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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