before lunch. Jean MacDonald and I used this extra day for Micro.blog planning, and to walk around the conference area looking for a good spot for the meetup. In the evening, a bunch of us met up at Santa Clara Valley Brewing.

Sunday morning I was up early, got some coffee and breakfast while working at Voltaire Coffee House, then drove up to San Francisco. I had rented a car for what has become a pre-WWDC tradition for me the last several years: having lunch out at the Presidio in San Francisco and catching the latest exhibit at the Walt Disney Family Museum. I picked up Jon Hays at SFO along the way, and we also stopped for the view from Twin Peaks on the way back.

It was great to catch up with people at sjMacIndie on Sunday night. Jon and I left a little early to watch the second half of game 2 of the NBA finals from a bar around the corner. I wore my Tim Duncan t-shirt.

Monday morning was keynote watching at AltConf. While I was initially underwhelmed by the keynote, the announcements have been growing on me throughout the week. Apple’s strategy with Siri still isn’t what I’d like to see, but it’s significant progress. We go into this more on the latest Core Intuition. Overall a pretty good conference. I’ll be watching the Mac App Store improvements too.

Hopefully by next year I’ll remember that finding a place downtown for dinner late at night requires a little planning. Nevertheless, had a great time talking with friends and meeting new folks over dinner or drinks for the nights I was in San Jose. This year even featured a random trip to In-N-Out for burgers.

I really enjoyed both the live recordings I went to: Accidental Tech Podcast and The Talk Show. Unfortunately I had to leave Wednesday so missed the Relay show. I have a bunch of podcasts to catch up on.

The highlight of my week was the 2nd annual Micro.blog WWDC meetup. It means a lot to see the support from the community. Micro.blog continues to get better every day, and I’m looking forward to meeting even more users next year. Thanks again to everyone joined us at the meetup, and to Jeff Watkins for the group photo!

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Back online after taking some time off to camp at Colorado Bend State Park last night. Great hike down to the waterfall this morning.

There are a few more Micro.blog apps currently in development that I’m really excited about. Here’s the latest dev build video from Kiwi for macOS. Looks great.

I usually queue up Micro Monday when it goes live, but today has been a blur, and I just finished listening to the latest episode in the car while running an errand. This week, Jean talks to Jim Withington about early blogging, XOXO, and more. Enjoy!

Finally tracked down and fixed a couple issues with photo upload in Micro.blog after recent server improvements. Everything should be working much better now.

Server upgrade went pretty smoothly. Photo uploads were disabled for about 10 minutes, but everything else stayed up. Improved profile photos to be a little more resilient as well.

Going to take photo upload offline for a quick update tonight, midnight CST. The rest of Micro.blog will stay up including all hosted blogs.

Just posted this week’s episode of Core Intuition with our initial thoughts on WWDC 2018: UIKit on the Mac, Siri’s automation-based strategy, App Store trials, and more.

The past can be a bit of a blur, but I think this was my 20th time out to San Jose and San Francisco for WWDC. 1996, 1997, 2001–2018. Feel lucky to have seen the platforms change and the community grow. Still exciting.

Updated my WWDC expenses page after going through some more receipts. Surprisingly close to what I had estimated.

Quick layover in Los Angeles on the way home. Had a great time in San Jose. Thanks again to everyone who made it to the Micro.blog meetup yesterday or said hi during the week. Enjoy the rest of WWDC!

Thanks so much to everyone who joined us at the Micro.blog meetup! We had a great turnout. Really enjoyed talking with everyone.

Reminder: Micro.blog WWDC meetup is today at lunch, 12:30pm outside Grace Deli & Cafe.

The 2nd annual WWDC Micro.blog meetup will be Tuesday at 12:30pm outside Grace Deli & Cafe. If you’re attending WWDC this week, grab a to-go box lunch and meet us there, or you can get a sandwich or wrap first from the cafe.

It’s less than a block from the convention center: 303 Almaden Blvd. View the location in Google Maps or Apple Maps.

If you were at the 1st meetup last year, it’s just on the front side of the building from where we met last year. We’ll have some more Micro.blog stickers and would love to show off the new beta version of Sunlit or talk to anyone who is currently using Micro.blog or interested in learning more about indie microblogging.

Hope to see you there! Thanks for all your support.

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Good news that they’ve improved the Mac App Store enough to convince Panic and Bare Bones to bring Transmit and BBEdit back to the store. I also like the pre-announcement of UIKit on the Mac, since it was clear they’ve been using this thing anyway. But now we have to wait.

Don’t forget, if you mention WWDC in a microblog post today it unlocks a secret pin on Micro.blog. Happy keynote blogging!

I haven’t really processed the GitHub news yet. I wrote a few years ago that I thought Automattic and GitHub were companies that could last for 100 years, following the spirit of the open web and safe to use for hosting or mirroring our content. Maybe I was wrong.

Glen Keane drawings at the Walt Disney Family Museum.

Cold brew and a breakfast bagel at Voltaire Coffee House.

Santa Clara Valley Brewing in San Jose.

Rolled out a series of performance improvements tonight for posting on Micro.blog-hosted sites. Had to work through a few unexpected glitches. If you noticed any posts that were slow to update, they should be live now.

I was re-reading Om Malik’s essay about algorithmic timelines today. There is a lot that is relevant to our approach with Micro.blog.

Got new lenses for my scratched-up glasses. Store employee thought I was nuts not to get new frames too (covered by insurance) but I’m the worst at picking out the perfect frames among hundreds. My buying strategy for anything is just gimme a new version of what I already have.

Need to get back into adding new Micro.blog pins, so added a “25 posts” pin and a new secret pin for WWDC that will unlock if you mention the conference on Monday.

Gonna miss NSDrinking after all tonight… But in related WWDC news, new Core Int will be out tomorrow with our predictions, and then in just a few days I’ll be in San Jose. Starting to get excited about the trip.

Going to Radio Coffee & Beer tonight at 8pm for NSDrinking. Stop by for a coffee or beer and last-minute WWDC predictions.

10 years ago today, @danielpunkass and I released the first episode of Core Intuition. It was right before WWDC when Apple introduced the App Store.

We made a small tweak to the Discover screen yesterday to randomly show a few of the common emoji, instead of always the same 3. Still want to improve this with more emoji.

Looking forward to Cavs/Celtics game 7 tonight. Could be a great one. 🏀

Posted a new Core Intuition about the Twitter API changes, Micro.blog, more on Ghost’s API, a technical diversion into Photos.app drag-and-drop, and some thoughts on the Developer’s Union.

At this point I think I’d rather never send an email to customers again than bother them with a GDPR update email today.

Great list of resources for using Micro.blog from the community. Blog posts, app links, and guides.

I’m starting to jot down notes of things to do in San Jose. I try not to over-plan for WWDC, but there are a couple things I don’t want to miss. You can also now sign up for more info about our Micro.blog meetup.

In addition to the post this morning with Icro developer Martin Hartl, there’s a new episode of Micro Monday where @macgenie also interviews Mike Haynes about his app Dialog. Love that it worked out to feature 2 third-party developers today.

This week for Micro Monday we also have a text interview with Martin Hartl, the developer of Icro.

The Developers Union is a good idea. I’d love to see Apple incorporate some kind of discussion at WWDC each year specifically about what the union is advocating for. Kind of like the old WWDC feedback sessions, but with a very narrow focus.

Posted a new episode of @coreint with talk about GDPR, the podcasting world, NPR and non-profits, Ghost’s 5-year review, and more.

Today the first third-party Android app for Micro.blog is out in beta. This is a really big deal. Now to find where that old Android test phone is buried in my messy office.

Trying out the Cappuccino feed reader. Looks like it has partial compatibility with JSON Feed too. (Works in some feeds, but not the Micro.blog timeline feed.)

Testing again.

Testing photo.

My Mondays have been a bit of a blur lately, trying to finish a bunch of things at once. Looking forward to queueing up the latest episode of Micro Monday.

Since the day I introduced Tweet Marker, people wondered if Twitter would add an official timeline sync API. They never did and clearly never will. It’s been about 7 years.

Thinking about Favstar shutting down. No doubt the first of several new casualties from Twitter’s latest rule changes. The end of the third-party Twitter era has a kind a “let the past die” feel to it.

Downtown today for a meeting and while I like getting out, there are so many little ways to get derailed and lose all productivity. It’s after lunch and just feel like I’m starting to get some stuff done. Now at Alta’s for coffee and work, overlooking the lake.

There’s an interview with me in the latest Club MacStories email newsletter. I talk a bit about the goals of Micro.blog and how people are using the platform. Also a link to Icro!

Trying to get the costs down for WWDC and other trips this year, I’ve decided to document my estimated budget and final expenses. We’ll see how close I get.

Just posted a new Core Intuition with a discussion about Google Duplex, App Store pricing, and Daniel’s rewrite of MarsEdit’s image handling code.

Registered a brand new .app domain this week but not sure where to point it? Micro.blog-hosted blogs make nice product sites. 🙂 Easy setup, custom pages, and a microblog for app news.

One of the best things about not having an ad-supported business is it doesn’t bother us if you use an app like Icro instead of the official Micro.blog app. No need to control the timeline experience. Use whatever you like best.

Added a help page with a download link and HTML examples for using the Micro.blog logo (in SVG) for anyone who wants to link from their blog.

Doing some long-overdue maintenance on the Tweet Marker database, clearing out old sync data that is no longer needed. Fun to watch the Redis memory usage go down. (This will free up more room to scale Micro.blog on existing servers.)

On the latest episode of Timetable, I talk about the upcoming Icro app for Micro.blog and what to do while waiting for the App Store.

Reflecting on the 20-year anniversary of the iMac, I’m actually struck by how Mac sales haven’t increased as much as I thought they had. 4–5x, but in my head it seems like the Mac is 10x as popular.

App Store propagation delays of 24+ hours might even be worse when you’re waiting for someone else’s app to go live. Still really confused by these delays.

There’s a new Micro Monday up! Favorite line from this episode: how early blogging was like “a window into another part of the world”. (We’ve got 9 episodes now. Great way to see what the Micro.blog community is up to.)

Took some time this morning to update several of the help pages: how Micro.blog uses emoji, Mac release history, and iOS questions in the FAQ.

One month until WWDC, realized tonight that I had never booked my flights. Fixed now and lucked out with a good price.

Updated the Mac app for Micro.blog to 1.3.1, working around an issue with imported Instagram photo @-mentions. If you missed the big release, I have a blog post and video here with details.

On the latest episode of Core Int, @danielpunkass and I talk about my experience at Peers Conf, Apple frameworks, and more. Thanks for listening!

Congrats to @ccgus on the Retrobatch beta. Really powerful app for batch image processing.

For the 100th episode of Timetable, I record a podcast while a thunderstorm rolls through Austin. The new Mac app, photo blogging, and some thoughts on a year of Micro.blog.

Micro.blog for Mac version 1.3 is now available. It features a brand new import feature for uploading an archive of Instagram photos to your blog.

The best way to explain it is to show it. Here’s a video:

You can download the latest version here or click “Check for Updates” in the Micro.blog for Mac app if you already have it installed. Let us know how it works for you and we’ll continue to make this better in future versions. There’s also a help page with more details.

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Shipping a new Mac-only feature today. I know this is disappointing for Android and Windows users, but I think this year we’ll have a more complete cross-platform story. Thanks for your patience as we try to do a lot with a tiny team.

For anyone who downloaded their Instagram archive, how big was the .zip file? Mine was 30 MB, but I stopped posting last year and only had a few videos. Wondering if the average size is too big for anything except as a backup.

Great sketchnotes by @bsndesign from last week’s Peers Conference, including one for the talk I gave about microblogging.

Watching part of Zuckerberg’s F8 keynote. Facebook totally on the defensive. Fascinating.

Updated the microcast hosting on Micro.blog to support customizing the iTunes “author” tag. It’ll default to your account name, but sometimes that’s a podcast name and you want a real person’s name for the author.

We released version 2.1 of Sunlit today, our companion app for photos on Micro.blog. Here are the changes:

• Added support for posting to multiple Micro.blog-hosted blogs. Tap the URL when publishing (or your profile photo in Settings) to change the default blog.
• Added setting to disable WordPress gallery support for external blogs.
• Added Micro.blog header to Discover section.
• Improved story publishing speed by uploading multiple photos at once.
• Improved layout of Settings screen into publishing and import groups.

Photos continue to be a really important part of Micro.blog, especially as more and more people are disillusioned with Facebook and Instagram. Here’s how I see it: a network of independent photo blogs is a much better replacement for Instagram than yet another closed photo silo. Sunlit is just one piece of the puzzle.

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Micro.blog has always supported cross-posting to Twitter. Write a post on your own blog, and Micro.blog will send it to Twitter with a bunch of great default logic like attaching photos, appending inline links, and smart truncation so that tweets look great.

Today we’re adding Medium as a supported cross-posting destination. At first I had resisted adding Medium because Medium might be someone’s primary blog, so it made more sense for you to post directly to Medium yourself and then add the RSS feed to Micro.blog, so that posts show up in the Micro.blog timeline.

But recently Medium discontinued support for custom domain names. And if you can’t even have a domain name for your blog, it’s clear that Medium is much less a true blogging platform and really just a social network for long-form content. It’s a very poor solution for anyone who wants to own their content, but it’s now a natural choice to cross-post your blog posts and reach Medium’s audience.

When you enable Micro.blog cross-posting to Medium, Micro.blog takes the HTML of your post and sends it to Medium. It supports titled essays or short microblog posts without a title. If your blog is hosted on Micro.blog, cross-posting is included for free. For external blogs like WordPress, it’s $2/month for cross-posting to Twitter and Medium.

I’m looking forward to hearing how people use Medium with their microblog and what improvements we can make. Thanks for your support!

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Fixed an issue this morning that should make a dramatic improvement to how fast a post shows up in the timeline from a Micro.blog-hosted blog.

As I was writing some documentation this week, I kept thinking about what makes great marketing copy. 37signals used to say that copywriting is a form of user interface design. That’s true but I think there’s more to it.

The best products don’t just have marketing copy; they have a mission statement. They don’t just sell a tool; they sell a movement.

When I stare at my product wondering if it’s too confusing — if it’s too different, and tries to do too many things, to be immediately understood by new users — I try to remind myself that it’s an opportunity. Instead of simply explaining what I’m doing, how can I pitch it in a way that strengthens a community around the idea. Because dozens of bloggers can spread the idea more quickly and in a more meaningful way than I can by myself.

And unlike a one-way press release, a community is inherently two-way. Every mention of the idea is both marketing and feedback. Someone blogs about how they’re excited for the product, but also how they wish it had a certain missing feature. Someone in the press writes a review, but also with a pros and cons list.

This cycle means the product gets better. And if we’re thoughtful in that first approach to marketing copy, then every blog post, review, and tweet that follows is laced with a little part of our mission statement.

Mirrored from the original post on manton.org.

Future-safe weblogs

It’s a common theme for Dave Winer to write about preserving our writing on the web. Today he outlines some criteria for judging whether a web host will last:

“The concern is that the record we’re creating is fragile and ephemeral, so that to historians of the future, the period of innovation where we moved our intellectual presence from physical to electronic media will be a blank spot, with almost none of it persisting.”

I think about this in 2 parts. The first is publishing your weblog to your own domain name. This ensures that your writing doesn’t go away and links don’t break when your web host goes out of business, because you can copy your content somewhere else and map your domain to that new location.

The second is some kind of host that will last forever. This is an unsolved problem. Hosting fees need to be paid, domain name registrations need to be renewed. It may be too big a leap to ever get there, but we could settle instead for better mirroring of content. I’d like to have my content mirrored automatically to GitHub Pages, for example, and maybe even Medium.

Imagine the life of a printed book from the early 20th century that has now survived generations. How was this possible? Many copies must have been printed, because some will inevitably be lost or destroyed. And when a library or bookstore is closed, copies of the book must be transferred to a new location.

This all follows naturally with a printed book, but to adopt the same pattern for digital works, we must go out of our way to create a system of mirroring and long-term storage that tries to match what happens in the real world automatically. It’s a great challenge.

Unfortunately very little has changed on this topic since I wrote about permanence 3 years ago. But we can change that. Open formats and auto-mirroring will be a key part of my new microblogging platform.

Mirrored from the original post on manton.org.

Medium is really interesting, and beautifully designed, but it’s not progress over Twitter unless you’re annoyed about the 140 character limit. It’s still totally centralized, has no API, and works against wanting to host and control our own content. Basically a step back for the open web. (Although I think there’s real value in mirroring content here.)

Write locally, mirror globally

The Atlantic has an interesting essay on whether Twitter is on a slow decline, less useful and meaningful than it once was:

“Twitter is the platform that led us into the mobile Internet age. It broke our habit of visiting individual news homepages first thing in the morning, and established behaviors built around real-time news consumption and production. It normalized mobile publishing power. It changed our expectations about how we congregate around shared events. Twitter has done for social publishing what AOL did for email. But nobody has AOL accounts anymore.”

It reminds me of something I brought up on Core Intuition a few months back, wondering if Twitter is a core part of the web, something that would be with us forever, or if it is “just another web site”. When we get into the groove of using a new service for a few years, it’s easy to forget that web sites don’t have a very good track record. Giant sites like Facebook and Tumblr seem to have been with us forever, but my personal blog is older than both.

Think about this: if it’s even possible for Twitter to fail — not likely, just possible — then why are we putting so much of our content there first, where there are rules for how tweet text can be used? Storage for all tweets is so massive that there’s no guarantee that other companies will be able to take over the archive if the service has to fold. It’s why I built Tweet Library and Watermark to archive and publish tweets.

Decentralization is the internet’s greatest strength and weakness. There shouldn’t be one service to hold all of blogging; each writer should have his or her own domain and web site. But web sites also die all the time from neglect. We need centralized services to index and syndicate content so that it’s preserved and accessible to more people.

Longevity is the next great challenge for the web. All of my work on Riverfold apps is leading this way, from archiving tweets, to curating and publishing your best photos, to indexing a copy of the text and HTML from your blog. But I’m just one guy with a limited server budget.

It’s time for a new web standard — a metadata format and API that describes how to mirror published content. Maybe it’s part of IndieWebCamp? When I write on my blog, I want the content to flow to GitHub Pages, to the Internet Archive, to Medium. When I post photos, I want the content to flow to Dropbox, to S3, to Flickr. It’s not enough to backup or copy data blindly; the source must point to each mirror, and each mirror service must understand who the creator is and how to find the original data if it still exists.

Unlike a distributed platform that works at the level of raw data, like BitTorrent, this new system should work natively with well-understood common files: text, photos, video, and the glue (usually HTML, Markdown, or JSON) that makes a collection meaningful. Instead of yet another generic sync system, it’s a platform that understands publishing, with adapters to flow content into each mirror’s native storage.

If you accept that this is something worth doing, then every place we put our content must be classified as either an original source or a mirror. And this brings us back to Twitter. Because while I think the next 5 years for Twitter will be strong, I’m not convinced that it will last 50 years. Therefore, Twitter cannot be an original source of data; it must be just one of several mirrors for micro-blogging.

This essay was republished from the original version on manton.org.