/reader

A few years ago, I would have definitely said yes. Not for financial reasons or because I loved the job more then (I still love it just as much). But simply because I had difficulty saying no.

That is one of the advantages of getting older: I feel secure in declining things. It's a great feeling!

While my body may experience more aches and pains with each passing year, it is a worthwhile trade-off.

🌟 You're reading this post via the RSS feed, you star! 🌠

Fast forward roughly a year and a half and I get an email from the always lovely Ray asking me if I was interested in becoming the new owner and custodian of his blogroll.org. I couldn’t pass on the opportunity. As you know, I am very into blogging and personal sites because I truly believe those are the antidote to the current awful state of the web. I started the P&B series because I wanted to help people connect with one another, facilitate discovery, and encourage more people to get back into blogging. That is because I believe that if you have something worth sharing, it’s better to do it on a site you control, rather than on social media. And blogroll.org, as a project, is very much aligned with that goal which is why I immediately said yes to Ray.

It took me a while to code a new version of the site and move everything from WordPress to Kirby but the new version is finally online.

I have to say that I’m quite pleased with this new version. It’s a lot more colourful than the sites I usually make but that tracks with the way my life is changing. I’m starting to get a bit tired of all this black and white and colours feel a lot more playful. The site is set in Sofia Pro and as mentioned runs on the latest Kirby version. It’s a V1, many features are missing and there are a lot of entries in my to-do list for this project but I’m happy that it’s at least online and people can start submitting sites again.

Like all the other things I’m doing online these days, the site is supported by the kindness of friends and strangers and if you find projects like this to be valuable and want to contribute you can join them for as little as 1$ a month.

As always if you have comments, feedback or feature requests, you can email me. My inbox is always open.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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When young people come out of university in a technical subject, they think they know more than people already doing the jobs. They quickly learn that in school they were doing "student projects" which are not the real thing. Ooops, maybe we didn't know as much as we thought.#

Why we all have to be working together on creating a modern easily distributed communication system that's truly decentralized. The key is to only implement features that have super-simple implementations, so it will be easy to product new versions quickly in all environments. Which means starting with formats and protocols that are already widely supported. #

This morning ChatGPT told me it knows more about me, and will learn better. Promises promises. I would like to begin with teaching it my coding conventions. Will make it much easier for me to work with it. Their idea of how JavaScript works is disorganized bordering on chaos. I find that human developers always find a reason not to listen to other people, and that has huge problems (like no interop), but machines should do better. It seems to have infinite patience. What I need is to share a bit of space with the bot, so I can keep it up to date on my worknotes. I'm pretty good at it these days. Why not let that be input into the system so I can say -- give me all the notes I have on my Bingeworthy project. Why should I have to copy/paste. This is a big problem in the web, products that pretend to be islands, when they're really all floating on the same sea, the internet. We were supposed to be able to network not only our attention, but also our work.#

Did you know there's a chain of beating hearts going from your heart all the way back to the first animal on earth with a heart.#

 

Win of the week: my walking buddy and I both needed new walking shoes, and I found a running shoe store two blocks off of our normal route, so we went shoe shopping on our walk 😂

Looking forward to: we’re hopefully going to see an internet friend who’ll be in-town-ish next month — an excuse to go out to the islands! (I need to find us somewhere to stay!)

Stuff I did:

• 9 hours consulting
• 3 hours writing
• ordered a bunch of clothes in anticipation of prices rising soon — got two extra copies of my favorite shirt, which is something I’ve never actually done before but wished I had
• restocked our household first aid kit which was running a bit sparse, and stocked up on a few household items that won’t go bad and we’ll need to buy in the next year anyway — air filters, toilet paper, toothpaste
• bought a taller ladder and a garden cart since our wheelbarrow died — now I need to assemble it! I wanted a tripod orchard ladder for easier tree pruning but we decided a multipurpose ladder made more sense, plus orchard ladders are $$$
• researched setting up a home music server in hopes I could pick out some hardware ASAP but I’m gonna need to read a lot more first 😅
• an hour of weeding when we had a sunny afternoon (and I was procrastinating on writing 😉) — meant to plant some heuchera I bought back in October but got distracted when I saw the shotgrass (which is apparently native? I’m still treating it as a weed) was going to seed — oops!
• scheduled a consultation with a window blind company I noticed in the strip mall where we get teriyaki… our blinds were cheapo to start with and they’re all starting to break 😒
• the husband took the car to be washed and I’d swear they didn’t touch the inside of the car except that they knocked down our HOV pass 🙄 As he said when he got home, we got what we paid for… thought $70 sounded too cheap, but maybe it was expensive for what we actually got 😂 We still need to get the air filter changed so I masked up to run an errand that couldn’t wait any more
• we’ve got a spare room that’s unfortunately become a dumping ground for storing junk, so I started pulling out boxes and sorting the stuff in them to tidy up a bit for the window blind person to get measurements… tools, stuff for house projects, random electronics and screws that I don’t know what they go to, etc — alas, my old phone remains elusive! where did I put it???
• one virtual appointment
• walk with my friend

Dinners:

• broccoli pasta (this made both of us feel terrible, do not recommend)
• smoked salmon and leek quiche with premade crust
• black bean burgers with avocado + tater tots + chipotle aioli
• Thai takeout — pad thai with fried tofu + sweet and sour with fried tofu + crab rangoon + rice
• Paneer Bhurji + blackberry soda
• lentil salad with roasted beets + carrots (based on) — so disappointing, less than the sum of its parts 🙁
• beyond burger takeout + fries

Reading:

• Read In Harmony with Nature by Rick Drake and The Pantry by Catherine Seiberling Pond
• Re-read Three Nights with a Scoundrel by Tessa Dare
• Got a free copy of Taken by Hattie Jacks

Words I looked up / concepts I learned:

• hyperstition
• windthrow and windsnap

Pretty stuff I saw:

• this holographic last unicorn sticker and cute cockatoo pin by mamath
• Cool imagined animal drawings by Vorja Sánchez — this article compares it to Haeckel but I’m getting more Shaun Tan

Website changes:

• Added a new project section to keep notes for some tech upgrades I’m looking to make this year

Nature notes:

• I thought I heard an animal sleeping in the attic a few times, but my husband thinks it’s too loud and regular for that so maybe a bird I’m misinterpreting as being closer than it is?
• encountered a baby bunny in the yard when I was weeding 🐇
• bleeding heart is emerging and just starting to bloom
• the apple trees have a ton of buds on them! my pruning has finally paid off 😱 I am determined to protect them from a deer eating them this year like they have every other year… ordered some netting and stakes but forgot to get zip ties 🤦‍♀️

24.4m climbed

158.8avg bpm

Mastodon allows you to post the equivalent of a web redirect: your followers are informed of your new instance and seamlessly migrated over. Your posts, however, do not move with you. Which is kind of a theme: the system simply doesn’t think posts are terribly important.

Some of what Rob says might be difficult for Mastodon users and developers to hear. But migration is such an important part of the federation model that moving posts should be a priority. Micro.blog can import an archive of Mastodon posts. Why can’t Mastodon import its own posts?

I assume the answer is that the Mastodon team has prioritized social features over microblogging features. It’s a trade-off, but it means that Mastodon is not suitable as a blog replacement anymore than Twitter / X is. Anyone who cares about their writing or photos should be publishing them at their own domain name.

I’m proud of Micro.blog’s comprehensive post import. As of 2025, I’ve coded custom importers for a dozen systems, all built-in: WordPress, Medium, Tumblr, Mastodon, Ghost, Markdown, Substack, Write.as, Pika, Foursquare, Instagram, and Twitter / X.

The other side of Rob’s point about migration is not being able to recover if a Mastodon server suddenly goes down without warning. I’m not sure this is realistic to solve without major changes. My approach has mostly been to encourage users to preemptively think about backups, so at least they’re not left with nothing.