Vines – July 2017
The State Street Grill, Clarks Summit, PA – August 2017
I had a recent business lunch at The State Street Grill and finally remembered to add anchovies to my Caesar Salad. It was delicious.
Of course Twilio’s platform is experiencing tons of queueing on a day that I’m to demonstrate an app to a client.
Zach Leatherman’s garden
As my own little corner of the web uncermoniously turned ten years old this year, it’s really starting to feel more like a garden than a piece of software. I certainly enjoy tending to it. I can plant what I like and with proper care it can grow into something useful.
First, how cool is his last name?
I like this analogy of comparing a personal web site to tending to your own personal garden.
Hudson River, Newburgh, New York – August 2017
On a recent weekend trip Eliza and I ate BBQ on the Hudson. It was a gorgeous weekend in the Hudson River Valley area.
Hazy day. Did some shopping this afternoon. Finally found some suitable flip-flops/slippers and sunglasses.
E18: Ground Digger Wasp
In late-July I stumbled upon a large mound of sand at a construction site that had several large wasps digging holes. I had never seen a wasp that large in my life. Turn your volume up for the tail end of this audio bit.
Links
- Video: Ground Digger Wasps in Australia. Look a bit narrower and perhaps smaller than the ones I encountered.
Repost: Phil Schiller on Twitter
Celebrating #HyperCard
(I created some insane stacks in the day…) http://blog.archive.org/2017/08/11/hypercard-on-the-archive-celebrating-30-years-of-hypercard/
As a result of this decision, I’ve now opened commenting up on all posts so far in August 2017.
Replies from Micro.blog and oh hai, comments
If you visit my site at all you may have noticed many of the recent posts have replies showing up on them from Micro.blog. Here is one example post. That is because webmention works pretty well on Micro.blog.
However, this is causing me a bit of frustration because it feels as though the conversation about a post is happening on Micro.blog rather than on people’s own blogs. Even if those people have their own blogs they are using Micro.blog to reply*. It is an interesting thing to see. Effectively, Micro.blog is feeling a lot like Twitter – replies to my posts are on there so I have to go there to reply to those replies.
To that end I’ve decided I’ll start turning comments on some posts (like this one). I’d much prefer people reply to my blog posts on their own blog or – starting today – on my blog. Even though I like Micro.blog better than Twitter or Facebook doesn’t mean I want to have to navigate to that web site each time I want to reply to comments on my posts.
* I’m unsure if that is what the M.b team wants to happen. But that is what is happening right now. Also, M.b is supposed to be a host for blogs if people want it to be. But, again, even people with their own blogs are using M.b’s reply feature to reply to posts.
Favicons on tabs in browsers
With many tabs open, there’s really nothing subjective about it: Chrome’s tabs are more usable because they show favicons.
Like John, I’m currently a Safari user. I switched to Chrome for a bit due to the Developer tools being a bit better at the time but, as you may know, I’m trying to go all in on Apple. Safari is just better all around when on the Mac, iPhone, or iPad*.
I totally agree, though, with everything John says in his piece. Go read the entire thing.
One thing that wasn’t mentioned in his piece though is Safari’s “Show all tabs” view. If you have a ton of tabs open it can be very useful to use the Show all tabs button to view them all and find the one you’re looking for. This feature alone will not pull Chrome users over to Safari but at least it is something.
* Currently iCloud tabs are not working at all for me on the Mac. But I’m guessing that may be due to me using the iOS 11 betas on both iPhone and iPad and I am not using a beta of macOS High Sierra.
Field of gold – July 2017
It is easy to take for granted the amazing landscapes that the area I live in affords. Much of what I see during my short hikes would be jaw dropping to lifetime city dwellers. I need to keep reminding myself of that.
E17: Crickets in a field
In late-July I went for a hike and recorded this audio bit.
Links
- Photo: The grass I mention
- Photo: The jake I mention
My personal blogging tips
I’ve been writing things down on my own blog for a few decades. I wish more people did too. If you’d like to have a personal blog but struggle finding things to write about, here are a few tips that may help.
- Don’t post about what you will do, post about what you’ve already done – In other words, I try to avoid the “I should blog more” posts and just get on with blogging more. Also, I like posting photos and status messages sometime after they’ve happened.
- Find a theme – Niche blogs do extremely well. So stay on topic. Personal blogs do less well but they should still have a theme and that theme should be you.
- Create reasons to post – My What I saw series and observations series give me a reason to write. Should I feel writer’s block I can fall back to one of the series.
- Have a schedule – I try to post one or two posts per day prior to 9am. Some are scheduled in advance some aren’t. Everything else that happens is completely random.
- Be totally fine with missing the schedule – Sometimes I don’t blog for a few days or weeks due to time off away from the computer or just being focused on something else. And I’m totally ok with that.
- Don’t post test posts – Create a staging or a local development environment to test your site’s features. It is really easy to do.
- Try not to care about stats – Stats are useful for a number of reasons but obsessing over them won’t help you at all. Check them once a month to see how you’re doing.
- Create an inspiration list – In your notebook or notes app write down some topics you’d like to write about someday. Make it long. Like, 50 items. Don’t worry too much about what should be on it just start writing the list down. When you can’t think of anything to write about look at that list and simply pick any one at all and check it off.
- Subscribe to a bunch of blogs that interest you – More than likely the conversations started by others will give you more than enough to write about.
- Perfect is the enemy of good – Just hit publish.
- Have fun! – I’ve thoroughly enjoyed blogging all these years and I don’t imagine I’ll be stopping any time soon.
If you have a neglected blog or are just starting one – jump in! Oh, and don’t forget to email me the URL.
Ron Chester on Webmentions
Ron Chester:
Please go to his site and read his entire post.
I read Ron’s post before making my decision to turn comments back on. Also, my email address is available on every page of my site. So if anyone would like to comment on anything on my site they should be able to do so both publicly and privately with ease.
Side note: One of the reasons we all turned off comments, aside from the benefits of disabling comments like more traffic to your site (I wrote this post 10 years ago!), is that people claimed that moderating comments is too much work. I no longer think that is an issue. Even if my blog became a popular place to comment I think I’d be able to keep up with it with the tools we have available now.
August 11, 2017 4 Comments