📰 Blog

Just making some final adjustments to the new Micro.blog homepage. This is kinda the first phase of what we want to do, and we'll expand from what we have. I'm really happy with the way it looks.

Made Name Server changes to the gluon.app domain. I'm monitoring it, but I think it's going to be A-OK. If something doesn't work for you, let me know.

I'm pretty happy with the response times for the new "fun" 😋 profile data for Gluon.

Tomorrow I’ll add a simple status page for all the Gluon services. There’s quite a lot going on now, so it’ll be good to have some central place, for myself at least, to check on things.

Just pushed out a little update to the Gluon TestFlight, Build 31. Now you can add a little emoji (or even two letters) to your profile.

Also fixes a few issues with navigating. Oh... and super experimental timeline tweaks (hoping it will better maintain position).

Got a few updates coming to Gluon later. Mainly fixing navigation issues when swiping on a timeline cell (to bring up the actions). Also... maybe a little bit more "fun" ✌️

If you're using shoutouts.lol, and you should be if not, I made a few nice changes that handles better image loading, and caching, no matter where you're located.

But first...

Moving away from Cloudflare

A theme for this year is to move away my dependency on Cloudflare. They know what they're doing for sure, but their support is absolutely, shockingly, terrible. That's not for me.

If you've been following along, I moved domain servers (the phone record book for the domain name) over to Bunny.net. It went without a hitch and the transition was smooth with zero downtime to the service. That's how I like to run the show.

Bunny is such a great service, and I really love it. It does a lot of things, which I'll get to in a minute, and they recently added DNS (that phone book record for the web), so I wanted to give it a try. And boy is it nice.

Better CDN handling of images

With using Bunny, I have more oversight and control of what to cache and where with their CDN. I've been using the CDN on my personal website for most part last year already, so I know I can count on it.

My task was to make all images that are served on shoutouts.lol and especially through the embeds, available throughout the globe with the least latency as possible. Images are the largest types of data coming through for embeds.

Enter Perma-cache. It basically stores all files (images in our case), across the globe. It'll load the image from the closest region to you. Go on have a read because I just can't explain it, haha.

It's all very cool to me (and maybe quite boring to you). So now images are permanently cached throughout different storage locations around the globe, with the least latency.

One more image related thing

Images are lazy loaded by your browser, because the normal embed script tells the browser to only load the image when it needs to.

Today I've added a minor tweak to this, which will preload the image, which means it'll "paint" quicker than usual, as the browser already knows about it ahead of time.

I've been doing some random testing, and "perceived" loading is much faster than without it.

If you're using a custom template, with your own markup, you can add the following snippet close to your image tag:

<link rel="preload" as="image" href="{{image}}" />

So that's it?

Yeah, so far. I am planning to play more with perma-cache and allow the embed script to cache the last result. So if shoutouts.lol would ever go down for some reason, it'll have the latest available to you as a fallback.

And what's next?

Not much. I am still planning a theme library as a third section on the site.

To be honest, I want shoutouts to be as simple as possible, so I think this is as far as I'll go... unless you have any nice suggestions?

For example, I was asked to allow ALL shoutouts to be returned, so I added an option for exactly that, so now you can add a ?all parameter at the end of your embed url.

Thank you for using shoutouts. I really appreciate every one of you that's been trying it out, and paying the small yearly ✌️❤️

Coming to a new Gluon TestFlight soon... profile accent colours. Just some fun really. Will add "emoji" badges and perhaps custom emoji images also. Planning to let other apps use the Gluon API to grab the data if they want (if there are any – HINT!).

There's a new TestFlight build out for Gluon on iOS (Build 27). Fixes the timeline jumping around like crazy (sorry 😞) and also adds a pure black/OLED mode when the dark theme is on (setting is in Appearance). Enjoy.

Did someone say “marketing” website for Micro.blog? 🤷‍♂️😏

I'm making Domain Name Server changes to shoutouts.lol. Moving from Cloudflare to Bunny. Hopefully it will go smoothly. If not, I'll pick up the pieces, and cry in the morning.

Currently thinking of how to get those "roll calls" into Gluon from Micro.blog. And trying to keep on top of them... hmmm.

Tweaking dark mode in Gluon a little. I had a lot of feedback about dark mode being too dark (thanks Apple for not thinking through pure black). So being opinionated and allowed to change my mind...

I'll be sending out a new Gluon TestFlight later today once it lets me (seems they're having issues). It'll probably be the last build before I send it over to the "Empire".

New update out to the Micro.blog Mac App. Manton has the details. Nice to see some of those timeline changes we made for the handheld apps come through, making it more consistent across platforms. Also, I really want to steal that icon for iOS now 😋

Who said the new Micro.blog app can't have settings? 😋

OK, Micro.blog app, come to daddy. Any on the side feature requests? Like small things to implement? Feeling generous.

If you're using Gluon, I'm looking for more beta testers for iOS. If that's you, please go ahead and check this section. I have a feeling this might be a longer beta. Share it with a friend! ❤️

Howdy there, it's another day for some Gluon updates for you fine folks. I wanted to document these so it's easier for me to write once, and then also get those details into TestFlight (because their editor is worse than rotting garbage).

Thank you all for your suggestions, as usual, and hope to continue ticking things off (including, soon, the syncing... – oh wait).

Features in this release:

• [NEW] Added an option to copy the plain text and/or HTML text through the context menu (long press on a feed item). This option allows you to do exactly that.
• [NEW/Nitpicky] Adds an option to open URL links in reader mode (if supported on that website).
• [NEW/Nitpicky] Adds an option to show an extra button in the header area that takes you directly to your pinned profiles. Hope that works for now.
• [NEW/TWEAK] Adds the ability to automatically paste the content from the clipboard when tapping the link button on the Reply screen. No idea why I never added that here.
• [TWEAK] Tweaks the loading indicator on a conversation screen. Now the header area shows a nice loading spinner, instead of that thing that never showed up, or maybe it did (if you know what I mean).
• [NEW/TWEAK] Tweaked the image modal slightly with a new close icon, and two options to share the URL of the image (opening a share sheet) and also a link button that takes you directly to the page in your browser.
• [FIX] Fixes an issue with deleting a post when on the Conversation screen.
• [FIX] Fixes an issue with reloading an actual conversation after deleting a post (it never worked – lolz).

Some nice screenshots for you.

Pinned Profile button:

Copy plain and HTML options on a timeline (hard to see, and no, try and find it haha):

Image modal options:

Added a new option to shoutouts.lol embeds, allowing you to pass in a "?all" parameter with your embed code, that passes back all of your active shoutouts in one go, instead of one random one – also works with the JSON response. So now you could do something like this:

Browsing my timelines, I sense that if Tapbots made an app for Micro.blog, then I can say bye bye to Gluon. Now what are the chances? I should have another year or two before that happens? 😋

Today I added settings that allow you define your default image resize options in Sublime Ads.

When calling the API, your images are automatically resized to 500 pixels wide with a quality setting of 95 (100 being the highest), without the need for you pass in extra parameters as per image resize options. This is done to preserve some bandwidth and make sure you're not sending huge images.

You can override these default settings on your settings page, to fine tune it to your needs for your app – removing the need to add extra parameters when calling the API. Useful when you just want to change things without having to update your app (unless you added image resize options).

Hope this is useful to some of you.

Sorry, no meaningful show notes this episode as I wanted to get this out for your listening pleasure.

I touch on Micro.blog, the web and the app we’re building. Then I touch on Gluon, what I’ve been changing (like push notifications) and why – teasing some new features. And of course I forget to talk about the other features I added to Gluon, like pinned profiles 🙃 Oh and I touch on plans on monetising Gluon somehow… somewhere…

Next on the list a quick update on Sublime Ads and how I spun it off to create shoutouts.lol – and I tease a few ideas I have, even though I think it’s one of those well rounded 99% done projects, meaning I don’t want to change too much.

To finish the year I bring back apps from the dead and perhaps something new I might pick up.

Recorded December, 23rd 2022.

Links

• Micro.blog
• Gluon
• shoutouts.lol
• Sublime Ads
• Status for updown.io
• updown.io
• Support me

I've been made aware of issues with filtering/muting hashtags in Gluon. Seems it's not so simple due to the way they are marked up. I'll get this working in the next iOS beta next week.

Without going into too much detail, if you're using Sublime Ads and the Edge API, note that I will be deprecating the Edge API come next year. It doesn't meet my quality standards, so it's going away. I'll make sure to resolve existing integrations as normal.