Rob Fahrni

I thought I’d share some early influences who got me into blogging and helped me model my blogging style, if you will.

Dave Winer

Dave is an early blogger, creator of RSS, and co-creator of Podcasting.

Dave’s writing and frequent tiny posts were the way to go before we had social networks. Blogging was our social network. His blogs style heavily influenced my own.

Jeffrey Zeldman

Jeffrey is a Web Standards pioneer, wonderful human being, and fantastic writes.

He doesn’t blog nearly as much as he use to, but I’d imagine he’s busy.

Evan Williams

Back when I was trying to figure out how to write more frequently on my website I had no idea there was a thing called blogging. I happened across an article about something called Blogger — Evan’s creation — so I signed up. As they say, the rest is history.

My blogging started off here at rob.crabapples.net in early 2001, moved to iam.fahrni.me in 2009, and returned here in August 2021. It’s hard to believe it’s been two years.

These different sites, over a combined 22 years, are my blogging presence.

Hopefully there are many more years to come.

What would be a good name for a blog editing tool? Just for writing, editing, and publishing. Native iOS and Mac. A companion to Stream, as it were.

Would a combined blogging and feed reader app be appealing?

Before doing Stream I was originally doing a blogging tool. I did Stream because a feed reader was easier than doing a blog editor. 🤣

It’s unfortunate I waste so much time thinking about these things but I want them for myself. I figure others might want them too.

SFGate: ”Twitter was sued for millions of dollars over allegations of unpaid rent at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, according to a lawsuit filed on Friday, Jan. 20.”

SFGate

Twitter was sued for millions of dollars over allegations of unpaid rent at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, according to a lawsuit filed on Friday, Jan. 20.

I’m curious what folks think of the two quoting styles above? The top version is the way I quoted things for years and years, dating back to 2001.

The second is a blockquote. I’ve been doing that more recently.

Which one is better for my blog? 🤔

The best way to own your content is to have your own blog.

Sure, Mastodon is open and a great way to share simple thoughts, but you can do that with your blog and echo it to Mastodon or link directly to a post on your blog.

For posts over 280 characters I typically post a link to it, otherwise it’s just a copy of the text.

UPDATE: I was able to recover all my content because Micro.blog maintains versions of your posts! That is a life saving feature! 👍🏼

Wow, that’s a first. I just lost some content on Micro.blog. 😔

I was making some edits to Saturday Morning Coffee to add additional links to things and after publishing I realized some prior edits are missing.

I’d imagine the Micro.blog folks are having issues related to the flight of folks from Twitter to better homes, Micro.blog among them.

This week will be slightly abbreviated. I’m in California for a funeral.

It’s 4:50AM here and I really need the juice. ☕️

Inessential

The internet’s town square should never have been one specific website with its own specific rules and incentives. It should have been, and should be, the web itself.

The open web is still the best web and weblogs play a big role in making the web better. When I post to my blog it generates an RSS and JSON Feed so you can point your feed reader of chioce to it and get updated when my blog changes. It’s nice in that way because it’s completely decentralized.

Mastodon also works that way. It’s a collection of different servers participating as a collective. I can follow folks from many different servers around the world and it just works.

I see my weblog as the central hub of communication and use Mastodon and other social networks as a means of broadcasting posts to a wider audience.

To subscribe to my Mastodon account all you have to do is point your favorite feed reader to my Mastodon account with a .rss extension appended and you get an RSS feed! How awesome is that?

Here’s what it looks like: https://curmudgeon.cafe/@fahrni.rss

Jalopnik

Formula 1 drivers are truly athletes at the top of their game. As such, they all follow strict diets, have nutritionists on hand to monitor what they’re eating and make sure that they’re only consuming things that keep them in tip top shape over a race weekend. For Alfa Romeo driver Valtteri Bottas, this includes coffee. Lots of coffee.

I got into F1 a little bit while watch Drive to Survive on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it I’d recommed giving it a try. It’s fascinating.

While I’m in California I’ll probably visit Exeter Coffee Company and Dutch Brothers.

It’s nice to see others with an extreme coffee addiction. 😀

Robert Reich

What worries me most about Trump’s dinner last week at Mar-a-Lago with Nick Fuentes, the outspoken antisemite and racist who is one of America’s most prominent young white supremacists, and Kanye West, whose recent antisemitic outbursts have rocked the entertainment world, isn’t just that a former (and possibly future) president would dine with such avowed bigots.

The GOP is not even trying to hide their antisemitic and racist ways. It’s seriously pathetic and signaling to every other garbage human it’s ok to openly talk about and act on their hate.

Jesse Skinner

I signed up for Mastodon back in May 2019 and, at the time, I wrote on there: “I just heard about Mastodon a few days ago. I keep spelling it Mastadon. It’s a really cool platform and architecture, and I would love to see it completely replace Twitter one day. Do you think it could?”

I also spelled it Mastadon at first, whoops.

As far as replacing Twitter, I think it will for me as a place to collect, perhaps as a public square. 😀

MacRumors

Tapbots, the company behind the popular Tweetbot app designed for Twitter, is working on developing a new app called Ivory that integrates with the Mastodon social network.

I’ve been using Ivory for a while and it’s absolutely gorgeous and works the way you’d expect it to work.

Mastodon has turned into an iOS App playground and I’m loving it.

chaos.social

The past month has changed the Fediverse, and, by extension, our instance. We’ve continued as normal (apart from limiting sign-ups) to give ourselves time to figure out which changes were only temporary, what seems to be changed for good, and how to react. A month seems ample time, and here we are with a set of changes in how chaos.social will work in the future.

Folks thought Mastodon would be the wild west, without good and proper moderation, but many instances take things very seriously and are making changes as needed to make their instance a better place. The chaos.social instance is one such example.

Jason Kottke

Hey everyone. Tomorrow, after almost 7 months of a sabbatical break, I’m resuming regular publication of kottke.org. (Actually, I’ve been posting a bit here and there this week already — underpromise & over-deliver, etc.) I’m going to share more about what I’ve been up to (and what I’ve not been up to) in a massive forthcoming post, but for now, know that I’m happy to be back here in the saddle once again. (And that my fiddle leaf fig is doing well!)

Welcome back, Jason! Jason has been a mainstay of my web consumption for well over 10-years, most likely since 2001-2002 timeframe when I got into blogs and blogging.

WillowTree

Charlottesville, Va. – December 1, 2022 – Piedmont Virginia Community College (PVCC) will launch a new Associate of Applied Science Degree Program (AAS) in Technical Studies-Software Development, co-created with WillowTree, in the 2023 spring semester which starts January 9. The two-year degree program will provide high school graduates and those seeking to advance in or change careers with the digital and data skills needed to fill current and emerging jobs in software development.

I thought I’d humblebrag a bit. I was honored to be part of the group who helped define this new program at PVCC. The working group was full of wonderful WillowTree folks and I think we wound up with a great program.

Since I don’t have a degree of any type I’ve been thinking about signing up for this program.

Thank you PVCC!

Why does software need so many people and take so long compared to the recent past? Let's compare! 🧵 cc @realGeorgeHotz

— Peter Yared (@peteryared) November 26, 2022

Ahh, the life of the modern developer. 🤣

Last week I wanted to send a link to someone for a piece I wrote in 2014 about my fear of public speaking, which was really about the pressure I feel during interviews.

I searched for the title of the piece, found it, and when I clicked the link it 404’d. Why?

A few months back I mentioned moving to Micro.blog as my blogging service because I wanted static publishing and I just didn’t want to manage Hugo or another tool. Anywho, when I did the import from WordPress to Micro.blog if failed at some point so I only had a partial import. So I tried again and thought it ran to completion. I was wrong. It failed again.

After poking around I realized I only have posts from 2019 and the archive page is broken.

I am frustrated by this but willing to accept this shortcoming if I can eventually get my entire blogging history pulled into Micro.blog. Heck I’m even considering importing my entire Blogger history from 2001-2009 just to have it in a single repository.

I’m going to give it another go soon and see if I can get it pulled in. If that fails I’m going to see if Manton has any further ideas about how to get my WordPress content in a form I could push into Micro.blog. Even if I have to convert the WordPress export file to something better for Micro.blog I’m willing to give it a go. It would be really nice if I could put it into a JSON format Micro.blog would accept as an import format it can deal with.

Anyway. That’s the sad state of my blog today. Hopefully I can get it fixed, soon.

If I can’t get it sorted I will consider moving back to self hosted WordPress and call it good enough.