Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist
Eli Mellen (eli.li)Community resources for the avid Micro.blogger
Micro.blog is groovy. This is a community index, champion’s enchiridion of all things Micro.blog. NOTE! This is a community resource and is in no way officially tied to Micro.blog. The bona fide documentation lives at help.micro.blog (make sure not to miss the community guidelines).
What a fantastic resource!
Syndicated copies to:For Micro.blog, I always want to encourage third-party apps. We support existing blogging apps like MarsEdit, and we have an API for more Micro.blog-focused apps to be built. I’m excited to say that a big one just shipped in the App Store: Icro.
Icro is well-designed, fast, and takes a different approach to some features compared to the official Micro.blog app. In a few ways, it’s better than the app I built. This is exactly what I hoped for. We wanted an official app so that there’s a default to get started, but there should be other great options for Micro.blog users to choose from.
I’m wondering if any of the pnut or ADN crowd have migrated over to micro.blog yet? I suspect that many of their apps (and especially mobile apps) could be re-purposed as micropub applications. I’m particularly interested in more Android related apps as a lot of the micro.blog crowd seems to be more directly focused on the Apple ecosystem.
Syndicated copies to:Earlier in the week I noticed how well reading.am dovetailed with Huffduffer. Now I’m noticing that my listen posts (aka my faux-cast) also now translate to micro.blog’s podcast discovery page. The secret to this seems to be having an .mp3 file in a post that feeds across. I do notice at least one post without an .mp3, but which includes the word “podcast.” Are there any other criterion for this @manton?
I wonder if there’s a way for more posts to display the inline audio player without being hosted directly by micro.blog?
After the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica catastrophe and recent Twitter news (and retraction) about support for 3rd party clients, I found myself wondering about Micro.blog again, after hearing about it on Kickstarter a little over a year ago. On the surface, it’s an indie Twitter-like app, in th...
This first half of the episode was originally recorded in March, abruptly ended, and then was not completed until April due to scheduling.
It’s been reported that Cambridge Analytica has improperly taken and used data from Facebook users in an improper manner, an event which has called into question the way that Facebook handles data. David Shanske and I discuss some of the implications from an IndieWeb perspective and where you might go if you decide to leave Facebook.
The originating articles that kicked off the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica issue:
Jonathan LaCour, Eddie Hinkle, Natalie Wolchover, Cher, Tea Leoni, Adam McKay, Leo Laporte,and Jim Carrey
New York Times Profile of multiple quitters: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/technology/users-abandon-facebook.html
You’ve made the decision to leave Facebook? Your next question is likely to be: to move where? Along with the links above, we’ve compiled a short list of IndieWeb-related places that might make solid options.
We have something really big to announce today. Micro.blog now supports hosting short-form podcasts, also known as microcasts, with a companion iPhone app called Wavelength for recording, editing, and publishing episodes.
Micro.blog is about making short-form content you own as simple to post as a tweet because we believe blogging should be easier. Podcasting should be easier too.
Wavelength looks like a cool new app in the podcasting space. While meant for growing category of microcasts, it portends some interesting things. I suspect this is just the start for something that will likely continue getting better over time.
Congrats Manton!
Syndicated copies to:Why join us on Micro.blog?
Because there is too little French on the indieweb! And that Micro.blog is a great way to get started easily on the IndieWeb regardless of your generation.
Une jolie traduction en français de la post IndieWeb génération 4 et des domaines hébergés de Manton Reece avec quelques réflexions supplémentaires sur l’utilisation de micro.blog en tant que plateforme alimentée par IndieWeb.
Si vous parlez français, rejoignez Christophe Ducamp (micro.blog) et d’autres dans la communauté IndieWeb et sur micro.blog.
A nice French translation of Manton Reece’s post IndieWeb generation 4 and hosted domains followed by some additional thoughts on using micro.blog as an IndieWeb powered platform.
If you speak French, do join Christophe Ducamp (micro.blog) and others in the IndieWeb community and on micro.blog.
Syndicated copies to:One of the things I love most about micro.blog is that it feels like an honest community of actual neighbors despite the geographic distance between us. I can freely post tidbits about my life and people have genuine responses to them.
Syndicated copies to:Micro Monday is a weekly microcast with Jean MacDonald talking to members of the Micro.blog community.
Also available at: https://micro.blog/monday
My Micro Monday recommendation is for micro.blog’s own Micro Monday Podcast hosted by @macgenie.
Syndicated copies to:We have been talking about the problems with Twitter, Facebook, and social media throughout the last year. Our guest has too, and he’s trying to do something about it. Manton Reece, talks about Micro.blog, the technology it is built on, and how he is being thoughtful about building something new.
I stopped using Facebook because I didn’t trust the people behind Facebook. I had grown weary of the sly and underhand tactics used to grow their network and was unwilling to remain part of it. But if I’m honest, I couldn’t trust myself either. Visiting Facebook would elicit behaviour you could only describe as stalking; trawling through the feeds of my friends, seeking out people I vaguely knew. I had better things to do with my time. Almost a decade later, I’m having similar thoughts about Twitter.
He’s got some interesting, but subtle references to pieces of the “old” web including Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.
Today we’re introducing a search collection using emoji, starting with books. Just include the books emoji with your microblog text about a book you’re reading or related topic, and your post will automatically be collected on /discover/books.
@Manton has added an interesting new feature to micro.blog. He’s created a special book discovery page which users can use to see what others are reading or recommending.
Simply by including the books emoji 📚 in one’s post, the page will collect all those posts and display them at http://micro.blog/discover/books. In a sense, he’s using an emoji almost like a hashtag, though the mechanics of how things work are slightly different. I’m curious to see how it evolves.
Based on what I’m able to discern, I have the proud place of ownership for being the fourth book post to micro.blog with “The Library is finally unpacked” from several months ago. It isn’t a book recommendation, but it’ll give you and idea about what I think about books.
The sad part for me though is that he chose the books emoji 📚 . Why sad? Because for quite a while now I’ve been posting updates on my own site about what I read using various book-related emoji to indicate where I’m at with a book. I’ll use the bookmark emoji 🔖 to indicate things that I want to read. I use a green book emoji 📗 to indicate that I’ve started reading something, an open book emoji 📖 to indicate that I’m making progress, and a red book emoji 📕 to indicate that I’ve just finished or stopped reading a particular book. Most of my book status updates also have some notes or thoughts about what I’m reading as well as quotes, highlights, and other marginalia.
Since micro.blog’s discover page only uses one emoji, it’s missing out on all my past updates. For those who’d like to see them on my site, this link should have the entire archive. Not all of them are syndicated to Twitter, but this link will give folks an idea what these posts all look like there.
In a similar vein, I also often post what I’m reading online with glasses 👓 emoji. One of the things that’s always bothered me about Twitter was that people often share articles, but research has shown that very few actually bother to read them before sharing. (I’ve always gotten the impression that many don’t even bother to read the headlines.) Thus, following reading.am’s lead, I post everything I actually read online to my own website, but to indicate that it was read (from start to finish), I add the glasses emoji to the title. If I haven’t read it yet, it’s more likely hidden on my back end or, if it’s something I really want to advertise, promote, or highly expect I’ll come back to later, it will have a bookmark emoji 🔖.
I don’t publish all my reads publicly, a large number are published privately. You can find all of the public read posts here.
Lastly, for movies and television I’m watching, I include either TV emoji 📺 or film emoji 🎞️. I find that these emoji do really well for microblogging spaces which often have space restrictions.
Overall, I’ve quite enjoyed the evolution of micro.blog’s discovery features. While there are a few follow recommendations available, the service has a page with recent photos, so one can scan photos as a means of finding interesting people to follow on the service.
I can’t wait to see how the reading discovery page works out or what other new discovery tools Manton implements in the future. It’s nice to see a service that continues to evolve and change in reaction to its community.
Thanks Manton!
There’s something appealing and inherently cool about the simplicity of Sameer Vasta‘s “read” posts as he posts them on micro.blog. Just the word “Reading” wrapped with the permalink of the article followed by a quote from the piece or a short comment following it.
Micro.blog just launched in beta recently and one of the biggest things burning up the airwaves there is how to easily post content from one’s own site as notes without including titles. Why? If a post has a title, then micro.blog thinks it’s an article and just posts the title along with a permalink to it rather than the desired content of the status update.
In the long run and for easier mass adoption, I’m hoping Manton can figure out how to parse RSS feeds in a simpler way so that users don’t need to do serious gymnastics to import their microblog posts from other sources. I’d imagine it’s far easier for him to adapt to the masses than for the masses to adapt to micro.blog. At the very worst, he could create a checkbox on the RSS import feeds to indicate which feeds are status updates and which aren’t and this would quickly solve the problem for the average user as most CMSes allow users to define custom feeds based on content type.
While there are a number of people doing things from simply adding date/time stamps (which micro.blog ignores) to functions.php tweaks to to custom plugins, some of which I’ve tried, I thought I’d come up with my own solution which has helped to kill two proverbial birds with one stone. (Note: I’ve listed some of these others on the Indieweb wiki page for micro.blog.)
The other day, I’d had a short conversation about the issue in the Indieweb chat with several people and decided I’d just give up on having titles in notes altogether. Most people contemplating the problem have an issue doing this because it makes it more difficult to sort and find their content within their admin UI dashboard which is primarily keyed off of the_title() within WordPress. I share their pain in this regard, but I’ve also been experiencing another admin UI issue because I’ve got a handful of plugins which have added a dozen or so additional columns to my posts list. As a result the titles in my list are literally about four characters wide and stretch down the page while knucklehead metadata like categories needlessly eat up massively wide columns just for fun. Apparently plugins aren’t very mindful of how much space they decide to take up in the UI, and WordPress core doesn’t enforce reasonable limits on these things.
So my solution to both problems? If found a handly little plugin called Admin Columns with over 80,000 users and which seems to be frequently updated that allows one to have greater simple control over all of the columnar UI interfaces within their sites.
In just a few minutes, I was able to quickly get rid of several columns of data I’ve never cared about, expand the title column to a reasonable percentage of the space so it’s readable, and tweak all the other columns to better values. Even better, I was able to add the slug name of posts into the UI just after the title columns, so I can leave status update titles empty, but still have a field by which I can see at least some idea of what a particular post was about.
