One Man's Notes

Early morning, South Downs.

My rule for living.

I week ago I was just glad I didn’t use WordPress for any of my sites.

Now? I’m wondering if I need to plan to migrate the journalism department’s sites in the near future.

Hey, random guy on Threads. I’ve only been managing large scale blog platform installs on and off for two decades now. I really need you to come and lecture me on how I should chose a platform.

Now, this is what Sunday evenings are for: a hundred-odd Kathys dancing to Wuthering Heights.

Oh, yes.

Set up author attribution on Mastodon on my Ghost blogs, based on this handy guide.

It's basically just setting up the meta tag using Ghost's Code Injection settings, and then adding the domains in Mastodon.

The growing tsunami of AI slop is going to force us towards a new wave of trusted curator.

Optimistic? Perhaps. Idealistic? Certainly.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't take this moment of opportunity and need and do something with it.

This is the problem with AI:

• “AI can help you create this” is a successful marketing message
• “This was created with AI!” isn’t

Far more people want to create with AI than want to consume the results.

A good rule to keep online debate constructive is “play the ball, not the man”. If you attack the poster, not the ideas, you’re playing the man.

Mullenweg’s response to DHH is pure playing the man, not the ball.

Y'know, I'm beginning to suspect that it might have been Agatha all along.

Finally had a much-needed trim.

Not gonna lie, it sometimes righteously pisses me off that journalism was going in exactly the right direction with community/audience work 15 years ago — and then we got distracted by Facebook and Google.

Is it too late to change course?

This looks worth a watch:

I love Discworld and I like TTRPGs. But I'm not convinced that the combination that's being Kickstarted is something I'm interested in. What makes Discworld special is Pratchett's words.

And we ain't getting any more of them.

Dashed dreams of better EV batteries are a core disappointment.

This is great reporting from 404 Media - but I do feel they buried the lead. The Blind stuff is more jaw-dropping than the second buyout offer.

Things are not good inside Automattic.

Finishing the (working) week with a round-up of news from the scrum where AI and journalism meet.

Technology is great. People are idiots.

It was a beautifully misty autumnal commute this morning.

The Ghost ActivityPub team being even more spicy than normal in their latest update, talking about choosing their first beta testers:

How did we select the 3? First we asked everyone to promise to give us 8% of their revenue, or else. Then, when that predictably failed we ultimately just selected 3 of the private beta applications with the smallest audience sizes.

🔥 🌶️ 🔥

Very proud of my eldest daughter. It's a seemingly small thing that really matters: she's choosing well in her friendships.

Started reading: Sleepless by Annabel Abbs 📚

I saw her talk about the book on Wednesday, at an event organised by the Steyning Bookshop. I’m really intrigued by the subject, especially as I’ve battled with insomnia myself this year.