Week Notes: January 5, 2024
Kicking off this year’s blogging challenge with some notes for this week of January 2nd. I’m keeping some thoughts as I work throughout the week of what comes up, what I’ve learned, and what I’m reading.
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First week back after an extended vacation. Working after a break is amazing. I love what I do, and it’s a good reminder to be excited about what I’m working on. Need to take more breaks!
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I’m removing Twitter share links from our site. I wanted to replace it with Threads, but there seems to be no way to directly share a link to a new ‘Threads’ thread that I can find. It seems that they really do not want news and links posted easily yet. One of the nice things about old Twitter was how easy it was to share things to it.
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Ended up replacing the Twitter share button with a generic ’native’ sharing control that uses the browser’s native control for doing so. This seems like a better idea than supporting one or two specific services. Just let people do what they want. Here’s a gist of a Stimulus controller to use native browser sharing menus.
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We’re working on using AI-generated voices to read articles on Air Mail. It’s a fascinating process. Rolling out an internal test for this weekend’s issue and if all goes well will roll this out to subscribers in the coming weeks. I’m using a service called ElevenLabs to do the heavy lifting on the AI side. A very nice service and API to interact with.
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For the new year, I’m starting out with some new structures for how the teams meet and collaborate. I really do resist regular standing meetings but we need to have a few to keep on pace. Without a regular cadence, it’s too much ad-hoc for me.
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Upgraded two of my apps to use Turbo 8 betas. Just making sure everything is stable for now, but really looking forward to using the morphing pieces in some future functionality.
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A nice post by Brad Gessler on the Fly.io blog about Turbo 8 tips and gotchas: 8 Turbo 8 “Gotchas”
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My Hey email account was upgraded to use the new Hey Calendar feature. As I expected, it’s very thoughtfully put together and has some nice unique features I’ve not used before. It’s going to be a tall order to replace my use of Fantastical, but I’m giving it a fair shake.
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We’re building an activity feed for one of our apps, and it was fun to research how ActivityPub works behind the scenes of Mastodon. This post from 2018 seems to be mostly still relevant and is really handy as a reference.
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I’d love to make Air Mail fully ActivityPub compatible some day. Would be pretty cool to follow authors, topics, or a general feed directly from the publication on federated apps and sites.
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