It’s been a while since I wrote a changelog. At some point I figured that these weren’t very interesting for people to read, so I paused. But when I think about how much time I spend thinking about and building stuff for the website¹, it makes sense that more of my writing should be about that process.

So here’s some of what changed in the last few versions:

7.10 - April 19th

☑️ New Feature: Thoughts

One of my reasons for building this website was to eventually completely replace social media apps. I’ve been wanting to have more of a presence online without having to use stuff from companies like Facebook, Google, or Twitter (or any of these other companies who have shown that they don’t give a shit about the downsides of mass surveillance, information gathering, and emotion manipulation for profit).

I haven’t used Facebook or Instagram in a while. I took some big de-Googling steps a little while back. I still use Twitter though. For a few reasons:

1. There are a lot of people there talking about things I want to know about.
2. It’s easy to write quick thoughts. Blog posts are not quick.

I tried to deal with the first thing by writing a RSS Reader and following more independent bloggers who publish feeds, which has been cool. For the second one, I built this new feature called Thoughts. They’re a new type of post, but only one is ever visible at a time, and only for a maximum of 48 hours. And they don’t show up in RSS feeds. So clearly they’re meant to be pretty ephemeral.

You’ll see the latest Thought (if it was posted less than 2 days before) near the top of the home page. They use the same Tags as my posts, so you’ll also see the latest Thought on the appropriate Tag pages too.

To get this built, I:

• Created thoughts and thoughts_tags tables in the database
• Wrote all the admin pages for creating and editing Thoughts
• Wrote the SQL query to get the right Thought, and wrote the cache function for it to make sure this isn’t making an extra database call on every single home page (and tag page) load
• Created a template for a Thought so I can use it for the home page and tag page

☑️ New Feature: Sponsorships

I’ve been using the site to help land clients for freelance web development, but I haven’t monetized it much yet besides the Contributions feature. (Thank you to everyone who contributed so far!) Weekly Sponsorships are the next step in the plan.

My Sponsorships page goes in to detail about the program from the perspective of a Sponsor. You can get an idea of what it’s for there. Here’s the dev stuff I did to make it happen:

• Created sponsors, sponsorships, and sponsorship version tables in the database
• Built admin pages for creating and editing Sponsorships
• Built non-admin pages for Sponsorship information, past Sponsorships, and the Sponsorship schedule
• Designed the Post page and sidebar ad areas
• Created the default ad that shows when there’s no active Sponsorship

I expect the program and features to grow and change a lot, but this is a good start. Now the work to get organizations interested in becoming sponsors begins…

7.10.1 - April 21st

• Fixed a bug that caused an error in the error log every time the home page was loaded when there was no recent Thought available. There were a lot of errors.

7.11 - April 25th

☑️ New Admin Feature: Web App Config

Note: This feature is just for me maintain the website easier. I’m the only one who can see it.

Most configuration settings on the site are either hardcoded (in the Go source code), or read from env variables², which means I have to reload the web server (or if it’s a code variable, do an entire deployment) any time I want to change any of them.

This change adds database-driven config settings so I can edit them from an admin page and avoid a server restart. What I did:

• Created a config table in the database with key, value, and description fields
• Built admin pages for adding, updating, and deleting config entries
• Wrote some functions to read and cache config entries
• Updated parts of the code that were reading config values from elsewhere and added those values through the new admin section

7.11.1, 7.11.2 - April 26th

• Fixed a catastrophic bug that affected article editing for me. If I tried to remove a tag from one of my articles, it would remove that tag from all articles. This one scared me. It’s fixed, but I still don’t know if I wiped out any tags by mistake while it was there.

7.11.3, 7.11.4, 7.11.5 - May 3rd

☑️ Improvement: User Account page

A lot of the changes were admin related, but I wanted to spend some time working on stuff for non-admin accounts too, so I at least started by improving the design of the page.

The admin changes to the account page:

• Added a new section with an organized list of links to all the admin pages. I was using the sidebar for most of my admin navigation, but adding the links directly to the page is a lot better for the mobile design.
• Added a new section with the most recent posts from my RSS reader and a preview of my emails using the Fastmail JMAP API I talked about in that earlier de-Googling post.

☑️ Improvement: Tag pages

• Added Related Tags to the sidebar when you’re on one of the Tag pages
• Added a list of any Bookmarks with the same Tag to the sidebar

Random stuff in this version

• I finally made the copyright year in the footer dynamic. I have no idea why I thought to do it this version.
• I cleaned up the way Tags are displayed throughout the website. All #’s are gone now.

7.12, 7.12.1 - May 5th

☑️ Improvement: Likes

I’ve had a “Like” feature on all my posts for a while now. I would say exactly when I added it, but it’s been there though at least one big refactor so it’s hard to tell when with git right now.

It’s a button at the bottom of each article page that you can click as many times as you want to increase the Like count. It’s basically just an integer field in the posts database table.

In an effort to add more stuff for people with user accounts, I added a feature to store when you Like an article if you do it while logged in. Whether you’re logged in or not, you can still Like stuff as much as you want, but if you are logged in, you can see a list of all the articles you liked from the updated account page.

Other stuff in this release

• Extended the auth and cookie expiration from 7 to 14 days

I wrote earlier about Basecamp’s terrible public blog post, where the CEO Jason Fried announced that employees are no longer allowed to have “societal or political” discussions on their internal discussion/messaging software (and that they’re removing committees, reviews, and some employee benefits).

The story has since been ongoing, with:

• An article from Casey Newton from The Platformer reporting that most of this blog post decision started with some heated internal discussion about a list their customer service team kept of the funniest customer names they came across and how racist that list might have been.
• Basecamp founder and CEO David Heinemeier Hansson (who previously wrote a tweet about how bad it could be to “appear apolitical” when trying to lead a company) trying and failing to explain how he agrees with the post.
• Basecamp inviting employees to quit (with severance of course) if they don’t like the changes (which to me sounds like: either agree with everything I said in the post and don’t talk about it, or leave).
• Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong literally (with emoji) applauding the post. I wrote earlier about him doing almost the exact same thing a while back with Coinbase.

In the meantime, John Gruber from Daring Fireball wrote a post quoting an entry Basecamp’s book about how when you make big decisions, people might not like them, but it’ll be fine if you just wait it out. His reply was “Good advice.”

What I don’t understand about these men in particular publicly advocating for this shit (remember, these aren’t just their personal opinions, these are public posts meant to be widely read) is just the basic optics of this. Even if you don’t agree that there’s anything wrong with CEOs making decisions like these, isn’t it just obviously a bad look for the type of people least affected by the “societal and political” problems that are being discussed here to publicly push for their employees to make them feel more comfortable?

From what I’ve read, right before the Basecamp blog was written, an employee at the company talked about potential links between the “funniest names” list and the mass shootings in March, where 6 Asian women (8 people total) were killed. As uncomfortable as that discussion may be, and as much as one might think that has no place in the workplace, when people are literally being killed because of our societal issues (I want to take a moment to include the names Ma’Khia Bryant, Ahmaud Arbery, Daunte Wright, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor), is this really the position you want to push for right now? In public blog posts?

John Gruber’s post wasn’t received very well on Twitter. It’s another guy not directly affected by the types of issues being talked about here publicly indirectly agreeing with the other guys (some of whom also happen to have been sponsors of his thing) not directly affected by these issues, so it’s not really too surprising.

He later wrote another post about Twitter being a “hate machine”, indirectly (again) referencing the situation and the push back he got for his earlier comment. Twitter’s definitely a hate machine, and a pretty terrible place overall, but that doesn’t mean all the feedback you get from it is invalid.

That last post went just about as well as the other one.

Jason Fried, CEO at Basecamp, wrote a very badly received post yesterday about changes he would like to see at the company, which can be summed up as “no more political discussions, just focus on work.”

I just came across a “fan translation” of the post that pretty much captures how I first read it.

This may look like compression. A reduction, an elimination. And it is. It’s precisely that. We’re compressing X to allow for expansion in Y. A return to whole minds that can focus fully on the work we choose to do. A return to a low-ceremony steady state where we can make decisions and move on. A return to personal responsibility and good faith trust in one another to do our own individual jobs well. A return to why we started the company. A return to what we do best.

Look, I’m just asking you to stop thinking about climate change, state murder of black lives, the ever-increasing reach of corporations, and the hollowing out of society and just get back to making me money. Is that so hard?

From The New York Times today:

But Mr. Zuckerberg has also been blunt about Facebook’s feelings on Apple. “We increasingly see Apple as one of our biggest competitors,” he said in an earnings call this year.

Even on that point, Mr. Cook has disagreed.

“I’m not focused on Facebook,” he told The Times this month. “I think that we compete in some things. But no, if I’m asked who our biggest competitors are, they would not be listed.”

iOS 14.5 just dropped.

I need that ability to unlock the phone with my watch when I’m out with a mask. This is the most excited I’ve been about an iOS feature in a very long time.

Some other notes about this release:

• This is the one that adds App Tracking Transparency, the thing that Facebook is really upset about. 🙂
• Siri doesn’t default to a female voice anymore (you have to pick a voice when you setup the phone). Defaulting to female voices for virtual assistants was a mistake, so I’m glad they’re trying to address it.
• More emoji of course! There’s always more emoji.