The Macro Report: July, 2019

Summer is well and truly upon those in the Northern Hemisphere and that means plenty of updates as the momentum from the first half of the year continued on throughout the month.

Let’s take a look at what’s been happening lately on Micro.blog.

In the past month…

Photos Index

The month ended with a big feature release; a photos index page. On this page you will see all of the photos posted to your blog in an index just like the format made popular by Instagram profile pages. The page is pre-built into new blogs whilst existing blogs can get it via single-button access; Manton also provided instructions on how to go about this if you already have a page named “photos”.

This feature is inspired by the work of Jonathan LaCour, who created Microgram which made it relatively easy for people to make such a page by copy-pasting a small amount of JavaScript into their site. Microgram is still available for people who would prefer to maintain the page in this way.

Manton has also since spoken about making additions to this feature, such as simple settings for customising the included post type. In the meantime you can customise the page via edits to your custom CSS, instructions for which can be found in Manton’s post.

Elsewhere with page structuring, it is now possible to make further edits to URLs as a way to signal greater granularity in your pages.

Enhanced Tagmoji

Several additions have been made to the emoji used for tagging in Discover, covering a variety of topics. These are all available via the menu on the web, which will soon be matched on both iOS and the Mac. The tagmoji can also be accessed by third party apps thanks to an update to the Posts API; this is reflected in an update to the official iOS framework, Snippets, by Jonathan.

With regard to emoji in general it is also now possible to use emoji in the (plain-text) bio of your account, which will then appear in your profile: micro.blog/USERNAME

Streamlined Subscriptions

Subscriptions are now much simpler, as the cross-posting plan has been merged into the basic plan. Not only has the basic plan been significantly improved via the many updates made by the team over the past 18 months, the cross-posting plan has now become more of a confusing element than anything else. Instead, the basic plan now includes unlimited cross-posting and those who already use the cross-posting plan have been switched to basic whilst continuing to pay the lower price.

This will make subscriptions easier to understand and reduce the support burden for the team from now on, thus freeing up even more resources for further improvements to both hosting plans, the latter of which – $10 per month for podcast and video hosting – remains unchanged.

As a reminder, you can choose to pay for your hosting with an annual plan which includes a reduced rate for 2 free months of hosting.

Copy HTML and more!

Another great feature was released in the later part of the month in the form of a new button: Copy HTML. With this you can easily grab the necessary code for easily positioning your uploaded images in a post or page. This is currently available on the web and ought to enable a greater variety of photo-blogging for more people.

After Apple updated the categories in their podcast directory, the settings for Hosted sites with podcast support was also updated to reflect this change. Also, in an addition inspired by Smokey Ardisson’s This Week on Micro.blog the Micro Monday newsletter now includes thumbnails of recent photos from across the community.

On the technical side of things, performance and stability improvements have been made to; Micro.blog in general; Sunlit; and LinkedIn cross-posting.

Elsewhere

  • Icro did not receive an update in the public release of the app but did get an improvement on the technical side of things, with Martin being able to remove CocoaPods from the app. This ought to make it easier for Martin to maintain the app.
  • Gluon had a relatively quiet month with a single update. However, this included a few changes with some minor tweaks, the addition of the new Micro.blog tagmoji, and the removal of push notifications. Vincent explained that notifications would soon return, better than before.
  • The Wiki received a few markdown-based additions on the main page and a minor edit to an existing category, as Smokey and Eli continued the steady progress of the new version.
  • A Drafts Action for posting to Micro.blog with categories was updated by Craig McClellan, fixing a token-based issue that would cause the Action to break.

• • •

It was great to see the team push on and fully embrace an active summer of updates. Hosted blogs are getting a lot of good new features whilst the platform as a whole continues to be improved on a regular basis, including an eye for stability and performance upgrades. Micro.blog continues to be supported with a thorough and carefully considered philosophy, whilst also embracing new ideas and feedback on a regular basis.

Whilst summer can be altogether quiet for many people in the world of consumer software, web-based platforms have the opportunity to make substantial improvements before the rush of large updates in the latter part of the year and the team is doing just that.

On top of that there was some sad news regarding our community manager, Jean. Whilst visiting Slovenia she became injured and had to return home early. Fortunately the community rallied and offered support as they could, showing yet again that this platform, this entire project is not just about technologies and the like but rather the people are what matter. Thankfully the team is made up of wonderful people and Jean is a fantastic representative for the community as a whole.

Enjoy your weekend!

– Simon