Excursions

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).

Back home after days of travel. It’s always great to be back at home, the “usual stuff” - usualities are welcome.

Folks with blogs on Blot, how do you typically post? Any micropubs? Or is it always save to dropbox from text editors of choice?

I hate reading articles on websites with monospaced fonts. It’s ok for code snippets, but please let’s not use them for long form posts. Not sure if it’s even made for that.

I recently received a great feedback and a query from @cygnoir at Micro.blog.

The links you share are so interesting! I especially love that you give a bit of an excerpt. Are you auto-posting these somehow? If so, would you be willing to teach me (or point me in the right direction to learn)?

Yes, I do read a lot of articles on web and share each one I like. And the reason I share them is I want others to read them too. I think it is difficult to convince people just with a title. So I also include an excerpt from the post that may give the readers an idea what the post is about (sample)

For me this usually happens while am on mobile and so it is just isn’t simple to copy and paste. So I have a system worked out on iOS with iA Writer and Workflow apps that allows me to easily post the links with excerpt.

It starts with a template in iA Writer with placeholders for all the relevant sections - date, title, link and content that is to be shared.

--- title : “” date : {date} --- ★ Liked "<a href="{link}" class="u-like-of" rel="like-of">{title}</a>" > {content}

I then have a Workflow which prepares the actual file with this template. I trigger this Workflow from Safari as Action Extension, which runs through the below process.

1. Gets the current URL and puts it into a variable link.
2. Gets the title of the current page and puts it into a variable title.
3. Gets the contents of clipboard and sets it variable content.
4. Gets the current date in required format.
5. Picks up the above template and replaces appropriate placeholders with the actual values fetched earlier.
6. Creates a new markdown file with this content and opens it in iA Writer for further processing. And publish.

This system, though not perfect, works for me currently. I want to simplify it further - mainly using Micropub endpoint. But haven’t got a chance to implement that yet. Till then, I am going to use this one.

I have similar template and Workflow combinations for reply, image, link posts.