Manton Reece

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.

www.manton.org/2018/05/i...

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.

www.manton.org/2018/05/s...

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!

www.manton.org/2018/04/m...

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.