February, 9, 2024 archives

Now that Bluesky is available without a waitlist and has a web interface, I have been playing around with it a little more. So in that spirit, posts here will get posted there just like I’ve been doing for Mastodon.

I’m just using this PHP interface for Bluesky because it was what I ran across first, but I probably should use Ben Ramsey’s socialweb/atproto which looks like a more rigorous implementation of the underlying AT protocol.

Anyway, it’s hacked together for now, and the very few followers I have over on Bluesky will now perhaps find these things in their feed.

You can even find links to the posts on Mastodon and Bluesky in the details of the entries here. One of my plans is to eventually pull in replies on either of those as comments here based on jwz’s hack for doing that with WordPress.

As I add (or re-add) features to this blog again, I find myself spelunking in some of the archives and hitting a lot of dead links. I was a little curious to see what the oldest still-alive link was, and it brought me to this very short link post from the year 2000 to this article by Greg Beato about a media startup called Verde.com that made me think of recent stories about The Messenger, a media website that went bust in under a year.

I have to hold back from digging into this sort of thing too deeply, or I start to wonder what happened to Scient, or Peek Garlington, and suddenly a day is gone chasing geese.

I also came across this old post about the Los Angeles Times partnering with a technology company to launch an RSS reader application and got a little sad that I have never managed to work my way into a job that is journalism-adjacent. Not because I want to take the money and run, but because I think it is a space where I could tremendously effective given enough of a mandate to do so.