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.
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.
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.
Austin.
Testing
Picking up smoothies from JuiceLand
Somewhere over California
Last week’s Sting concert
Exploring downtown this morning
Yesterday’s hike with the dogs
Dueling pianos
Trail of Lights 50+ years
Thank you Tim Duncan
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.
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.
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.)