cdevroe

[cdevroe]

Chicago snaps part 2: A few Tri-X photos from walking around downtown Chicago in mid-March. The worm-like aberrations seen on the images is because I didn’t pay close enough attention to temperature while I developed this roll. Live and learn. See also part 1.

[cdevroe]

Diversions #2: From Chicago to Assateague

Diversions is the central hub for news about my website’s membership, behind-the-scenes details of my personal projects, as well as a wide variety of links to people, places, and things that inspire me. It is free to sign up (or, you can choose to support my work financially).

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Favorite Toots now available on the WordPress plugin directory

Back in early February I submitted the Favorite Toots WordPress plugin I had been toying with on my own website to the WordPress plugin directory. Starting today, it is available publicly there and people can search for it from their own WordPress Admins.

The source code is available on GitHub if you’d like to contribute a bug fix or feature. However, if you’d like to install it on your website I recommend using the version that is available on the plugin directory.

Submitting a plugin for review is a valuable process and it benefits everyone in the WordPress ecosystem. If you’re in a hurry, it might be a little frustrating to get through review, but I believe the process is vital to keeping the plugin directory as safe as possible. Yes, issues still arise from time to time, but I’m glad there is a review process to at least make sure a plugin is ready to be released.

Here are some things the reviewers suggested prior to making the Favorite Toots plugin on the directory:

Rename the plugin from Mastodon Favorites – This makes total sense as I do not own the copyright to Mastodon and I wouldn’t want to take a name they may end up using themselves someday.

Fix some potential security vulnerabilities – I had written this plugin for my own website, from code I wrote a long time ago, and so I didn’t escape or sanitize a few things. I’m glad the review team caught these.

A misspelled function! – I don’t even know how the plugin was working! I’m very glad they caught this one.

Adding some security around direct file access – Honestly, I can’t believe I forgot this.

All of these were issues I should have caught on my own. But, in my own haste, I submitted code that wasn’t ready. And I’m positive the plugin needs even more attention than I have time to give it. But I’m thankful the review process is in place to catch things like this.

Updates to Hubbub Lite (which is also available on the WordPress plugin directory) and Hubbub Pro (which is deployed directly to customers) are reviewed by the team at NerdPress prior to being deployed. Most companies have a code review. It just makes sense. So having a code review for new plugins on the WordPress plugin directory is a reasonable and needed process.

In addition to the above code edits, there are a few other requirements and nice-to-haves for plugins on the directory. I wrote a readme file that follows the conventions of the directory, created some images to showcase what the plugin does (the directory calls these screenshots, but they can be anything), and designed an icon and a banner image.

I’m glad the plugin is now available to all WordPress websites. I have no aspirations that very many people will want to use it. But if even one or two people end up showing off their favorite toots publicly on their website it will be fun to see. (If you end up doing so, please let me know!) And, going through the process reminded me of the requirements and steps needed to publish a new WordPress plugin on the directory.

[cdevroe]

An interview with Manton Reece for 2024

I interviewed Manton Reece about his journey with Micro.blog in 2018 and again in 2019. They’ve been fun to look back on as the service matures, grows, and changes. I’m a big fan of Micro.blog and the community there (follow me there, if you’d like) and Manton was very gracious to agree to be interviewed once again.

If you’re unfamiliar with Micro.blog their homepage and Welcome areas are a good place to start.

Two quick notes before we jump into the interview:

All links in Manton’s answers were chosen by me. It is my hope that the links provide some context and make it easy for people to learn more on their own.

Both Manton and I keep up with what each social networking platform offers, the decisions they make, the mistakes they’ve made, and their policies. Both of us work in the social networking / blogging market as our day jobs. So some of our discussion is fairly “inside baseball”. If you’d like context on anything discussed, feel free to reach out to me or him.

Thank you for doing this interview again. Hard to believe how much time has passed since our previous interviews.

How is Micro.blog going?

It’s going well! We’ve seen a lot of steady growth since you and I talked last. We’ve rolled out new features and apps. I’m really happy with where the platform is right now, but of course there’s always more to improve.

I’m glad to hear it is going well. In our 2019 interview I asked you about how you prioritize your time working on so many projects with such a small team. You have multiple apps, the website, support, servers to administer, etc. And it has only grown since then. Back then you said “I think good things can come from trying to do a little too much, but it’s not usually sustainable. Eventually it catches up with you and you have to simplify and wrap up or delegate some tasks.” How are you doing on that?

It hasn’t caught up with me quite yet, and I think over the last couple of years I’ve done a better job of focusing on the most important parts of Micro.blog — the core platform that affects everything from the web interface, to blog publishing, to federation with other services. It feels less stressful as we mature as a company. And now Vincent Ritter is helping with both server code and the native apps, including the bulk of our new app Strata for notes. That is a huge difference, not needing to do everything myself.

I’m glad that the number of projects you have going at once hasn’t overwhelmed you. I have noticed though, from time-to-time, Micro.blog may have some downtime. Or, syndication to other services isn’t so reliable. Of course, this type of issue plagues any growing platform. But I’m wondering, if you didn’t have so many codebases to manage, would the core product benefit from your entire focus? Or, have these issues been mostly one-off issues?

After some downtime last year, I took a fresh look at our servers and what upgrades we could do. Luckily the last few months have been really solid. There were some growing pains for us when Mastodon got popular too, because extra traffic from all the new users on the fediverse might reveal performance problems that were never a problem before. Of course, we should’ve caught that in testing, but some things are difficult to plan for until you see how it works in the real world. I expect this is partly why Meta is adding ActivityPub support in phases to Threads.

For distractions on the core Micro.blog features, the problem is everyone has a different view of what is core. Micro.blog has a lot of features. If we paired that down to the absolute minimum and only focused on that, those features could be as reliable and fast as possible. But then the product might not be as valuable or interesting, and we’d have fewer customers, and maybe not even enough customers to have a business that could sustain itself. There is always the balance of fixing bugs and taking care of the basics while also expanding what it can do.

Have there been any interesting or unexpected uses of Micro.blog that have surprised you?

Not exactly surprising, but it has been interesting to see how people use the various pieces that we’ve built, often beyond how I use the features myself. For example, using email newsletters to connect with their readers and wanting more control over how that works. Or using our external feeds support to plug in services like Letterboxd so their movie reviews show up on their own blog. Or taking the Hugo themes and customizing a bunch of the built-in assumptions in Micro.blog’s templates.

The citizenry of the social web are a passionate bunch. I consider myself among them! All social networks experience some turmoil based on the decisions of those leading them. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, WordPress, Mastodon have all had their share. Is this something you worry about with Micro.blog? Do you have a decision making process that can help you to avoid a mutiny or revolt?

We don’t have a formal process for handling a potential mutiny, but it is something I think about whenever there is a heated discussion about the direction of Micro.blog. Because we are small, a few loud voices that get traction could have a real impact on our business. Thankfully that is very rare. I remind myself not to take it personally because Micro.blog has always attracted people who have very high expectations. They want something different, more open, more civil, just better, otherwise they’d stay on Twitter or Reddit. If we fall short, I want to know about it, and most people are patient if we mess something up, as long as it’s fixed quickly.

I also often see the other side of this as we welcome new customers who have been frustrated elsewhere. Recent examples just in the last couple of months include Substack and even Automattic, because of controversy with selling user data to AI companies. When a company burns goodwill, it is really hard to get it back.

How do you see the future of AI and Micro.blog playing out over the next few years? Both in terms of how it might be implemented into features and whether or not the data on the platform should be included in these datasets.

I’m fascinated by AI. We’ve added two AI features to our Micro.blog Premium subscription plan: podcast transcription and summarizing web pages that you’ve bookmarked. I love the summarization feature, because I’m bookmarking pages often but maybe don’t read them right away. Now I can tell at a glance what the basic idea of the article was, then read it later. Micro.blog is about personal blogs and human-generated content, though. We’re never going to have AI features that write blog posts for you.

For how content is available to companies like OpenAI and others crawling the web, we will never sell user data. When we were working on our terms of service, I made sure that we spelled out that all content is owned by users, not us. We have no rights to that content beyond being able to display it in Micro.blog. I believe the web should be open by default and personally for my own blog, I’m fine if AI bots crawl it, but there should be easy ways to opt-out. There are a couple of Micro.blog plug-ins to exclude OpenAI, so it’s essentially just a couple clicks to set that up.

Micro.blog has intentionally omitted some social features that are commonplace on other platforms; such as likes and boosts. I know for me personally, I occasionally wish I could easily boost a post to help someone get a bit more exposure. Have you ever regretted omitting those features? Is there any consideration to adding them someday?

I try to reevaluate these decisions occasionally, but no regrets. For everyone who wishes Micro.blog worked a little more like Twitter or Mastodon, I think there are other users who would be disappointed if we changed it. The goal was to minimize a lot of the noise, judgement, and outrage in other platforms that are partially given fuel by public likes and boosts, especially when combined with algorithmic timelines and trends. Micro.blog can also work as a companion to other networks, so if someone wants those features they can can use Mastodon or Threads for the social aspect, and use Micro.blog more for traditional blogging, or for handling cross-posting.

Speaking of cross posting, Micro.blog supports a nice range of services and protocols. Do you have a favorite? Or a protocol that you think may stand the test of time and be here 40 years from now?

40 years is a long time! The oldest formats that Micro.blog supports are probably RSS and the MetaWeblog API, and those are “only” a little over 20 years old. For cross-posting, a lot of it has to use proprietary APIs that I do not expect to be around forever. Posting to services like Tumblr, Medium, or LinkedIn is not based on standards. I like the IndieWeb’s Micropub and Webmention APIs. I also expect ActivityPub to be with us for a long time. Those are all W3C Recommendations.

HTTP will turn 40 in just 5 short years. We are old men Manton!

Thank you for taking the time for this interview. I really enjoy catching up. I think Micro.blog is a bright spot of the open web. Is there anything you would like people that are new to Micro.blog to check out or anything new for existing members to look forward to?

Thanks! Great talking to you again. For anyone new to Micro.blog, the platform isn’t just one thing: it’s a social network with fediverse compatibility so people on Mastodon can follow and reply to your posts, but it’s also a full blogging platform, similar to what you might have with WordPress. We are always making it better… I’m currently working on improvements to our web post editor and support for Threads. It’s going to be an exciting year for the open web.

My thanks to Manton for taking the time to do this interview. I hope we do it again in a year or so.

[cdevroe]

Quoting Elliot Jay Stocks on how writing a newsletter feels different

Elliot Jay Stocks:

When I first decided to start a newsletter, I’d assumed it’d be just like publishing a blog, but with a different delivery method — but I was completely wrong. Although I do see blog posts as quite personal outputs, a newsletter is just different somehow. It’s hard to say exactly why, but I suspect it’s something to do with the fact that people have opted in to receive your updates. Sure, you could say the same of those who subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed, but publishing something that lands in a person’s inbox just feels inherently more intimate, and I’ve personally been surprised at how writing and publishing a newsletter has felt very different to writing and publishing a blog.

I completely agree. I’ve published a fair number of newsletter editions professionally but zero personally. That is, until I’ve begun Diversions. Though I haven’t yet published an edition of Diversions that lands in someone’s Inbox (that is coming soon), I can already feel a difference in publishing posts for members. It just feels different. Writing Diversions or recording voice memos, just feels different than even this post. It gets the juices flowing.

I’m really liking the feeling. The response to the membership has been incredible. I’m still just figuring things out. I’m still getting things set up. I’m just getting started and there is already a slew of posts in the hopper. It has been a lot of fun.

[cdevroe]

Switcheroo – An open source Little Arc for Safari

This post details a Mac app that recreates Little Arc in Safari. The post and source code are available for members only until April 3rd. Sign up to access the post and code or wait until it is published publicly.

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Chicago snaps part 1: A few iPhone captures from last week’s trip to Chicago with the NerdPress team to sponsor the Tastemaker Conference. Hubbub had its own booth while NerdPress had a large lounge with an impressive view. A fantastic work trip.

Lake Michigan

Sue

Chicago Style

Foggy Lake Michigan

The Bean

The L

[cdevroe]

Voice Memos #1: Reframing our thinking about follows, views, likes, etc.

In this voice memo I chat a little bit about how I’ve tried to think about my follow count, my blog’s statistics, likes, and other metrics. As the internet begins to divide into smaller groups once again, this perspective may become more important than ever.

Voice Memos #1 is 7m54s.

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Diversions #1: I have no business owning this camera

This is the first edition of an all-new series of posts and future email newsletter that will be part of a new membership on my personal website.

Diversions will the central hub for news about the membership, behind-the-scenes details of my personal projects, as well as a wide variety of links to people, places, and things that inspire me.

It is free to join with an optional paid membership. You can read a little bit more about the membership at cdevroe.com/join. It is very early days, I hope you’ll come along for the ride as I continue to learn film photography, darkroom printing, art curation, writing software, and a myriad of other topics that my divert my mind and keep me creatively inspired.

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[cdevroe]

Here is my profile on RsS iS dEaD LOL. Try it yourself. By @paulcuth.

[cdevroe]

I’m trying Safari for the rest of this week in place of Arc. I’m not revolting against them, I just feel as though our values are no longer aligned. They’ve shifted from trying to build a really great web browser (which they’ve already done, imo) to chasing AI venture dollars. I don’t blame them. I’m sure their overhead would make me sweat.

So far I’ve been able to replicate some of the features that made me so productive in Arc. I can sort of make vertical tabs and their grouping work similarly by adding two tab groups to each of my Safari Profiles: Favorites and Today. What I haven’t been able to replicate is Little Arc (and its ability to send a link to a specific Space/Profile) and the ability to quickly move a tab from one Space/Profile to another (though, dragging works for Safari).

I will say I’m a bit surprised at the bugginess of Safari. I was an avid Safari on Desktop user for many years and I can’t remember a time it has ever been so buggy. I’ll give you one example; Safari has an option to always open pages (or, links you’ve clicked from other apps like Mail or Ivory) in a tab rather than in a new window. This simply does not work consistently. Because it is so easily replicated I’m going to submit a Feedback (though we all know how those go).

[cdevroe]

An aerial comparison of Carbondale, PA in 1948 and 2023

Sometime near 1948 Fiore Cerra took an aerial photograph of Carbondale, Pennsylvania that captured how very different a place it was just 75 years ago or so. I live near Carbondale and the moment I saw Cerra’s aerial I knew I wanted to try to recreate it. Well, in early 2023 I did and I uploaded a quick comparison of the two images to Instagram at the time.

Recently, however, after talking with Cody Gonsauls – the founder of the Carbondale Township Historical Society – I knew I wanted to revisit this data and see if I could make it easier to compare the two images. This morning I uploaded a 12s video to YouTube that helps do just that. I also emailed Cody a bunch of comparison images for the society’s digital archives. Here are some of them.

1948 Aerial credit Fiore Cerra (source)

2023 Aerial made by me (perspective adjusted to match 1948 aerial)

Cropped 2023 aerial to 1948 aerial’s dimensions

1948 aerial overlayed on 2023 aerial

[cdevroe]

A few snaps with my phone while browsing a few local antique shops and garden center last weekend.

[cdevroe]

The first rebuilding blocks

Korczak Ziolkowski wakes up early on a bitter cold winter’s morning – the same way he has for several decades – after breakfasting and a few mugs of the hottest coffee his palette can stand, he shoulders his tool belt and trods his way in knee-high snow to the eastern wall of the Crazy Horse Memorial… his lifelong unfinished masterpiece.

I like to think that working on one’s own personal website is a lot like Korczak Ziolkowski’s pursuit of progress on the ambitious mountain-sized memorial he started in the late-1940s. He knew he’d never complete the work in his lifetime. He knew that each day’s progress would be measured in inches and pounds and that, only after a generation’s worth of effort, would he be able to look back and see that what he had begun to make was worth it.

In late-November 2023, I changed jobs from VP of Marketing to Senior Product Manager (and lead developer) of Hubbub. When I was working in marketing I needed technical side projects to scratch that particular itch I’ve always had. But now that I spend some amount of time every workday programming – I don’t need to be working on side projects as often. And I certainly don’t need to be building my own static site generator anymore. But I do need a better playground to test and improve Hubbub. So I’ve switched back to WordPress to power my blog.

If you were following along on my journey to build Tuff, the static site generator that powered my site for well over a year, you might be wondering whether I’m upset that I’m replacing it. Wasn’t it a waste of my time? I think it was a valuable project for me to work on.

Martiijn Doolaard, a web designer, musician, cyclist, and now successful YouTuber rebuilding stone animal structures in the alps (who I watch every Sunday with Eliza) recently had a similar reaction to one of his projects. Doolaard had spent a great deal of time building a crane to move large heavy stones on the roofs of his buildings. He spent several weeks honing the tool to work for his needs – only to set it aside when the day came to use it. He answered some questions about whether or not he felt that was wasted time and he said (I’m summarizing) that it wasn’t a waste of time because he enjoyed building the crane.

I enjoyed building Tuff. And that should be enough to consider it time well spent. Tuff is still currently powering a few of my other websites (though, I plan to move them all to WordPress over the course of this year). Imagine building something from scratch that you were able to use for more than a year on multiple websites? That isn’t wasted time. I learned a bunch, used my brain, and honed some of my skills that I use everyday.

In order to improve a software product, I need to be one of its most active users. We acquired Hubbub in December 2023 and for the last few months we’ve had a roadmap of low hanging fruit updates. We’ve fixed some bugs, patched some potential (albeit mild) security vulnerabilities, and added some new features. But our best work is definitely ahead of us. We’re now up-to-speed on the codebase, the issues, the customers, etc. and we’re in the phase where I’m using the product everyday. I’m beginning to have ideas of how the product can be much better, more capable, and more valuable for customers. It is also more likely that I will run into an issue by using the product daily so that I can fix the issue before customers even notice it.

My website is a child theme of the Twenty Twenty Four theme. When I set out to begin this rebuild my goal was to use WordPress’ full site editor (FSE) to complete my entire site with writing as little code as possible. I thought it would be a worthy exercise to help me understand the state of this part of the WordPress ecosystem.

The full site editor in WordPress has really improved a lot and at a fairly rapid pace. While I wasn’t able to complete my entire site without any code, it may not be long before I’ll be able to do so. I’ve seen a lot of complaints in the community about the direction that WordPress is taking with Gutenberg and the FSE. Alternative forks are being worked on. My opinion is that the FSE is the right direction to go, especially to enable non-technical users to build their own websites. I have a lot more to say about this but overall I’m bullish on the FSE.

My site uses a child theme so that I can enable custom post types, add custom styles, a Query Loop Block variation that adds custom taxonomies as filters, adds a template part for my new logo, enables some meta boxes for the metadata on portfolio items, adds support for the aside Post Format, and manipulates the guid in the database. A few of these features could have been done another way (perhaps by someone with more experience than me). I’m hoping that future versions of WordPress will allow me to remove code rather than add it.

Based on my experience rebuilding my website, I may write a separate post about some features that WordPress should have out-of-the-box that it currently does not. Maybe some of them are already underway.

My personal website is not as ambitious a project as Ziolkowski’s memorial of the Lokatan war leader, but I’m fairly certain that my website will never be truly finished. I’m glad that I spent the time to get to where it is today. There is a lot of work yet to be done (especially on mobile and the archive) but I’m excited to be publishing new stuff again. Recently I published a new portfolio piece, a podcast appearance, a new open source plugin, and some photos into my new snaps area.

Much more to come. Stay subscribed.

[cdevroe]

Introducing the Mastodon Favorites WordPress Plugin

One of the primary ways I find new accounts to follow on social media is by eavesdropping on other people’s favorites. Many social networks make each account’s favorites public but Mastodon does not (yet?). So I wanted a way to show my favorites publicly so that others can look through them. And I’m hoping others make theirs available too.

The Mastodon Favorites WordPress Plugin adds an Editor Block so that others can easily add it to their websites. It has been submitted to the WordPress Plugin Directory (currently number 276 in review) and have I released the code on GitHub.

You can view 50 of my most recent favorites.

This plugin should be considered beta. There is a lot I’d like to improve when I have the time. Perhaps if you would like to contribute to improving the plugin you can fork the code on GitHub and submit a Pull Request. I’ll be keeping the list of Issues up-to-date as best as I can.

If you have any general feedback, send me a mention @[email protected]

Download mastodon-favorites-0.1.0.zip

I’ve had my favorite toots displaying on my website for over a year. When I built Tuff, my static site generator, I had built a small Tuff plugin (the first!) to fetch my favorite toots and build them into the HTML. However, that meant that the list was out of date. With this update, the oldest my list will be is 6-hours old.

[cdevroe]

I’m excited to finally share a portrait I made of S. Robert Powell Ph.D., the President of the Carbondale Historical Society, back in April 2023. I’m donating the prints and images to the society for their archives.

Washing prints

[cdevroe]

Last year my mother-in-law gifted Eliza and I with a train ride to Jim Thorpe for our anniversary. I managed to snap a few color film photos along the way.