I’ve very nearly decided that Ghost is more than I need from a blogging platform (not to mention that I’m quite happy with Micro.blog for my primary blogging). I do like the new Ghost recommendation engine, though.
The dirty secret about Recommendations, though, is that most platforms have designed them primarily to boost their own growth. You can’t recommend anything you like, you can only recommend other people who use their product.
We wanted to give publishers the ability to benefit from cross promotion without limits or hidden incentives, so we decided to do things differently. We built a full Recommendations system for Ghost that’s compatible with any platform, website, or publisher out there — so you can recommend whoever you like.
Its open nature makes the new feature attractive, but it’s also useful for developing a sort of virtuous circle of promotion. Give your friends a boost, and hopefully, they will do the same for you. Open to the whole web with no walls.
It seems that DHH may have insisted on adding HEY World to the 37 Signals email product so that he could have an Elon Musk fan blog.
It’s comforting going to a different church and following the same liturgy.
The experience at the tea shop today was like the opposite of going to the mechanic. The saleswoman spoke to my wife 90% of the time even though it was fairly clear I was the one buying and consuming the tea.
🍿 Watched Dungeons & Dragons last night. It was a delight. It’s still amazing how modern filmmaking and technology can bring concepts like magic and fantasy to life. The makeup of the adventuring party, with each member complementing the group, captured the dynamic of D&D extremely well.
🍿 Watched Asteroid City last night and I still don’t know what to think. I loved the lusciously oversaturated colors and the sets. Most of the actors were charming. I just wish the film had been less disjointed and had dropped some of the art for art’s sake.
I’ve had trouble keeping mostly silent about the events taking place in the Middle East. A couple of days ago, I read only a snippet of an article about the attack in Israel by Hamas, and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to read. I’m haunted by it and probably won’t forget those images conjured in my mind from the text for the rest of my life.
In NC, our attorney general, Josh Stein, is part of a group of attorneys general who are suing Meta over Instagram’s targeting of teens and addictive nature.
“Facebook has spent untold billions of dollars … figuring out how to design this to maximize its addictiveness, and we want them to change the parts of the platform that serve to be addictive,” Stein said, noting features like infinite scrolling and how content is suggested to teens.
Frankly, I’m glad to see someone going after Meta for how it builds and targets its product. We know that Instagram can be detrimental to teen mental health (especially for girls), and we know that there are other ways of managing a social media service.
I finally reached the breaking point with Apple Music. I’ve been a loyal Apple Music subscriber ever since the demise of the beloved Rdio streaming music service. I just can’t deal with the bugs across the application and service anymore. Recently, I set my downloads to lossless quality, but I had trouble simply downloading music. I would try to download an album, and the progress indicator would just spin around and around.
The idea proposed by DC lawmakers of funding local journalism through vouchers is a fascinating one. I just cancelled my local newspaper account, due to the content becoming post-journalism. Even without that issue, it would have been hard to keep it with all of the price hikes.
Via @miljko