When I read about iMore closing yesterday an idea I’d been thinking about for a while came back to the front of my mind.

My favourite sport to follow is Apple and adjacent tech. Living in Australia a lot of that reporting, opining, talk, and gossip happens while I’m asleep, so I’ll like the idea of a “front page of the web” for my favourite sport.

So I deployed a domain name I’ve held onto for 15 years to build theapplenation.com yesterday. It’s a testament to Wordpress and OpenAI that I can pull something like that together in an hour or so.

The whole website is just one page, the front page, that shows you the last 36 hours of Apple related content from the web.

If no-one else ever uses or visits the site I’ll be happy to just use it myself, but I thought I’d share on the chance that there might be other burghers of the Apple nation that might be interested in saving it as a bookmark, or a homepage in their browser like I’ve done.

For those who celebrate, the tech stack is wildly simple. Wordpress running the RSS Retriever plugin that summarises the article in ChatGPT and posts a referring link on the front page, then deletes it in 36 hours.

The websites I’m sharing links to today include:

  • 404 Media
  • 512 Pixels
  • 9to5Mac
  • Above Avalon
  • Apple Developer
  • Apple Newsroom
  • Applelnsider
  • Basic Apple Guy
  • Cult of Mac
  • Daring Fireball
  • Hacker News (if the headline mentions Apple)
  • MacSparky
  • MacStories
  • Mark Gurman on Bloomberg
  • Michael Tsai’s blog
  • On my Om
  • Patently Apple
  • Six Colors
  • Spyglass
  • Stratechery
  • The Eclectic Light Company
  • The Verge (their Apple feed)
  • TidBITS

No ads, no subscription, no tracking except for Tinyltics analytics so I know if it somehow gets wildly popular.

Just something fun for a thing I find fun in

Screenshot of theapplenation.com

About the domain name

I’ve owned the domain name for about 15 years and here is its weird story.

In 2009 Facebook introduced pages. Before this time businesses and non-human entities started profiles that people would add as “friends”. When I saw the feature I tapped “create a page” and typed option+shift+k.

Overnight hundreds of thousands of people became fans of .

A few weeks into it Apple legal got in touch and said no way, so we renamed it to “Fans of Apple”.

Then a dude from CBS in LA gets in touch about monetising it and going big on the interwebs. He -and I - thought this Apple company might go somewhere and maybe it would be a good business opportunity. He was big on buzzwords like UGC and ROI. He suggested I register a domain name for the new project and community and he was busy getting funding from rich people. I was on breakfast radio in Esperance, Western Australia, so I waited patiently and decided upon theapplenation.com for the new brand.

Then they stopped replying to emails and I’ve held onto the domain since then.