Note: Some older posts are no longer available. Thanks for understanding ✌️
Current status of getting Micro.blog back into the play store is that I need to fix build errors, which has been a rollercoaster ride. Too much work on the iOS side, including React Native upgrades, caused this (I think).
Still a few hours away from getting anywhere.
Micro.blog for Android is currently unavailable on the Play Store.
Google probably hired all the dropouts from Apple App Review… and they removed it for an issue that was resolved months ago (allowing reporting and muting). Guess they are getting mixed up with naming.
Howdy ho. I've gotten asked this a lot today, and of course previously, on how to best support my work.
Firstly, I want to thank you for even considering it, it really means a lot. You have no idea how much this means to me.
The best way, of course, is to just tell people about my projects:
If you have any use for these, please consider subscribing or letting your dear friends know that they exist. I'd love to grow Sublime Ads more one of these days.
An indirect way to show your support is to sign up to Micro.blog. I work 2 days a month on the app and some other things, so that ultimately goes to making Micro.blog more viable, and pay the bills 😋
My income needs are small and I can operate at ~$2500 a month and live OK. My biggest expenses are rent (~$1000), school (~$500) and whatever social (~$500) and tax (😭) payments I need to pay a month. As I always say, I have zero loans, or own the bank massive amounts of money, so I don't pay for any of that.
If you want to support me with money, you can do so, and there are details on my support me page.
Whilst I don't yet offer in-app purchases for Gluon, you can make a one time donation or even make a small subscription payment on Buy Me A Coffee. There are different monthly tiers. I even offer my time for some of them, if you want to work together. There are also small advertising opportunities with Gluon, details are here.
Whilst my freelance gig looks like a ball of shame as of late (blame empty promises), you can also perhaps consider hiring me for any projects you might want me to look at, or work on, for you. I have no clue what I'm doing, but that's ok... who does? 😅 Don't look at prices too much.
If you have donated in the past, I just also want to say thank you for believing in me. Also a huge thank you to everyone that uses my apps and continues to support me. Even just a nice comment here and there always makes my day (so thank you for all the comments to date) ✌️❤️
I still have a glimmer of hope I can turn everything around this year... I don't want to stop doing what I do, because it gives me energy and life.
Well, thank you for reading this so far to the end. Just you reading it means a lot.
Wonder what I was planning when I registered those domain names 🤷♂️ Fun aside... when I first created Gluon, I called it "Gluon Social".
For the eagle eyed devs, on the new Micro.blog homepage, you can see we are using ES Modules, and a shim for... SAFARI. Really nice to be able to make this work without build tools. Gonna work on replacing "legacy" code for sign in and register now, so we can ditch jQuery there.
There will also not be any timeline syncing anytime soon in Gluon. Work needs to happen on the Micro.blog end to make that happen. I can make it happen my end, but that's a lot of work for me. Would be a paid feature if I did it.
I'll be ripping out all the Gluon notification and profile "fun" options in the next build (probably). I need to do more work here to make it what I want. Also going to make it a paid option when it eventually ships.
Today I'm introducing a new minor feature for client portals on Sublime Ads.
You can now add extra info to your portals, for example a title, some welcome text and also a payment link.
At first, this will apply to all portals and I'm working on making these overridable on a per portal basis, giving you extra flexibility.
This is just a small step to run your whole ad system through Sublime Ads, giving you flexibility for portals, getting ads into your app, and of course getting paid.
For more information you can head on over to the documentation.
The new Micro.blog App for iOS (still in beta) and Android is now open-source. It's built on React Native. Most of the action happens in the develop branch. Happy to get this out there ✌️❤️
I've tweaked the pricing model for Sublime Ads today. Something I wanted to do since shoutouts.lol. Now pricing is a "pay what you want" kinda deal. Good for any budget.
I also removed API limits, so everyone gets the same service. Of course there is still the fair usage policy, but hopefully it won't stop a lot of folks.
You don't have to think about it which API limits you want. Pricing will change at some stage, but I am still thinking about price points. Probably $7, $14 (default), $21 etc. Existing plans are not affected.
Trials still exist but won't have everything enabled until you enter your card details. I think that's a good compromise.
Oh and I removed the yearly price plan. If you want anything yearly, just use shoutouts.lol.
Hoping to open-source the Micro.blog App for iOS and Android soon. Then you can all cry how I code in Javascript 😋
Just a general shout out to say thank you for all the donations and general love that you're all giving Gluon ✌️❤️ It means a lot, and makes me want to get out of bed in the morning. Can't wait to ship the next update.
I'm happy with the speed increase across the globe for feeds (for discover and tagmoji) coming into Gluon. Compare that to the other day.
Gluon uses its own "on edge" feeds for the discover feeds (including tagmoji). I just moved on over to use Bunny Storage. Let's see how response times work out here. Also using the Gluon Sync server to keep things fresh and updated.
Here are the current, old, response times:
I pulled the Gluon build from review. Needs more tweaking. Not happy with something. Might just remove the feature for now.
Gluon, for iOS, has been submitted for review ✌️ It's future is now in the hands of the Empire.
Just a quick shoutout to all the wonderful people using the Gluon iOS beta and trying out the new profile options within the app. So fun to see.
And here is the HOMEPAGE of Micro.blog:
And yes, just for historical archives 😋😏
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...
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.
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.
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}}" />
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.
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 ✌️❤️