Excursions

So nice and brave of @manton to congratulate third-party dev for an app that sits right against his own. It also shows how much trust and confidence he has in his underline platform. Kudos Manton!

It’s been so long that I wrote a fiction, let the teeny writer in me express himself freely. I think it is time for an early morning rise and socialising with my characters. They must have many tales to tell now 👨🏽‍💻📝

I read some fanwars and associated diatribes after a long time today.

I read some cringeworthy posts, and some spiteful responses.

I read some inhuman sentiments flung around as words.

I logged onto Twitter after a long time today.

I think all of these might be related.

Nature and family get-togethers go along pretty nicely

I am kind of bummed that no one here had any interest in Yahoo! Pipes. I really wish there was an alternative to that wonderful service. It would be so useful to deliver single feed from multiple sources. Also allows us to capture all mentions to single place.

Remember Yahoo! Pipes? I had built so many custom feeds combining different feeds using that service. With my recent pull back to RSS, I really feel a need for some such similar service. I wonder though if anyone else shares this need too.

I wish micro.blog becomes bigger, more diverse with more voices spread across the world, the timezones, narrate their stories. It becomes difficult for a user from a non-American timezone to benefit from the timeline. It is either crawling or swings past as you stay asleep. I have to consume posts via feeds and depend on Micro.threads to pull out posts that lead to discussion overnight.

I fear though if the place becomes bigger before there are tools in place to handle the scale, we may inundate it with too many voices and interactions. Making it extremely difficult and unpleasant to follow along for any person. We need to tread carefully.

It is important the service attracts both established and diverse voices. I am sure the awesome people behind Micro.blog are already planning for this.

Date 2018-08-11 01:15

It’s amusing to see the weekly reports from Screen Time. I knew I have been spending far less time in Productivity/Reading categories (as compared to Social Networking). I didn’t know it was this bad.

And, no surprises, Micro.blog becomes first app to hit App Limit.

I have been reading a lot of views from people who are leaving Twitter. But it is different from the Facebook exodus. They aren’t quitting. And I wondered why?

I still am on Twitter - accessed from website only. It’s work to sidestep the noise. But the community there has worth.

I read this post first in my feed reader. I wonder how these reads will get translated into BAT. Not sure if consumption in feed readers is a sizable chunk of regular web. But I guess it should be amongst intended Brave users.

Here’s a snapshot with all the “new” Android smartphones being sold online, placed right next to one another. Yeah, there is so much of innovation, so much of “choice” in this space. 🙃

When you have “magic” in your name, you tend to suffer later. I was always sceptical of the promises Magic Leap was making. Demos looked too good to be true. Finally, their marketing team have realised they’ve overstayed their welcome. Back to reality.

Another day, another AMP horror story. AMP has to be the ideal use-case on how an incumbent on web muscles its advantage to make others embrace its proprietary non-standard technology. Will anyone even consider AMP without its prominence in search?

This is a running list of things I need to implement in Blotpub. I intend to pour my thoughts and prioritise. This may also go to github on things to come once finalised.

1. [Low] Support like and reply with data pulled xray. I am not sure what I plan to achieve out of this. It is primarily when I like a twitter post or an image posts, xray gives data in nice format. I would want to use that.
2. Media upload as multipart. I thing this should address the need for photo upload, mainly from quill. It is simpler as I have a reference of voxpelli’s project.
3. Media endpoint(?q=config). This is a big ask. First need to implement one without any reference. Second use it for photo upload.
4. Syndication (?q=syndicate-to). This should be simpler. Need to support sending posts to twitter. Again, I have the reference from voxpelli’s project.
5. Support for update/delete posts
6. Handle authentication issues reported by micropub.rocks

I would like that world. However, I think we tend to ignore the social aspect that Twitter has enabled. Yes, people need to own their content. But there will always be space for that one place where they can share their content and trigger discussions.

It would be important, and is incumbent on all players involved to not let that place become a mess like Twitter. Engaging community guidelines and stringent checks & policies for bots would need to be ingrained in the design.

It is important, but extremely difficult, to hit that right balance between being productive and being healthy. I often tend to hit the zones when I ignore my health, the sleep primarily, just because I do not know when to stop. I need to learn to say “no” to myself.

I wonder how is this still allowed on the App Store.

Every day dawns with a new lesson. There is just so much fun stuff to learn in the IndieWeb world. And play around with. I have booked myself at least a couple of weeks worth of work. Yay(!?)

After an extremely productive last couple of weeks, it was time to reflect on the days gone by and update the /now page. It is good every now and then to read through your recent posts. To see what worked well and what needs changed.

I also believe Bloomberg’s this statement, though accurate, is misguided.

“(…) unless you really love Apple, there aren’t many reasons to buy this expensive phone.”

This is not India specific, that is believed to be Apple’s user base across the world.

..related

India is turning out to be a difficult market to crack for Apple. No surprises — it is a price sensitive market where spec wars are still prevalent amongst sales executives.

Only way Apple can succeed is controlling the sales experience, by launching Apple stores.

Some mornings just aren’t easy. And it is even more frustrating if they are Monday mornings. You get up with a plan in your mind - when kismet has other plans. Sigh.

To anyone using Business G Suite just make sure that you’ve “downgrade” instead of cancelling your subscription. (…) To Google, I lost trust in your service.

Google’s customer care horror stories just don’t die.

Updated: 05-Aug 15:15

I am seriously considering the option to make this blot blog as my primary site. I do not want to take decision in haste. So here I am jotting down the things I will have to sort out before the switch. This would be a rolling list.

1. Moving all the old posts to Blot. This should primarily involve handling of metadata. Hugo frontmatter needs to be converted to something that Blot can parse. Tricky part is going to be around dates and tags.
2. Handling of redirecting journal posts. Currently they are available at /journal/<postname>. This will have to redirected to /<postname>.
3. Handling of redirecting lab. urls. All the current blot posts will move to www subdomain.
4. Handling of Blot images redirect or modification of the posts.
5. Moving of the /now and /about pages to blot.

As I jot this down, there is another option that looks simpler (and so more probable).

Blot becomes my blog, replaces journal on the current site. Hugo site remains my main site. I will not move any posts, journals or pages. Everything in the old site remains in the old site. All the formatting rework is avoided.

I can move the complete journal section to an archive link in the footer. Blot will be serving /blog. /lab will be redirected.

Main site navigations will be Home | Arcticles | Blog | Now | About

That means the current site will keep serving my long form posts, the articles. Ones for which I spend significant time, I have a machine available to write over the days. And I can control the publish process. The blot blog will sever my thoughts, ones that I need to quickly put out, may be mostly while mobile.

Update [04-08 17:40]: Discovery of threads

• Discover new threads from timeline
• Refresh explore threads if not refreshed for 2 hours
• Minor styling changes

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Update [04-08 17:40]: Possible options to unearth in Dashboard

1. People I do not follow, but are in my stream (via interactions) - with a easy follow button - Done
2. Find original posts in the stream - with option to respond
3. People recommendation from Discover - Done
4. People recommendation by emojitag
5. Longest threads
6. Recommendations from threads — add to recommendations thread
7. Post reply-of - API seems to not expose this information

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Update [20-07 23:43]: User information display

• Added user information for recommended users
• Follow directly from app, with an option to open profile at Micro.blog
• Thread recommendations purging of old items on refresh
• Upgraded packages to latest - npm-check

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Update [17-07 00:50]: Refresh to the Micro.threads

• Added performance improvements by rewriting using Promises.
• Added content around user recommendations
• Security improvements around using and storing tokens
• Security improvements around using config
• Fixes for unhanded promise rejection errors

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Update [15-07 11:00]: Tentative Authentication flow

Implemented using Passport. Passport handles maintaining os user object in session. DB temporarily stores the token information — deleted on logout.

1. Get the app token (user provided or from Micro.blog login API)
2. Make an entry in db with token and a primary key [some thing unique and encrypted]
3. Store the key as cookie on client side, sent with every API call
4. On API call, fetch the key from cookie and query DB using the key to get app token.
5. Use token to fetch data from M.b

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I need to improve micro.threads. Noting down the current limitation with the implementation.

• Threads concept itself is limited. Currently it takes a post id, fetches the conversation (thread) and then pull out all the links and only show these links as a thread.
• Creating thread is a mess and so is updating it.
• No way to provide access to external users. Only I can create/update threads at this point

What I want to introduce now

I think it would be important to change the whole direction itself. I feel the goal needs to be discovery. Help users discover interesting posts and people on micro.blog. To achieve this, below has to be handled.

1. Authentication against micro.blog. Pull individual stream.
2. Dashboard against individual stream. Summarise. Most active posts, links, micro monday recommendations, likes, books etc - similar to nuzzle etc.
3. Simple way to build threads, including ones with just posts and no links - similar to twitter moments.
4. Updating existing threads with contents from different topic id
5. Auto refreshed public threads - built from discover section of micro.blog (this is close to available).