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Exclusively for Micro.blog Studio subscribers: Micro.blog can automatically adjust the audio levels and reduce noise for uploaded MP3s. We want to make podcasting easier, with more tools and defaults so that things "just work" without requiring a lot of podcasting experience.

On your blog settings page, you'll see a new checkbox: "Level audio and reduce noise". This is a feature that some people would previously use services like Auphonic for.

Now when you upload an MP3, Micro.blog will make it available right away but also process it in the background, replacing the uploaded file with the new version. We preserve the original file, so you can visually compare the waveforms. Click on the audio file on the Uploads page on the web.

Is this as good as Auphonic? No, they have some secret sauce for cleaning up audio with lots of configuration options. For Micro.blog Studio, I wanted a single checkbox that will improve most audio, especially if recorded on-the-go from your phone or without a good microphone. It's optional. If you find it doesn't help your audio uploads, you can leave it turned off.

Thanks again for everyone who has tried Micro.blog Studio. More to come!

I only stayed with DreamHost for a few years before switching to Bytemark, with whom I was a loyal customer right up until a few years ago², but in that time I took advantage of DreamHost’s “Refer & Earn” program, which allowed me to create referral codes that, if redeemed by others who went on to become paying customers, would siphon off a fraction of the profits as a “kickback” against my server bills. Neat!³

A year or so after I switched to ByteMark, DreamHost decided I owed them money: probably because of a “quirk” in their systems. I disagreed with their analysis, so I ignored their request. They “suspended” my account (which I wasn’t using anyway), and that was the end of it.

Right?

But the referral fees continued to trickle in. For the last seventeen years, I’ve received a monthly email advising me that my account had been credited, off the back of a referral.

About once a year I log in and check the balance. I was quite excited to discover that, at current rates, they’d consider me “paid-up” for my (alleged) debt by around Spring 2026!

I had this whole plan that I’d write a blog post about it when the time came. It could’ve been funny!

But it’s not to be: DreamHost emailed me last night to tell me that they’re killing their “Refer & Earn” program; replacing it with something different-but-incompatible (social media’s already having a grumble about this, I gather).

So I guess this is the only blog post you’ll get about “that time DreamHost decided I owed them money and I opted to pay them back in my referral fees over the course of eighteen years”.

No big loss.

Footnotes

¹ At about the same time I moved Three Rings over from its previous host, Easily, to DreamHost too, in order to minimise the number of systems I had to keep an eye on. Oh, how different things are now, when I’ve got servers and domain registrations and DNS providers all over the damn place!

² Bytemark have rapidly gone downhill since their acquisition by Iomart a while back, IMHO.

³ Nowadays, this blog (and several of my other projects) is hosted by Linode, whose acquisition by Akamai seems not to have caused any problems with, so that’s fab.

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