Yesterday, the Mastodon team announced it would be handing over control of its project to a new non-profit organization. The timing of this announcement is perfect given everything that’s happening with WordPress, Meta, and… well, everything else. To date, I think Eugen Rochko has done an excellent job stewarding Mastodon, but I also might have...
Since I last wrote about WordPress, things have gone off the rails. This after a brief period when things were blissfully quiet. Matt Mullenweg stopped commenting for a while, though his company had launched WP Engine Tracker — a site for tracking WordPress-driven websites that moved away from WP Engine. I think this is a bit gauche, but it seems...
This morning I read a 404 Media article about Instagram showing people ads with AI-generated images of themselves. I thought this take from Sam Biddle was very good:
At the end of last year, I wrote about wanting to focus on the web in 2024. How did that shake out?
Earlier this year, I looked into why Mastodon didn’t include referer headers. As someone who enjoys following web analytics, it seemed a shame that Mastodon appeared never to send any traffic. I knew this wasn’t the case, but that lack of traffic data certainly wasn’t doing Mastodon any favours in terms of marketing.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays! I hope everyone out there has a joyful and relaxing day, however you celebrate. During the downtime I got to play a game I’d been wanting to try for a while.
The weeks leading up to the holidays have been hectic. I’m behind on “internet stuff” since entering Christmas-mode, and have been looking for a better way to capture things I want to look at later. I’ve had this issue before, but solved it in an ad-hoc way. Previously I’d made notes in Bear or used Safari’s Reading List feature, but I wasn’t...
Yesterday, user @saeri.xyz on Bluesky posted some screenshots of a potential upcoming Bluesky subscription plan.
NiGHTS into Dreams is one of those games I tend to think about when Christmas rolls around. It’s one of my favourites from the Saturn lineup, and it also had a free Christmas version.
The latest instalment of The Upgradies is coming soon from our friends at the Upgrade podcast. I submitted my recommendations earlier today, and thought it would be fun to share my picks.
Back in the early 2000s, there was this nebulous idea called the semantic web. It never really went anywhere, but I found it exciting at the time.
Over the weekend I started playing around with Jetstream, a project from the Bluesky team to deliver a JSON based firehose of atproto data. Here’s an overview of the simple project I built with that data.
Here’s an excellent article from Christine Lemmer-Webber that takes a deeper technical look into some of the criticisms I had in my previous piece.
Some fun news today from the creators of Jet Lag: The Game. They officially announced the next season, and also a “home version” of the game. I’ve written about Jet Lag: The Game before, so you might want to start there if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Turns out you can release a QBasic game on Steam if it’s packaged correctly. Beside being a nerdy oddity, this game is extremely well made and quite fun! Lots of Castlevania II vibes going on here. Check out Anzu Castle Gracula on Steam, or give it a shot on Itch.io.
November has sucked so far. One upside of the terrible nonsense is that more people are fleeing X. Many are choosing Bluesky. I’ve seen a bunch of takes about this recently, but I keep seeing things I disagree with. I figure that’s a good enough excuse to write more about this weird-assed social network.
It’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote about WordPress. Stuff’s been happening in the background, but I’ve been trying to ignore it. This morning I read a story that bothered me enough to require another round of therapy-by-blog-post.
I missed the date on this, but it’s been over two years since Elon Musk walked into Twitter HQ with a sink. Today I looked back at some conversations I had at the time. There were a lot of feelings.
This morning I saw a Bluesky post from Andy Baio mentioning that Too Many Cooks was released 10 years ago.
A flood of users left X and moved to Bluesky over the weekend. I’ve written a bunch of times in the past about Bluesky, and have gone from grumpy frustration to general acceptance of the service. I’m happy that people are moving away from X, and I think Bluesky is a reasonable replacement. That said, I think new users should understand a bit how...
The WordPress saga continues. Theo Browne has a great video overview of things up to October 14. Since I last wrote about this there was more back-and-forth between David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) and Matt Mullenweg. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a fan of DHH, but I agree with his takes on this situation. On October 13, DHH commented on the...
A couple of days ago, I saw this Mastodon post from Casey Liss. I had previously used GitHub Codespaces when working with a client, but it was a bit much. It relies on VMs that run on GitHub servers to give you a VS Code instance. Those VMs take a while to spin up and you have a limited number of hours per month depending on your plan. It’s a...
It’s super late at night on Thanksgiving weekend in Canada. I shouldn’t be thinking about weird internet drama, but here we are.
I came across HTML for People this morning, and it put a goofy smile on my face. It’s a fun and thoughtful introduction to web development that focuses on HTML and CSS first. Through it, you’ll learn to build a site, understand the basics of local development, and get pointers about what to learn next.
Look, I’m just about as tired of writing about WordPress drama as you are of reading it. That said, I think this stuff needs to be documented because it’s so off-the-wall bonkers. Also, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that drama about blogging software has gotten bloggers to blog about it.