/reader

But it would be a huge overreach to also photocopy the ID and file it away in the store, forever, where nearly anyone could get access to it, and where it was connected to a database of purchases. Customers would be very anxious about that. That is what it’s like to be asked to show an ID online. We need to be extra careful with privacy online because the default is to store way more information than in the real world.

Last week when working on our discount for teachers and nurses, I started by implementing support with ID.me, a service that is already common in the United States for some industries, such as nursing. By delegating verification to ID.me, Micro.blog could avoid any risks with transferring or storing private information. Unfortunately, ID.me doesn’t currently work with small companies like mine, so I had to scrap that work and go with a much simpler setup.

For the Online Safety Act, I expect that apps will want to delegate verification to trusted third parties, like the App Store and Google Play. Bluesky has rolled out compliance by using a service from Epic Games:

We’ll use Epic Games’ Kids Web Services (KWS) to give our UK community choices about how to verify their age. If you’re in the UK, you can choose between methods like credit card verification and face scans.

There are trade-offs, for sure. Centralized platforms risk exposing large amounts of private data if hacked. But it’s just not realistic or safe for every website to be in charge of something as sensitive as an ID card.

My short post earlier about Ghost and open APIs was admittedly a little grumpy. If you’re already using Ghost, the 6.0 upgrade should be a no-brainer. The prices have shifted up, though, so if you’re just starting out, it’s worth evaluating other blogging platforms too.

Ghost(Pro) starts at $18/month. Micro.blog Premium (for email newsletters) is $10/month, WordPress.com is $9/month, and Write.as Pro (for newsletters) is $9/month. If you don’t need newsletters, the standard Micro.blog subscription is only $5/month, and Micro.one is the ridiculously low $1/month.

People seem to like Ghost’s editor. In the direction that many rich text editors are going, it resembles WordPress’s block-based editor. Micro.blog uses a Markdown editor instead, with more full-featured editors like MarsEdit, Ulysses, and iA Writer as options.

For posting APIs, Ghost has a custom API. WordPress and Micro.blog have JSON APIs and both the MetaWeblog and Micropub APIs. Standards allow broad interoperability between clients and servers without everyone reinventing the wheel and supporting potentially dozens of different APIs.

Each platform has its own unique twist on blogging and social interactions. Ghost supports Bluesky with Bridgy Fed. Micro.blog supports cross-posting to Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn, and other services. WordPress has plugins for nearly everything.

If you need a paid email newsletter, Ghost is a great choice. If you need a blog or podcast, there are limitations in Ghost that would make me recommend something else. People who use Ghost tend to have a different platform for microblogs, for example, instead of being able to unify everything under a single custom domain name and platform.

It continues to be a great time for blogging. There hasn’t been this much activity in new tools in years.

The models seem very strong. From OpenAI’s blog post announcement:

gpt-oss-120b outperforms OpenAI o3‑mini and matches or exceeds OpenAI o4-mini on competition coding (Codeforces), general problem solving (MMLU and HLE) and tool calling (TauBench). It furthermore does even better than o4-mini on health-related queries (HealthBench⁠) and competition mathematics (AIME 2024 & 2025). gpt-oss-20b matches or exceeds OpenAI o3‑mini on these same evals, despite its small size, even outperforming it on competition mathematics and health.

The 20b model runs well on my MacBook Pro — M3 Max, 48 GB. Looking forward to experimenting more with this. The download is 13 GB, so might be too big to optionally use (downloaded on demand) in a native app in the way I was testing with Google’s Gemma open source model.

Nurses always seem to have nearly infinite kindness and patience. It’s one of those jobs that probably seesaws from very rewarding to very difficult. Patients come in and out of your life for an hour or a day or a week, and you do your best within what must sometimes feel like a convoluted system. (My daughter is actually a nurse too, so I’ve had a glimpse of what it’s like.)

For a long time I’ve wanted to do something extra for the people who do so much for their community. Back in 2020, we experimented with offering 6 months of hosting for teachers. There was some interest in it, but the announcement quickly got buried on my website, and even I forgot about it until I started drafting this new post.

So let’s start again with teachers and nurses. Micro.blog’s standard blog hosting is now free for them. Teachers and nurses can visit this special page after they’ve signed up for a Micro.blog account.

Thanks everyone who has helped make Micro.blog what it is, and what it can still become. If you know a teacher or nurse who might enjoy Micro.blog, let them know!

Now with Micro.blog Premium, we’re also saving a separate larger version, with resolution up to about 3000x3000. This version of the photo is available for themes to use, and it automatically works with the “Photo collections” plug-in, so that when you click on a photo in a collection it uses the higher resolution when zooming the photo to full screen in your web browser.

For more about photo collections, see this help page.

In the web interface to Micro.blog, for uploads you’ll start seeing little icons for various sizes of a photo: small, medium, or the new “extra large” size. These icons link to that resolution. Here’s a screenshot:

The URLs for photo sizes are available in the Hugo front matter under the existing .photos_with_metadata array:

- url: https://www.manton.org/uploads/2025/filename.jpg
  sizes:
    small: https://www.manton.org/uploads/2025/filename-s.jpg
    medium: https://www.manton.org/uploads/2025/filename-m.jpg
    xl: https://www.manton.org/uploads/2025/filename-xl.jpg

You might wonder why we handle photo URLs this way, while other platforms try to hide the implementation behind random, super-long CDN URLs and dynamic scaling. I find that approach confusing whenever you need to customize anything. All the technical bits in Micro.blog are designed to be human readable. You should be able to view HTML source if you need to and not be completely lost.

Hope you find this new size useful! As more larger photos are saved, there will be opportunities for further tweaks to use the different sizes in more places. But I wanted to get the foundation for this change out now.

As traffic from Google drops off, some things will be worse for a little while, but the open web isn’t going anywhere. Over time, we’re going to be better off with new competition in search. Google’s dominance in search has also created an imbalance in AI training and robots.txt, essentially handing Google permission to do whatever they want with data, while Cloudflare and others restrict access from new crawlers. No one can afford to cut off Google’s crawler.

I’m loving Kagi. Am I searching the web less often because of AI? Sure. But web search is still useful and always will be.

I remember when AltaVista came out and blew away other search engines because it was so fast. Then Google obsoleted everything else because its results were so relevant. Now ChatGPT is even more disruptive because it works so differently, rarely needing to send traffic to websites at all.

I’m sorry if your recipe website littered with ads and filler content about the history of the avocado is no longer monetizing as well as it used to. That may sound a little harsh, and I don’t mean to completely dismiss the real frustrations that some website authors are feeling, but the truth is the web was already broken in some places, fueled by greed and the ad companies' surveillance machine.

The web is changing again, and we need to change with it. Not just to preserve the status quo, but to look for opportunities to make things better than they were before.

This is a great time to build a relationship with readers. Start a blog, start a newsletter, start linking to your posts on social media or wherever makes sense. Forget about Google. Put good content out on the web and the right people will eventually find it.