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Took a walk after getting to Amsterdam to explore and counter jet lag a bit. I’ve travelled through Amsterdam a lot but this is my first time travelling to here. It is a cool city.

A narrow, bustling street features rows of bicycles parked alongside pedestrians walking past shops and signs, creating a typical urban scene.Bicycles are parked along a canal in front of traditional, narrow Dutch buildings under a clear blue sky.People are lined up outside the Anne Frank House, a modern building with large glass windows.A boat filled with people travels along a tree-lined canal, with people sitting at a café and bicycles parked nearby.A boat cruises along a lively canal lined with historic buildings and lush trees under a clear blue sky.A serene canal in a city is lined with boats and historic buildings, with people relaxing by the water's edge under a clear blue sky.A historic church stands majestically amidst vibrant flowers and lush green trees under a clear blue sky.A narrow street lined with old European buildings features rows of bicycles parked on both sides.
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My cousin Josh introduced me to David Francey and his album Right of Passage has become a favorite of mine. 🎶

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Summer is starting to wind down — Tyler finished his summer project — upgraded to the Nintendo Switch 2! 🎮

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Blogging with Messages

Conversation named "Blogging with Messages".
Me

Hey Matt,

An ask for Tiny Theme new feature to consider.

There is a general case where I would like to blog and include a conversation. Two examples:

  • Mimicking a back and forth in Messages
  • Sharing a dialog with an AI and the back and forth
Matt
That seems like a pretty cool idea!
Me

Ideally I’d like to be able to show:

  • A “left side” versus “right side” component of the dialog.
  • The “name” of the author of that side.
Matt

Great! Add this to your Custom CSS:

Me
That is great! I added author styling as well which looks really good. Oh, and an action as well.
Matt
That looks great. Awesome idea with the author's name.
Me

Cool. I put chat.css up so people can play with it.

Conversation ended.
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Blog Categories via LLM

After using GPT-5 to create category introductions for my website I got to thinking about the categories themselves.

With over 9,800 blog posts spanning 20+ years it is daunting to figure out an approach to categories. It is especially daunting to approach them in a way that would make sense to a visitor to my website. As a test, I gave this challenge to GPT-5 using Agent mode. It took 31 minutes to do the research. I have no idea how many web pages it hit on my site (I wasn’t watching!). It gave me a whole report and the results seem really solid.

Me

I would like you to do an extensive analysis of my blog archive at this URL:

www.thingelstad.com/archive/

I would like you to recommend a new set of categories I could use for my blog posts that may be easier and more useful to visitors. You can feel free to ignore existing categories or use as input into the process. I’m fine if there are a lot of categories, I also wouldn’t want hundreds. It feels like 30-50 categories may be fine, but I’m open to a different count. There are over 20 years of blog posts to categorize. I’m fine if categories only exist for a period of time, they don’t all have to have content throughout the life of my blog.

GPT-5
  • Travel & Adventure
  • Family & Life
  • Food & Cooking
  • Coffee & Drinks
  • Music & Concerts
  • Sports & Recreation
  • Kubb & Lawn Games
  • Escape Rooms & Puzzles
  • Fitness & Wellbeing
  • Outdoor & Nature
  • Photography & Videography
  • Technology & Coding Projects
  • Crypto & Web3
  • POAP Adventures
  • MarketWatch & BigCharts
  • Work & Leadership
  • Minnestar & Tech Community
  • Books & Learning
  • Charity & Fundraising
  • Candles & Crafting
  • Magic Pines & Cabin Life
  • Road Sign Math & Puzzles
  • Board Games & Tabletop
  • Commentary & Reflections
  • Nature & Weather
  • Pets & Animals
  • Meditation & Mindfulness
  • Travel – Food & Drink
  • Travel – Urban Exploration
  • Events & Conferences
  • Weekly Thing (Newsletter)
  • Other Side Projects

Each one of these is also provided a description and examples posts that would fit into it. This seems like a great place to use AI.

Going through my blog and assigning posts to these categories could be done with a script and some vibe coding. Perhaps this will be a winter project for me.

All of this has me thinking that it would be nice for micro.blog to do this for me. I wouldn’t mind having micro.blog use AI to recommend categories for me. But then separately, now that we have categories with introduction text take each of my blog posts and ask the LLM to categories it into the existing structure. All the data is there. 🤔

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POAP 7409077 at 612 POAP Challenge - Lake Lover.

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I collected my 200th POAP by claiming 7409051 at Minneapolis Institute of Art, part of the 612 POAP Challenge! 🎉

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POAP 7409036 at Martin Olav Sabo Bridge — 612 POAP Challenge.

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POAP 7408993 at Lake Hiawatha — 612 POAP Challenge.

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Out collecting 612 POAP Challenge locations at Minnehaha Falls.

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POAP 7408966 at Minnehaha Falls — 612 POAP Challenge.

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Perfect night for soccer game. United v Sounders! ⚽️

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I can’t believe I only tonight discovered I can get Kramarczuk’s Cheddar Sausage at Allianz Field! This will be automatic going forward. So good! 🤤

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Category Introductions via LLM

I used GPT-5 to create introduction text for my blog categories. Now I just need Tiny Theme to pull them in and I’ll be set.

This is the prompt I used:

I’m including a list of all categories on my blog along with the link to the archive page for that category. I would like you to visit each one of these links and use the sample of blog posts to create a short one to three sentence introduction for each category. Don’t get overly specific and make sure to keep the introductions in a similar writing style to the content on my blog.

Passing the explicit list of categories and links worked much faster than the first prompt which I asked it to just look at the Archive page and figure out what to do.

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Ruthie Foster at the Dakota

We got to see Ruthie Foster play at the Dakota tonight. She did a solo set — just her and her guitar named Pearl. We hadn’t seen Foster play before but my Mom is a big fan of hers and I can see why. Her songs were amazing and she added so much with the stories behind them as well. I could have kept listening for another hour easily. What a great musician. 🎶

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I got my ModRetro Chromatic today! Delightful so far.

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First time at a TEDxMinneapolis event! Looking forward to tonight’s speakers at Orchesta Hall.

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Sunset on Sugar Lake.

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We finished watching Season 1 of Stick tonight. We all enjoyed it a lot and thought it was a wonderful story and show. Looking forward to the next season.

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We have significantly increased our escape room activity in 2025! Just past half-way through the year and we are already at 23 and 82 total since 2016. 🤩