📰 Blog

This is totally how I use the Micro.blog app... in the simulator 🤣✌️

I updated the homepage on shoutouts.lol a little. Tweaked the header to display a random underlined word and also an image of what embeds could look like. Not great at generating images in Sketch, so will tweak – probably should add more variety and less frogs 😅

Yes, I'm breaking the silence to introduce you to a new blog I started called "a.i. shorts".

I’m trying something new, just for a little bit of fun, by generating short fiction stories… using generative AI.

Website is here and you can follow on Micro.blog (and Mastodon) or RSS.

Made a slow start on adding Pages and Uploads to the Micro.blog app. Pages is up first, so you can edit all your pages. Using the same icon as per website for now.

Similar flow as per Posts, thanks to Micropub.

Eagle eyed readers may have noticed I've been taking a short break from general blogging.

This has been a long time coming and slowly bubbling away inside of me. That small redesign I made to my site has a lot to do with a slightly renewed direction.

Blogging started for me mainly because of Micro.blog. When public registration started, I signed up. Shortly thereafter I started blogging about a project I was building... and I enjoyed it.

Fast forward a few years, and I accumulated over 3,600 posts. Small compared to some, but a lot for me.

But then it dawned on me. I was over sharing. There was a lot of noise. Some things were incredibly open about very personal things. A lot of things were also a lot of "hot takes" and some other random junk.

So I just stopped 2 weeks ago, just before I started with tweaking my homepage. Not going to lie, the temptation to just blog something meaningless and random was hard.

Part of that redesign process included disabling over 2500 posts on my blog that were not tied to a particular dev project. Probably bad for "SEO", you say? – I don't care about SEO.

There are more things I've been doing that involve my "online" life. But I won't go into that.

A few years ago I told myself that I will stop being socially online once I "made it". Now that's a real pretentious thing to say to myself, and probably do. Having "made it" can be different things. So how do I define it personally? A question that was answered one day, when I woke up, and my inner voice just said – "this is good enough".

You see, I love working on things behind the scenes. I love it because I get to touch a handful of people's lives in a meaningful way. I don't need to blog about it... all I need to do is bring myself and deliver what I do. That's it.

It's simple. I love touching peoples lives through my code. That might be directly through my products, or code that you don't see and perhaps use without knowing. And I don't need confirmation of big user numbers to feel a sense of achievement, nor do I need follower counts to claim my "status".

With everything going on, I want to help out the people I work with directly, and concentrate on that going forwards (Micro.blog and others), I want to keep writing my little side projects, because they're fun. And yes, I'll probably blog about those every-now-and-then.

I am happiest when I open my code editor and create something. I am happy that whoever I work with is happy with the results... and I am happy when those results speak and get in the hands of a handful others (maybe just used internally, who knows).

So, what am I getting at is that I am taking a break from sharing personal things on my blog. It's been hard the past 2 weeks, but I am here.

I'll continue blogging about my projects. It's where it all started. I'll be sharing personal things with my closer family, but nothing publicly.

I am still here, just sitting at my computer, writing or coding. Or maybe I am not here... enjoying some quiet time with no obligations to share or post about it. Enjoying the moment. The simple joy of life. Just being.

Hey, and at the end of the day, a little less garbage on the internet isn't a bad deal ✌️❤️

Thanks as ever for reading, and I'll see you next time in a dev update.

Micro.blog for web should be back as normal, and the official apps should also be serving images as usual. The CDN SSL cert ran out, so I disabled it for now, until Manton is back (who has AWS access) to renew it.

There wasn't any downtime, just things looked a bit more Web 1.0, without images and styles 😋✌️

Howdy Micro.blog folks. There is an SSL issue with the CDN we're using (I suspect it ran out and was not renewed). This affects the web app, and images that are served on the timeline (shouldn't affect hosted blogs).

Sublime Ads now includes a 42 day free trial (yes!) and also has all features enabled, so there is no need to add your details before unlocking other features during the trial.

I recognise the fact that you want to implement this in your apps or sites. Should be enough time.

Just testing it all wraps...

Been working on the posts screen for the MB app. Still some bigger work to do of course, but glad it's rendering in a way I want (sort of). Kinda fun to work on, so check out the develop branch commits so you can pull out your hair on how I do things.

Last week I changed the initial Dashboard that is shown in Sublime Ads... think it looks better with the tiles. Might explore this further and add Clients to it too.

Hello dear users of Gluon on iOS. I am happy to report that version 2023.1 is now released. There's a lot in this update, so head on over to the abbreviated release notes on the Gluon website.

Thank you to all ✌️❤️ Happy updating.

Gluon 2023.1 on iOS: "Pending Developer Release"

Ah damn, wanted to ship a few Artificially COMPUTER GENERATED icons for Gluon... like these ones:

"Waiting for Review". Goodnight peeps. Glad I finally pushed that button. Too long of a beta.

I've added the ability to reset and remove your extra Gluon based profile data. That'll reset it and also remove the data from edge storage. Should be up in the next TestFlight.

Decided on the new pricing plans for Sublime Ads. They are the same, except the highest one... which is now $27/month instead of $39.

Current line up (Pay what you want):

• $4/month
• $9/month
• $18/month
• $27/month

Should appeal to indie developers near and far ✌️❤️

I'm transitioning Sublime Ads to be used more by indie devs, and less by big players, so I'm scrapping the Team features. I also added the "pay what you want" model to further help devs integrate this on their budget. Still need to figure out new pricing. 30 day trial now also.

Adding a few more push notification options to the Micro.blog app, allowing you to toggle if you want to enable them on a per account basis. By default they are on, but you can pop in over to settings if you wanted. (Not yet released).

Just added an extra little option in Sublime Ads to add a portal logo into the header for the client area. That including all the other portal settings too.

There were a few issues with the new Gluon feeds, for the TestFlight app (and also current ones). Which meant slow updates. Hope to have that resolved now after a few days of making a change in Bunny (was caching related).

OK, Android is building again for Micro.blog. Funny enough, the last time it built without issue was back in January, and then I upgraded React Native on iOS. Oh well. Should have seen that coming. There were a lot of changes to config files that I had to manually comb through...

🥳 Patience and persistence is the key. Micro.blog app for Android building again.

Kiddo finally in bed. Tea is ready. Time to fix the Micro.blog app for Android.

As a funny aside, Google emailed a week or so ago saying there are issues that we should look at… and that they “might” remove the app. And so they did.

And this is why I want direct downloads. So no big tech child can do what they want.

Imagine if they could also stop a website…