As I like to note every year, today is the anniversary of starting my blog. Good day to release some new web software!

Looks like ChatGPT is back at #1 in the App Store. Claude had bumped it out of that spot for about a week. App Store rankings are just recent trends, so maybe we’ll see some flip-flopping going forward based on the news cycle.

Ran into some last-minute problems with my bridge to Feedbin. Going to have to disable that feature for launch. I’m a fan of Feedbin, so not happy to do this, but it’ll be something else we can roll out in the future.

Today we’re releasing a new RSS feed reader called Inkwell. It’s a companion product to Micro.blog, so you’ll sign in with your existing Micro.blog account.

Inkwell is a special take on RSS. It has many features you’d expect in an RSS reader, but it also adds integration with Micro.blog conversations and text highlighting. While reading a blog post, you can highlight passages to blog about later.

Inkwell is built around three main tabs: Today, Recent, and Fading. Today is for the latest blog posts. Recent is for posts yesterday or the day before. And Fading is for posts up to a week old. After a week, posts fade out of Inkwell, so you’ll never be overwhelmed with unread posts. If you missed them, it’s okay.

But Fading also comes with a superpower: Reading Recap. Reading Recap takes all of the blog posts in Fading — some you’ve read and maybe some you’ve skipped or just skimmed — and groups them together by website, summarizing what the recent posts were about. It pulls an interesting quote from one of the blog posts and includes it directly. It adds topics so you can tell at a glance what the blog has been focused on.

Reading Recap helps surface interesting posts in your subscriptions that deserve another look. You can also have Inkwell automatically send the Reading Recap in a weekly email.

(There are new costs for us to host Reading Recap, so it and the Fading tab require a Micro.blog Premium subscription.)

I’m excited to announce that a new version of Unread for both iOS and Mac is shipping today with Inkwell sync. Add an Inkwell account to Unread just as you would add Feedbin or other RSS sync services.

Jon Hays has also developed a new app for iOS called Silverleaf. This came together very quickly because Inkwell has an open API. I expect other apps to follow, including the official Inkwell apps.

Inkwell completes the suite of products that make up the Micro.blog platform. For nearly a decade we’ve worked on short-form posts, photo blogs, cross-posting to other social networks, and much more that encourages people to post on their own blogs instead of silos. And now we have long-form reading and discovery, integrated with the unique strengths of Micro.blog.

Can’t wait to hear what everyone thinks. Thank you!

P.S. While I’m working on a new video to introduce Inkwell, you can also watch this video I shared with beta testers. It’s a little out of date but still covers all the basics.

This is hard to believe, but I introduced a bug minutes before blogging about Inkwell. Sync was partially broken. Apologies to folks who tried it right away, it should be returning to normal now.

Thanks @numericcitizen for creating a video of Inkwell with a closer look at everything! Lots of good details in here.

John Brayton blogs about Unread 4.8, with syncing to Inkwell, faster link articles, and more.

Jay Graber is stepping aside as CEO, staying at Bluesky to work on other things:

I’ve grown a lot as a leader and had the privilege of assembling the best team I’ve ever worked with. As we’ve grown, I’ve found that people thrive when they’re in a role where their passions overlap with their strengths. This is as true for me as it is for our team.

Toni Schneider will be CEO. I expect 2026 will be an important year for Bluesky, presumably with new ideas for increasing revenue beyond domain name registration.

I sort of collect “micro” domain names now, so using micro.ink for Inkwell felt right. All the HTML and JS is actually bundled in a Micro.blog plug-in and served just like any blog. I think it demonstrates how flexible Micro.blog hosting can be.

Android folks, @gregmorris is looking for beta testers for Micro Social.

If anyone else would like to test Micro Social on Android please let me know.

Apparently I cant open test or release until I have at least 12 closed testers for 14 days!

Sneak peek of Inkwell for Mac. It’s coming along well. I was going to do a beta but might jump straight to 1.0 this week. Need to fix a few things and wire up version checking.

Working on Inkwell is in some ways a little awkward because I’m competing in the same space as some of my friends for the first time. But I root for their success and find ways to collaborate. It’s similar to how MarsEdit and Micro.blog work together and also “compete” as blogging client apps.

Meta acquires Moltbook. From TechCrunch:

OpenClaw blew up among the tech community, but Moltbook broke containment, reaching people who had no idea what OpenClaw was, but who reacted viscerally to the idea that there was a social network where AI agents were talking about them.

Moltbook is still crazy and interesting, but not sure it fits at Meta in the way that OpenClaw might’ve. I’m just glad Peter Steinberger ended up at OpenAI.

Dave Winer writes in his blog post linking to Inkwell:

I love that creative people are using RSS in new ways.

This feels like a great time to experiment, maybe more so even than the early 2000s blogosphere. Ask people I worked with back then, I was putting RSS in everything. And now I am again. 🤪

I’ve been doing a lot of work in Codex for the upcoming Inkwell for Mac release. I’m weeks ahead of where I thought I’d be. One small tweak I’ve made to my workflow is to wire up ⌘R to run the project while I’m in Codex.

Codex has its own run action button, which in theory could run xcodebuild or osascript command-line tools, but that didn’t work for me. So I reached for FastScripts instead. I wrote this tiny AppleScript:

tell application "Xcode"
	activate
	run workspace document 1
end tell

Here’s a screenshot of the config in FastScripts:

Now when I’m in Codex and it has finished a change, I review the transcript, then hit ⌘R to run my Mac app and test the new thing. If I don’t like it, I’ll ask Codex for changes and run again. Then I can review the code diff and tweak or commit as needed. The keyboard shortcut makes this cycle just a little smoother.

Miloš Miljković has written an Emacs client for Inkwell. Amazing. It supports bookmarking too.

Thomas Ricouard is joining OpenAI. Thomas worked on the Medium iOS app, Ice Cubes for Mastodon (written in SwiftUI), and Codex Monitor. From a thread on Twitter / X:

I also can’t wait to bring my iOS and macOS expertise to help shape the Codex experience around those platforms.

He appears to have stopped posting to the fediverse. It’s too bad the AI community is so entrenched on Twitter / X.

From reviews, sounds like the MacBook Neo is a great little laptop. It has been a while since I’ve thought an Apple product actually followed that “a thousand no’s for every yes” video from WWDC a decade ago… This laptop makes the right trade-offs.

Beto Dealmeida blogs about a human.json file and browser extension that lets other bloggers vouch for who is writing their own posts, not AI-generated:

This JSON document not only says, “all my content under https://robida.net is human-generated”, but it also indicates other people who I trust are doing the same.

I wonder if we all have the same definition of human-generated now? For me, it’s okay if people use an LLM as an advanced grammar checker. Human drafts a post, AI suggests how to polish it.

Thanks to everyone who has tried our new feed reader Inkwell, and especially folks who have upgraded to Micro.blog Premium for the Reading Recap feature. Now that I’ve had a few days to evaluate how the launch is going, we’re going to need to add more servers, so the upgrades help a lot.