Manton Reece

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!

www.manton.org/2019/03/0...

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.

www.manton.org/2019/02/2...

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.

www.manton.org/2019/02/2...

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!

www.manton.org/2019/02/2...

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.