Manton Reece

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.