My friend Yaron direct messaged me: “You like Space?”

Me: “Yes.”

Almost one month to-the-day later we launched Spacebits together.

If you like Space… you can subscribe via RSS or follow along at @SpaceBitsFeed.

Jeremy Keith, on his personal blog:

It is entirely possible—nay, desirable—to use features long before they are supported in every browser. That’s how we move the web forward. If we waited until there was universal support for a feature before we used it, we’d still be using CSS 1.0 and HTML 2.0.

We agree. For our broad features we do our best to make sure our services work in the widest array of browsers possible. However, we are not afraid, nor will ever hold back from, using the most cutting edge features of the web simply because some percentage of people using old terminals at their desk job can’t use them.

Move the web forward.

Brie Weiler Reynolds, writing on Medium about working from home:

The salacious reality about what I really do when I work from home is that I…work.

Interesting word use. She makes the point that so many people still do not understand how working from home can be a real, actual, job and how it has its perks and downsides as much as working anywhere does.

Matt D. Smith, whom I met at Greenville Grok and whose work I admire, recently held a Transform Athens event and asked John Saddington to present. And present he did. On blogging, of all things. Here is what Matt wrote afterwards about the event and blogging:

The very fact that you are reading this right now gives you a glimpse into my head, my thoughts. It‘s like we‘re sitting down for coffee right now and I‘m telling you about what I did last night. Only instead of having a one on one conversation I‘m logging my thoughts onto my blog. What happens from here is up to the crazy wormhole that is the internet.

I agree with him, obviously. But I take two things from this; Man I love blogging. And, I need to get to Athens.

Fresh URL is a JavaScript library that strips away all of the extra cruft at the end of URLs but does so only after each service that uses that cruft gets the data they need.

Brendan Schwartz, CTO of Wistia, writing on their company blog on how it works:

Here‘s how it works. Fresh URL detects which analytics providers you‘re using and sets up watches on them to see when they‘re ready. Once Fresh URL confirms that each provider has extracted the information it needs from the URL, it calls replaceState to remove the UTM codes.

Nice of them to release it as open source. Kudos Wistia.

Chris Poole, founder of 4chan, remarks (on his personal blog) on the debate for and against anonymity on the web:

The combination of anonymity and ephemerality has fostered experimentation and creativity rarely seen elsewhere. It’s incredible what people can make when they’re able to fail publicly without fear, since not only will those failures not be attributed to them, but they’ll be washed away by a waterfall of new content. Only ideas that resonate with the broader community persist, creating the most ideal conditions for the production of viral content, which established 4chan as one of the Web’s earliest “meme factories.”

Anonymity has fostered both positive and negative results online. Just like anything in life you must to take the bad in order to get the good. And you can learn to avoid the bad.

Stewart Butterfield, on Medium, regarding the “innovation” that Slack brings:

But, for organizations that adopt it, there will be a dramatic shift in how time is spent, how communication happens, and how the team’s archives are utilized. There will be changes in how team members relate to one another and, hopefully, significant changes in productivity.

We at Plain have been using Slack day-to-day since their preview release. We love it and I can personally testify to Slack changing the way a company can work together; whether you work remotely or you are all in the same room.

For us Slack has changed the way we communicate in three very measurable ways. First, it has effectively eliminated internal email. Most of our team members don’t even need to open their email on a daily basis. Second, it has all but eliminated the dozens of notification emails we get from other services we use since we now have all of those funneled into a #notifications channel in Slack. And third, it has made file transfers even easier than using Dropbox (though we still store data there).

I recommend reading the entire internal memo which Stewart published openly on Medium.

David Sparks, on his blog MacSparky:

I‘ve been sloppy about cleaning out my camera roll. I could do this on the phone but it isn‘t very fast. So I fired up my favorite Mac app for managing/copying/deleting lots of images at once, Image Capture. I‘m often surprised by how many Mac owners don‘t even know this application exists. It is part of the operating system and ships on every Mac.

I’ve been using Image Capture to clear my camera roll on iOS since day one. It is easily the quickest way to get your photos from your phone and onto your computer where you can do anything you’d like with them.

Lately I’ve been adding them to Picturelife.

The people behind 1910 Design & Company took at stab at redesigning Wikipedia:

While big parts of the internet have gone through an amazing journey in terms of typography these last years, Wikipedia’s reading experience is still stuck in the 90’s. We wanted to take a few days and propose a direction through which Wikipedia could move forward, focusing on articles and reading without necessarily having to change too much of what it is and should continue to be.

I use Wikipanion for nearly all of my Wikipedia reading. Which is a lot. I’d welcome a redesign that helped make it much more readable than it currently is.

Conor McClure, on his personal blog:

What is an RSS feed? I thought you’d never ask. No, really; the non-geek community is seriously missing out by not taking advantage of RSS in this online-media-dominated world we live in.

I agree. And sometimes, on Twitter, I pretend to know the way out. Sometimes I think that so long as we rename RSS subscriptions to things like follow or subscribe and leave the tech details out of it that more and more people will use RSS. But I don’t really know if that will help.

Flipboard, Facebook Paper, and other massively popular applications use RSS behind-the-scenes to allow their users to “subscribe” to content. So, are non-nerds using RSS then? Some would argue no.

RSS has served us remarkably well and I don’t think it is going to go anywhere. But, whether or not it becomes something mainstream — with a different name or not — remains to be seen.