Like last year when I covered Episodes 1-10, I took advantage the quiet time between Christmas and New Year’s to gather up some clips from Episodes 11-20. If you’re new to the podcast, here’s another great starting point.

All the best to this wonderful community in 2020. xoxo

Links to the episodes excerpted

11: Mike Haynes (@mikehaynes)
12: Smokey Ardisson (@smokey)
13: Fiona Voss (@fiona)
14: Jim Withington (@jw)
15: Chris Powell (@mnmltek)
16: Vanessa Hamshere (@vanessa)
17: Eli Mellen (@eli)
18: Eddie Hinkle (@EddieHinkle)
19: Jason Dettbarn (@endonend)
20: Jason Burk (@Burk)

Manton Reece interviews Jean MacDonald about what it’s like to be the community manager for Micro.blog. We talk about Jean’s early expectations for the platform, talking to users on the podcast and at meetups, curating posts in Discover, how Micro.blog features are different than other platforms, and the advantage of starting small.

Vincent is the developer of Gluon, the iOS and Android app for Micro.blog. He just announced a public beta for the Android version (the iOS public beta was already available). We talk about his journey from pilot training to app building, what he likes about Micro.blog, and what you can do with inedible Christmas cookies. (Hint: watercolor)

With Micro.blog, I wanted to explore the API, which was really easy to get going with, and I really appreciated that. It’s not like some black box magic, you get raw JSON feeds and it’s really nice.

🎙 Episode 73 of the Micro Monday podcast is out:

This week’s guest is Andrew Canion of Perth, Australia, who created a Blogvember challenge for himself and shared it with the Micro.blog community. He also inspired Microblogvember.

📆 Thanks to everyone who participated in Microblogvember! You should have already unlocked the Daily Blogger pin on your account pins page, and we’ll also have a special pin specifically for November later this week.

📷 It’s starting to look like winter for a lot of microbloggers. Here is a selection of recent winter photos.

📚 One more month until Manton releases his book Indie Microblogging. You can pre-order here and get the book on January 2nd.

This week’s guest is Andrew Canion of Perth, Australia, who created a Blogvember challenge for himself and shared it with the Micro.blog community. He also inspired Microblogvember. Thanks to Andrew, lots of folks at M.b blogged a daily basis for a whole month!

📚 This week I want to start with something big: the book Indie Microblogging. It will be published on the web in January, and you can preview the table of contents and pre-order it now. (You won’t be charged until it is released.)

💬 The feed reader Inoreader has been updated with a new design for microblog posts and special support for Micro.blog feeds:

So we took the extra mile and extended our feed parser to read additional author metadata whenever available and also added a custom parser for Micro.blog JSON feeds extensions.

💬 @1pairofshoes turned the Microblogvember prompt “company” into a post about thinking of others this week:

We are headed in a holiday week in the US. That means company. For many, either we get to have company, or get to be company. Hosts need to be gracious. Guests need to be grateful. Remember those who don’t get to be guest or host.

💬 @smokey publishes This Week in Micro.blog with featured posts and photos you might have missed. Among his links this week is this post from @kimberlyhirsh:

You are worthy of love, whether you love yourself or not, and the people who love you will love you when you think you’re great and when you’re very down on yourself.

🦃 Happy Thanksgiving to everyone celebrating on Thursday, and to everyone else I hope you have a great week too! Thank you for supporting Micro.blog and giving us the opportunity to keep making it better.

🎙️ The latest guest on Micro Monday is Ton Zylstra, who just celebrated his 17th year of blogging:

He works as a consultant, assisting governments and private entities in being open by design, as part of a more comprehensive data governance approach. Together with his wife, he organizes a “birthday unconference,” a unique gathering which is part conference, part celebration, combining public and person interests.

📚 We’re past the halfway point for NaNoWriMo and Microblogvember. It’s never too late to get into a daily blogging routine. Writing short posts more often removes the pressure you might feel about publishing longer blog posts.

💬 Even if not everyone is following Microblogvember, many bloggers are committing to writing every day. CJ Chilvers set a theme for his posts:

I’m going to post every day to this blog for the entire month of November on one subject: anxiety. More specifically, I’m going to post 30 practical tactics to decrease your anxiety, one per day.

💬 Thanks to the community for offering ideas for how we could improve Micro.blog to be even better for live-blogging. We’re always looking for suggestions that can build on Micro.blog’s foundation in unique ways. @bix said:

It would be useful sometimes for how I blog if there were a built-in way to post an update to a blog post other than editing the post, e.g. maybe if I replied to one of my own blog posts here in the social feed, it gets added as an update on the original post, with its own timestamp.

⭐ Looking for tips on how to customize your microblog? @Miraz created the blog custom.micro.blog with dozens of tutorials. If you need help, let us know at help@micro.blog or ask in Slack.

🌮 IndieWebCamp Austin will be February 22-23, 2020. Register now for just $10 for the weekend:

IndieWebCamp Austin 2020 is a gathering for independent web creators of all kinds, from graphic artists, to designers, UX engineers, coders, hackers, to share ideas, actively work on creating for their own personal websites, and build upon each others creations.

⭐ We improved how Micro.blog can automatically assign categories to your posts. That feature and others are mentioned if you’re following @news:

Another new feature for hosted blogs: filters can automatically assign categories to your blog posts based on text or type of post, making it easier to blog by removing friction when writing a new post.

💬 @adders blogs about the state of discourse on the web:

Let’s not turn social media into a secondary school environment where the meanest win. Be helpful. Be useful. Don’t associate with those who aren’t.

💬 We’re 12 days into the Microblogvember challenge, but it’s not too late to use one of the prompt words to inspire your next blog post. Prompt words so far:

key, mark, fancy, mean, street, stick, frightening, star, cold, space, touch, and stay

📷 @DiplomaticDiva is participating in Microblogvember and also posting a photo each day, often captioned with a quote from a song.

📆 If you enjoy someone’s posts on Micro.blog, why not post a Micro Monday recommendation? Here’s @smokey’s latest:

On this Micro Monday, I’d like to recommend @joshuabeatty, one of the Historians of Micro.blog (also Librarians of…), who shares the obligatory cat photos and writes about teaching history, libraries, cricket, and life in the northeast US.

Any questions about Micro.blog? Let us know at help@micro.blog. Thanks!

This week’s guest, Ton Zylstra just celebrated his 17th year of blogging. He works as a consultant, assisting governments and private entities in being open by design, as part of a more comprehensive data governance approach. Together with his wife, he organizes a “birthday unconference,” a unique gathering which is part conference, part celebration, combining public and person interests.

⭐ Micro.blog now offers domain name registration! If you don’t have a domain name yet for your microblog, let Micro.blog handle everything for you. No configuration required.

🎙️ The guest on this week’s Micro Monday podcast is @yorrike:

Jean induces him to talk a bit about his specialty in geology, meteorites, which leads to a microcast-sized explanation of the origins of stars and planets, and how meteorites are dated.

🗺️ Want to post your location check-ins to your microblog? We’ve improved Micro.blog’s support for OwnYourSwarm, which will read your Foursquare/Swarm check-ins automatically.

💬 NaNoWriMo has started for anyone who wants to try to write a novel in November. @cheri has a blog post about preparing with the right mindset:

Writing is work, right? It’s work in the same way that going to your day job is work. If you put in the time and make an effort, you’ll make it through and you’ll improve your skills over time. And because we learn by writing, not by worrying about our writing, action is what matters.

💬 Don’t have time for 50,000 words? Start small with Microblogvember. @macgenie picks a new prompt word each day to incorporate into your microblog post:

In the spirit of other challenges, you can do any variation of this that suits you: write something inspired by the word, write a longer post and link to it, etc. But I’ve made the basic instruction as simple as possible, so it’s fun while helping you flex that writing muscle and establish a daily writing habit.

Thanks for your support of Micro.blog!

This week’s guest is Chris from New Zealand. He’s a geek, an environmentalist, and a geologist. He is also known around Micro.blog for being a cricket fan. 🏏

Jean induces him to talk a bit about his specialty in geology, meteorites, which leads to a microcast-sized explanation of the origins of stars and planets, and how meteorites are dated. Chris even indicated he’d be willing to do a short microcast series about meteorites, if there is any interest. Meteorite Monday, anyone? 🌟🎙

🎙️ On episode 70 of Micro Monday, Jean talks with @adders about when he first discovered blogging, the impact of social media on journalism, and the value of being able to easily share something:

Random glimpses into humanity all over the place, doing different things, living different lives – I think that’s a wonderful antidote for the polarization we see in many places now.

⭐ Sunlit was updated to version 2.5.7 with a new round of bug fixes and improvements. You can download it for free in the App Store for a photos-only view of Micro.blog.

💬 We love having an archive of conversations with the Micro.blog community. @Gabz has been going back to listen to older episodes:

After been around in the Micro.blog community for a little while, it is kind of cool to go back and listen to old episodes of the Micro Monday podcast 😊

💬 @bsag blogged about seeing the morning sky while driving and not being able to take a photo:

There was a heavy mist lying on the fields and wrapping the trees like a comfort blanket. The rising sun lit up the drops of dew on the grass like fairy lights. Everything was distilled but diffuse and shining.

💬 Inktober is still happening! @adders likes all the new sketches appearing in the timeline:

Inktober is one of my favourite “internet challenges”. It fills my feeds with such interesting and varied images.

💬 Twitter has a polls feature, but it doesn’t work in third-party apps. Sometimes an old-fashioned poll is best where people can answer beyond a few specific choices, like this question from @Burk with dozens of replies:

Do you use a case for your phone?

📷 @adactio was at IndieWebCamp Brighton and posted photos of pre-conference planning and a conference session.

📷 Did you know that Micro.blog automatically creates a photos page of thumbnails for your blog? It’s like an Instagram profile, but at your own domain name. You can see an example here on @manton’s blog.

Adam Tinworth was a journalist for two decades. He started blogging in 2001, “a transformational moment” for him. He now works as a consultant and trainer in digital journalism, social media and content strategy, teaching classes such as Social Media & Audience Engagement for Editorial.

Why he likes Micro.blog:

Random glimpses into humanity all over the place, doing different things, living different lives – I think that’s a wonderful antidote for the polarization we see in many places now.”

Welcome to another Micro Monday email newsletter. If you’ve recently joined Micro.blog, thank you! This week we’ll recap some software updates and news from the Micro.blog community.

⭐ We updated Micro.blog for iOS to version 1.7.1 with several bug fixes, including updating more screens for Dark Mode on iOS 13. Download it in the App Store.

⭐ Micro.blog 1.9.1 for macOS was released with a bug fix for macOS 10.15 Catalina. “Check for Updates” to grab the latest version.

🎙️ On the last episode of our Micro Monday podcast:

Jeannie McGeehan visits with Jean to talk about how she found Micro.blog (The New Yorker article), her Etsy store with handmade soaps made for shaving, how the Like button ruined social media, and her blogging journey.

🎙️ We launched podcast hosting with a focus on short episodes because we thought it would encourage people to try new formats without the pressure of recording longer shows —podcasts like this one from Patrick Rhone, who last week posted a particularly unique episode:

A little something different. No words. Just the soothing sound of my 1907 Underwood No. 5.

📷 There was a meetup of microbloggers at the Release Notes conference in Cancun. Great to see so many people make it!

📷 @dejus also attended Release Notes and posted photos of sessions and from the beach.

🎨 Inktober is underway! You can follow recent sketches in the special Inktober section of Discover. Post a sketch this month with the word “Inktober” anywhere in the microblog post to unlock a Micro.blog pin on your account.

💬 @jeannie started a great discussion about when to reply, emoji reactions, and more with this post:

Have you ever wanted to comment on someone’s post but you just can’t seem to find the right words to not sound like an idiot so you just don’t comment at all?

🚫 Facebook has not re-approved our API access, so we’ve had to remove the cross-posting feature that sends posts from your blog to Facebook. Manton writes on his blog about why it’s a good time to say goodbye to Facebook.

We’re committed to making Micro.blog the fastest, best way to blog, but we can’t do it without your support. If you have any questions, let us know at help@micro.blog.

This week, Jeannie McGeehan visits with Jean to talk about how she found Micro.blog (The New Yorker article), her Etsy store with handmade soaps made for shaving, how the Like button ruined social media, and her blogging journey.

Welcome back to the Micro Monday newsletter! We took a break for the summer so there’s a lot to catch up on.

🎙️ Jean talks with Manton about new Micro.blog features he worked on this summer, including new emoji, iOS 13 support, photo pages, Tumblr-related features, and test blogs.

🎙️ Featured guest Tiffany White joins Jean for episode 68 of Micro Monday. They talk about photoblogging, podcasting, and Tiffany’s personal blogging history.

🛰️ Congrats to @brentsimmons and everyone who contributed to NetNewsWire 5.0. This new version can share blog posts directly from NetNewsWire to Micro.blog for macOS.

⭐ Micro.blog 1.7 for iOS was released with iOS 13 features like Dark Mode and Sign in with Apple.

⭐ We’ve added a powerful filtering interface in Micro.blog that can automatically assign categories to your blog posts based on text in the posts.

⭐ Tumblr was acquired by Automattic, makers of WordPress.com. Tumblr and Micro.blog work really well together. Manton summarizes how you can follow Tumblr blogs from Micro.blog and import Tumblr posts to Micro.blog.

💬 Sarah Gooding of WP Tavern writes about the Tumblr acquisition and Micro.blog’s new feature to cross-post from your microblog to a separate Tumblr blog:

Micro.blog may bear some similarities to Tumblr but the service has an entirely different flavor. It has become an alternative watering hole for indie web enthusiasts with its support for Webmention and Micropub protocols. Many who use the service seem to already be convinced of the value of hosting a blog that is independent from the major social media silos.

💬 Matt Mullenweg was interviewed by The Verge about the Tumblr acquisition. @jsonbecker posted to his microblog:

This interview is so encouraging. I’m very excited about the future of Tumblr and the web in a way I was not just a couple of years ago.

💬 @AlanRalph acknowledged how much work is ahead for the Automattic team:

As someone who used to be on Tumblr, I’m curious to see what Automattic will do with it. Given the damage that Verizon (and Yahoo before them) wrought, however, I think they’ve got their work cut out…

💬 @collin also thinks Tumblr is in better hands now:

I don’t know what the consensus is on Automattic acquiring Tumblr, but my take is if you like Tumblr, you should be really happy. Verizon was going to continue ruining it until it died and now it’s owned by people who care about and understand exactly this sort of thing.

💬 @cdevroe recorded an audio reaction to the Tumblr news:

Automattic sees Tumblr as an entry point for new WordPress.com customers – especially youth. For someone to go from idea to full commerce or publishing success via WordPress.com’s current offering could seem cumbersome and not nearly as hip as Tumblr.

📷 Micro.blog now has a full-screen grid view of recent featured photos. It’s a great way to find new people to follow.

📷 Or maybe you’re just here for the cat photos? No problem. Here are some from the last day via @hollyhoneychurch, @tgray, @richnewman, and @pgor.

📷 Beautiful ink sketch of a bird from @mikehendley. Inktober starts tomorrow, and we also have 🎨 emoji you can use for adding art posts to Discover.

Thanks for your interest in Micro.blog! We’re committed to making Micro.blog the fastest, best way to blog, but we can’t do it without your support. If you have any questions or feedback, let us know at help@micro.blog.

Tiffany is a Mac Nerd who writes articles on Apple, musings on personal things and observations, and productivity. We chatted about photoblogging, microcasting, and her personal blogging history.

I enjoy Instagram, but it’s a totally different thing. Micro.blog has its own vibe and I really enjoy it. It’s almost like there is no pressure there to stick out.

tiffany.blog: your friend tiffany’s little corner of the internet

This week Jean catches up with Manton about what new features he worked on for Micro.blog over the summer. They talk about new emoji, upcoming iOS 13 support, the new photos page for blogs, Tumblr-related features, and creating test blogs.

There was no Micro Monday newsletter last week, so this week we have several new features to highlight.

📷 There’s a new built-in photos page for Micro.blog-hosted blogs, showing a grid of photo thumbnails. Manton has the details here on his blog.

⭐ We added a “Copy HTML” button next to each of your photos under Posts → Uploads, to make it easier to copy a reference to that photo and paste it into a blog post draft.

🎙️ Micro.blog has been updated to support the new categories that Apple added to their podcast directory last week. If your podcast is hosted on Micro.blog, click Posts → Design to see the list of categories.

🐛 After a LinkedIn API change, Micro.blog could no longer automatically cross-post your blog posts to LinkedIn. We’ve now got that bug fixed.

💬 Neat idea with screenshot from @tiffany to organize Overcast playlists based on days of the week:

Trying out a new playlist structure in Overcast. No longer a night owl, can’t be. I don’t do too much news; it’s oft depressing with little benefit besides raising my blood pressure. So instead I read RSS and listen to podcasts.

📆 People on Micro.blog who post a photo every day end up with an amazing collection of photos on their own blogs. Just a few of the folks I’ve noticed posting daily photos: @pip, @johnpeterharvey, @JezB, and @dejus.

If you have any questions or feedback, let us know: help@micro.blog.

This week’s newsletter is a little different. I just want to highlight some of the great photos that people on Micro.blog have been posting.

Thanks to @joec, @johnpeterharvey, @johnjohnston, @vincent, @JezB, @pratik, @ronguest, @Cheri, @mpospese, @pip, @seishonagon, @svenseebeck, @jwelby, @vanessa, @chrispederick, and everyone who owns their photos by putting them on their own blog. Y’all are making the open web a more beautiful place.

You can see many more featured photos in the Discover section of Micro.blog, or use Sunlit for an Instagram-like photos timeline.

Need any help starting your own photo blog? Let us know if you have questions: help@micro.blog.

For this week’s newsletter, we feature updates to Micro.blog, a quote from Manton Reece’s interview with the IndieWeb co-founders, and more.

⭐ Sunlit version 2.5.6 is now available with several bug fixes. Use Sunlit for a more Instagram-like experience to Micro.blog. It’s all about photos.

🎙 On the latest Micro Monday, Jean MacDonald talks to Pratik about photography and Micro.blog.

🥞 New emoji! In Micro.blog, we use emoji to help discover posts and people to follow. These topics were just updated: breakfast, racing, cricket, guitar, knitting & crochet, and travel. You can learn more here.

💬 Last year, Manton Reece sat down with IndieWeb co-founders Tantek Çelik and Aaron Parecki to talk about the history of IndieWebCamp. The full transcript is now available. Here’s an excerpt from Aaron describing the big shift from the early conferences to now:

Now we actually have a lot more stuff working together than we did in 2011, obviously, and even in 2014. At the beginning it was the same goal, the same ideals, but we couldn’t demo me commenting on someone’s post. That didn’t work until way later. And because of that the sessions were all drastically different, because there wasn’t a thing to coalesce around except for the ideals of own your data, have a domain name, do stuff on your web site.

💬 Ben Norris blogs about how writing can be a helpful exercise even without a large audience:

Life can quickly get overwhelming, and if you allow yourself to be paralyzed by waiting for perfection, you will miss out on many opportunities.

💬 Kimberly Hirsh has a post exploring the idea that when we build a web site for ourselves, we’re building a narrative for our own identity:

I got my first personal domain in 2001, and building an online space to represent myself has always meant choosing what I want the world to know about me, who I want to seem to be, and by defining who I want to seem to be, am I not defining who I want to actually be?

If you have any questions or feedback, let us know: help@micro.blog.

This week’s guest just returned from Yellowstone National Park with some amazing photographs. Pratik talks about his approach to taking photos while on vacation. We also talk about blogging in a post-Facebook existence. And we go on a tangent about Star Trek fandom, and learn that Pratik can’t do the Vulcan “Live Long and Prosper” salute.

This week in the newsletter we highlight a new podcast and posts from the Micro.blog community. Thanks for reading!

📅 If you have an active Micro.blog subscription, you can switch to our yearly plan. That effectively gives you 2 months of blog hosting for free.

🎙️ On the latest episode of Timetable, Manton Reece talks about recent server upgrades and work on the Indie Microblogging book.

🎙️ New podcast from the Xcoders meetup in Seattle with hosts Liz Marley and Jared Sorge. This podcast is hosted on Micro.blog along with the Xcoders microblog. Brent Simmons adds a note about what the podcast will cover:

Future posts will include interviews and discussions of interest to our community of developers, designers, testers, support people, and writers.

💬 Tiffany White discovers Icro for iOS, a great third-party app for Micro.blog:

Found a nifty little Micro.blog client for iOS called Icro. Very minimal a great looking.

💬 David Dykstal started a long conversation on Micro.blog by asking:

I’m thinking a bit about what creativity means. Who is a creative person you admire? Can you explain why you feel they are creative?

📷 Looking for more great photos and posts on Micro.blog? Smokey Ardisson collects his favorites each week.

🎙️ Smokey was also featured on an early episode of Micro Monday last year:

This week we hear from Smokey Ardisson, a historian and specialist in Middle East studies—who also worked on the Camino browser. We talk about the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, introverts and social networks, and how the historians of the future might judge Micro.blog.

If you have any questions or feedback, let us know: help@micro.blog.

This week in the newsletter, we have podcasts, a site for musicians on Micro.blog, new videos, and posts from the community.

🎙️ For Micro Monday this week, Jean MacDonald talks to Greg McVerry about the upcoming IndieWeb Summit in Portland, commonplace books, and more.

🎙️ Manton Reece has resumed his Timetable microcast. The latest episode covers preparing this newsletter and server upgrades.

🎸 Jacob Gorban has created a new site for connecting musicians on Micro.blog. There’s a list of what instruments people play, their username, and a short bio.

🎬 Film Fest Friday returns! In the 2nd week, we highlight nature videos.

💬 Jean wrote a longer blog post about how Micro Monday was inspired by the Follow Friday convention from Twitter, to help discover new people on Micro.blog:

We also wanted to encourage people to think a bit differently, and rather than recommending a long list of Twitter handles (which I rarely clicked through because it was too much work to figure out who to follow), we strongly suggested that a Micro Monday post consist of one recommendation plus a short description of why someone would want to follow that person.

💬 Vega started a discussion about whether Micro.blog could take inspiration from LiveJournal’s community blogs:

Everyone already has a personal blog/domain. Perhaps there can be a way of creating the M.B equivalent of LJ’s “community blog” — a particular topic specified by user(s), which other bloggers can then “post” under. The blogger still owns their post on their blog, but M.B can congregate them based on these user-specified topics.

💬 Jason Becker had a blog post on the problem with prequels:

A good author starts their story at the most interesting point. Good fiction is rarely a biography of its characters, starting at the beginning and covering the most mundane details of their lives. Stories always start in the middle, and they start in the best middle, just as the most interesting events unfold that lead to change.

💬 Richard Leis created a web page for books he’s reading:

Inspired by @rnv and others, I created a page on my website about what I’m reading and what I’ve finished reading recently.

💬 Robert van Vliet posted an update on the progress of tracking books to be read:

It has encouraged me to actively engage in reading poetry almost every day, and it’s also made me realize just how difficult it can be to do something you love. If I struggle to find time to read poetry, then how much harder is it for people with a far more casual relationship to it?

If you have any questions or feedback, let us know: help@micro.blog.

This week’s guest is Greg McVerry, associate professor of education at Southern Connecticut State University and a leader in the IndieWeb movement. He will be attending the IndieWeb Summit, coming up on June 29 & 30, 2019, in Portland, Oregon. We talk about what happens at the event and why it is a great place to come and learn, whether you are a beginner or an expert, whether you attend in person or remotely.

We also take a bit of a detour as Greg talks about the concept and history of the commonplace book. He quips that the instructions John Locke wrote in 1706 for maintaining one’s commonplace book could be considered the original blogging documentation. Many IndieWeb bloggers use their site as a digital commonplace book.

Greg believes in the power of people coming together to make the internet better by working on their individual blogs:

When you organize around people who share your values and goals, by focusing on yourself you are also helping the larger group become better itself. So: Find A Passion. Get A Blog.

Welcome back to the newsletter! Thanks for supporting Micro.blog. This week we have a new podcast, featured videos from the community, blog posts, and more.

🎙️ On this week’s episode of Micro Monday, Jean MacDonald welcomes Miraz Jordan back to the podcast to talk about her new project, How To Customise Micro.blog. Miraz tells us how she went from a teaching career to creating her own business as an internet instructor and co-authoring a book on WordPress. Then we take a look at the new tutorials she’s created for customizing a blog on Micro.blog.

⭐ Jean also wrote a blog post explaining how we approach curating the Discover section of Micro.blog.

🎬 Film Fest Friday is here! Check out friday.micro.blog for the first post. If you’d like to post video to your blog, the iOS or macOS apps can handle everything for you, including upgrading your blog if needed.

💬 One of last week’s posts about writing started a discussion on Micro.blog about using journals. Thanks to @Cheri, @amoroso, @jamesloscombe, @cygnoir, and @smokey for participating. View the full conversation here. Halsted Bernard added:

I try to use the latest apps to write my first drafts, and always end up with a pen in hand. I love your idea of matching notebooks to the type of story I’m writing.

💬 David Sinclair wrote up his experience at Apple’s developer conference, including attending our Micro.blog meetup:

Micro.blog is my preferred social network; the people there are generally more friendly than on Twitter, in large part to the way the service is designed, without casual likes, so people often reply with a more meaningful comment if they enjoy a post.

💬 Chris Wilson says you should sometimes risk looking foolish:

More convinced that being creative mean accepting occasionally (or frequently) looking foolish. Doing something that might not work sometimes means it doesn’t work…but occasionally magic happens.

⭐ We’ve updated our iPhone app Wavelength to version 1.0.3. This minor update improves stability. Wavelength is a simple way to record, edit, and publish a short podcast.

If you have any questions or feedback, let us know: help@micro.blog.

This week, Miraz Jordan returns to the podcast to talk about her new project, How To Customise Micro.blog. She first appeared on Micro Monday Episode 35.

Miraz tells us how she went from a teaching career to creating her own business as an internet instructor and co-authoring a book on Word Press. Then we take a look at the tutorials she’s created, starting with basic customizations that don’t require any special skills or experience. Miraz also recommends folks check out Mars Edit, the blogging software by Daniel Jalkut, which she used to author all the posts on How To Customise Micro.blog.

At 35 minutes, this episode is a bit longer than a typical Micro Monday, but for those interested in learning more about customizing their microblogs, there is a lot of great information to help you get started. (There is also a quail update.)

Hi! We’re starting a newsletter to complement our Micro Monday podcast.

Each week on the podcast, Jean MacDonald interviews a member of the Micro.blog community to learn how they blog and what their interests are. There are already over 60 episodes! This email newsletter will add to the podcast with links to past episodes, new features on Micro.blog, and highlighted posts from the community.

⭐ Version 1.9 of Micro.blog for macOS is available today. This update fixes some bugs and adds an option to open the selected post in your web browser.

🎙️ On the latest special episode of Micro Monday, Jean talks to Manton Reece. We answer your questions about Micro.blog.

🎙️ Joe Cieplinski started a new microcast called The Weekly Listen, hosted on Micro.blog. Each week, Joe plays a favorite song and talks about it for listeners. You can learn more or subscribe here.

📷 Some incredible photos were posted this week. Browse the latest featured photos in the Discover timeline here.

📚 Manton published a blog post about open gardens that was adapted from his upcoming book Indie Microblogging. The post explains some of our thinking about the role of a platform like Micro.blog compared to huge social networks.

💬 Here’s a microblog post from Brent Simmons, inspired after seeing Panic’s upcoming Playdate handheld video game console:

On seeing Playdate, I realized the question we should ask ourselves is: are we working on our own Playdates? I don’t mean hardware necessarily — I mean the thing that seems very difficult, maybe even impossible, that may fail, but is the best expression of our talent and love.

💬 Cheri Baker on writing fiction by hand in a notebook:

I’m experimenting with writing fiction by hand after listening to Neil Gaiman talk about his process. So far, I really like it! I’m using separate notebooks for each story.

💬 Alan Jacobs is also thinking about his writing:

I’m thinking that I will continue, as I write my book, to post brief thoughts about the challenges and pleasures of writing. (I love how the Drafts integration with micro.blog makes this super-easy to do.)

💬 A reflection on a beautiful morning from Sameer Vasta:

There are few things as delightful as strolling aimlessly for a few hours through small neighborhoods in a city you don’t know as the sun rises up over the houses and parks around you.

💬 Miraz Jordan, who has been posting her own great photos and videos, noticed an interview on photographing waves:

If you enjoy looking at photos you should read this: Interview: Photographer Spends 10 Years Capturing the Visual Symphony of Waves The photos are absolutely astonishing. I can’t begin to imagine how he made them.

🎬 Film Festival Friday! Now that we have video hosting on Micro.blog, we are going to start highlighting videos that catch our eye from the Micro.blog community. It has been really fun to see how people use video. Follow @friday to be ready. (We’ll have the first post this coming Friday!)

Thanks for using Micro.blog! If you have any questions or feedback, let us know: help@micro.blog.

Manton returns to the podcast to answer questions from the Micro.blog community. We discuss new features, goals for the platform, audio players, encouraging people to stick with blogging, curation, t-shirts, and more.

Holly Honeychurch sings, plays harp, and hangs out with cats, per her user profile info. She also dances, house/catsits all over the UK, and writes quite a bit. When she first started out with Micro.blog, she was simply posting her harp videos. But an irresistible urge to write led to greater interaction with the members of the community.

“I really enjoy being part of the community and connecting with lovely people of the Universe. It’s brilliant.”

This week’s guest is Tim Smith who has been part of the community since the beginning. We talk about Bokeh, the private-by-default photo sharing platform that Tim hopes to launch with the backing of a Kickstarter campaign.

This week’s guest is William Schuth, who has been with Micro.blog since the Kickstarter. He celebrated his two year anniversary on the platform with a thank you to everyone in the community who has made it a great place to share thoughts and ideas. He might be doing a microcast next! We’ll see. :-)

David Johnson is originally from the UK and now lives in Maui. He’s a life coach who works with introverts and Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs), and has practiced Buddhism for over 30 years, so he evaluates the Micro.blog experience from some interesting angles.

It’s been an interesting six months. It’s almost like my creativity and my ideas are expanding more as well as my excitement for what I can do.

Crossing The Threshold

This week’s guest is Joe Cieplinski. Joe talks about his podcast and conference Release Notes, first learning about Micro.blog, how he approaches what to post on Micro.blog, customizing the design of his microblog, and why he no longer posts to Instagram and Facebook.

I actually post quite a few photos now in Sunlit. I haven’t posted to Instagram in like a year now. And I’m just putting all of my photography out there on Micro.blog, which is a lot of fun. […] And also sharing small thoughts, but like I said, not the negative stuff. I try to find on Micro.blog reasons to post positive things. Things that are encouraging or inspiring to people, or at least inspiring to myself.

This week on Micro Monday, we have our first Scottish guest. John Johnston is a primary school teacher who lives in Glasgow. We talk about the signal-to-noise ratio on social media and what makes Micro.blog a great experience.

I’ve learned more about the tone of online conversation on Micro.blog than anywhere else. Even if there isn’t a community of teachers talking about education all the time, even people are talking about something I’m not desperately interested in, you can enjoy it because of the tone.

The Microblogger known as But She’s A Girl is a biologist based in Birmingham UK who has “too many interests” outside her professional life: cycling, programming, photography, music, sewing, and crocheting. We talk about these interests, blogging, and the album A Pocket of Wind Resistance.

It took me a while to appreciate the model, that it is more about people posting on their own blogs, essentially, and other people following along with that in a centralized place… I really like the tone of the way that people post on Micro.blog. It feels like a very human place to be, where people treat each other with respect and humanity.

Mike’s microblog caught our attention because he posts incredible drawings as works in progress. In this episode, Mike talks about his process and how he is using the iPad to create his artwork and Micro.blog to share it. He also appreciates the camaraderie of the Micro.blog community:

It’s like walking into a room and there’s always a seat for you. And you don’t have to speak, if you don’t want to.

This week’s guest is Kim Landwehr. Kim is no stranger to social media and blogging platforms. We talk about what is different about Micro.blog that holds her interest:

There are a lot of interesting people, obviously, on Micro.blog, but also I’m less afraid to put my ideas down.

Not everybody agrees with everybody else, but they disagree in an agreeable manner.

This week’s guest is Martin Feld, from Wollongong, Australia. Martin credits microblogging with his ability to write more consistently on his long-form blog as well. (That’s no small feat for someone who describes himself as “Seinfeldian overthinker.”) We talk about how the Micro.blog timeline has been great for finded like-minded people, including people who like guinea pigs.

This week, Gabriel Santiago talks about how Micro.blog has helped him to find joy again in blogging and stay off Facebook. We also talk about the experience of community and conversation on the timeline.

To be honest, at first I felt out of place because most of the people I happen to follow are coders, developers, engineers, things that I am not… Then I realized they are just normal people and we have common interests.

It’s time for another episode of Ask Manton. We collected questions from the Micro.blog community and talked about some of the features and issues on your mind, in particular:

• Portability and Backups
• Possibility of Private Accounts
• Adding photo collection grid and “On This Date” memories to Micro.blog
• and more

Thanks to everyone who submitted questions. We’ll do this again in another couple months. In the meantime, you can ask @help or email help@micro.blog.

It’s the 50th episode and Jonathan LaCour is our guest! 💃🎉🍾

You know him best as @cleverdevil, the creator of utilities that enhance your microblog such as microgram (an Instagram-like photo grid page), and micromemories (a Facebook-like “On This Day” feature). We talk about the Indieweb and ditching Facebook with ditchbook. We even mention dogs and karaoke.

Tom Cutting, creator of the Stickman Diaries, talks about the winding path of his working life, including copying code for Pong to play with his brother, working in desktop publishing and the prepress industry, and eventually embracing the internet. He also talks about his favorite piece of tech, the iPad, and how it makes it possible for him to do art.

About Stickman Diaries:

One of the things I like about Micro.blog is that I don’t feel like I’m performing. If somebody likes it, they like it. I’m doing it really for myself, as a record of things. The nice thing about not knowing whose following you is there’s no number ticking up to make you think, ‘Oh no, I must get my drawing out this week, I can’t disappoint my viewers.’

Chris Wilson joins us on Micro Monday. He lives in Kraków, Poland, and works for an ad technology company, but he is originally from London, where he graduated with a degree in Politics. We talk about how his blog has evolved throughout this journey, which included teaching English in several countries, and how his podcast dreams are deferred while his infant daughter makes predictable quiet time a challenge.

This episode takes us to Finland to chat with Sven Seebeck, a blogger, a photographer, a musician and a music teacher. He’s been blogging since 2008, focused on a variety of topics. We talk about the difficulty of doing a music microcast without falling into the trap of perfectionism.

Regarding the Micro.blog community, Sven compares it to that favorite bar of yours, “where everybody knows your name…” 🍻

This week’s guest, Ben Norris, is a husband and father of six children (plus a new puppy), as well as being an iOS developer, a blogger and a sketchnoter. He has also written quite movingly about mental illness and healing, and we chat about that a bit.

Ben’s Sketchnote of Manton’s Talk at Peers Conference

Sketchnotable

Mormon Sketcher

Coming Out
(tl;dr Hi, I’m Ben, and I have OCD. 👋)

This week, Annie Mueller is our guest. She’s a freelance writer who has recently relocated with her family to Puerto Rico. “I do the words,” her About page says. And she likes Micro.blog:

I feel that it’s less about me expressing myself, and more about being part of this conversation with other people who are making their own cool things. It’s a neat meeting of interesting minds, and creative, thoughtful people. I just really enjoy the conversations that take place there.

This week we head back to the home of the Kiwis and talk to Tony in New Zealand. An engineer by trade, he’s been blogging since 2002.

I love writing but most of my writing I do for me…I just basically do what I think I would want to look back and read. I don’t really have an audience in mind.

We kick off the New Year with Jack Baty, a long-time blogger and a partner in a digital development studio since 1995. He has a eclectic mix of interests that you might want to check out. The fellow pictured in his avatar with the pipe is not him, but it’s a cool story.

Micro.blog has become my favorite place to hang out online. And I’ve hung out in a lot of places online, so that’s saying something.

Tilde Club
Jack’s Tilde Club page