Blog

We’ve been doing some walking in the afternoons lately.

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DuckDuckGo: DuckDuckGo just crossed ten million searches a day for the first time ever! We’re proud to be helping so many people take back their privacy. In celebration, we’re giving away ten thousand DuckDuckGo t-shirts to enthusiasts who help their friends and family take back their privacy as well. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo on every […]

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Yesterday a young chap walked into the doors of Coalwork wanting to see “what we were up to”. He moved away from Scranton but would like to see Scranton improve. After talking for awhile about start ups, failures, successes, our respective backgrounds, whether or not there was money to be raised in this area, it […]

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Manton Reece, writing on his blog, about quick blogging workflows: I believe there are two important facets to microblogging. The first is the timeline experience: a reverse-chronological list of posts from your friends, like you see on Twitter. The second is that posting should be effortless: if there’s less friction between your idea and publishing […]

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Monkey Keyboard: Monkey is a free keyboard for iOS and Android that allows you to drop stickers while you’re chatting in WhatsApp, snatch a file from DropBox while you’re writing email, or send your lover a Spotify song right in iMessage. Looks very interesting. But free makes me leery.

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Dave Winer is at it again. This time with an open source “browser” that can read a “river” called riverBrowser. riverBrowser is, at its core, a set of HTML, JavaScript, CSS that can read JSONP files and output them as HTML. What can this be used for? Well, it could — potentially — replace RSS for a […]

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Yes, I skipped the weekend. I’m going to skip all weekends likely. Here is why. And you may just have to live with that. Speaking of the weekend, this one was pretty good. On Friday, I was able to play full court basketball for the first time since I was injured. It was painful but […]

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43North “Behold the world’s largest business idea competition.” Five million dollars in cash awarded to the winners (plural) of this competition happening in Buffalo, New York. If you’re into investing this is a model to watch as it goes into its second year. I’m watching closely.

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Manton Reece, on his blog, about the fact that he’s using WordPress to “tweet”: I’m very excited about the potential for microblogging. For the last year I’ve been working on a new platform around this stuff. By adopting some of these tips for WordPress, your microblog will be ready for my platform, but more importantly your […]

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WordCamp is a big deal in the WordPress community and I’m very pleased that Joe Casabona, fellow Coalworker, is organizing one for Scranton, PA. There are only 88 seats left so run and get your ticket. Side note: I’ve been to WordCamp’s in Hawaii, California, Texas, Arizona, New York, Philadelphia etc. I’m looking forward to […]

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At Coalwork we somewhat recently began offering $5 Fridays. A chance to come in and work for just $5 (regularly $15). And today was the first day that someone officially took us up on the offer. In fact, two people — one from about 45 minutes away — popped in. Scranton has never seen coworking. […]

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Jim Dalrymple, one of the nicest people on the planet, is down 40 pounds — in part, due to the Apple Watch’s constant nagging to move. He wrote a follow-up to his excellent review of the product specifically about his weight loss. While I’ll do my best to answer the questions, I have to say that […]

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Speaking of losing weight; an interesting piece in the New York Times by Aaron E. Carroll about how eating less is more important than exercise as a determining factor in weight loss. In the adult population, interventional studies have difficulty showing that a physically active person is less likely to gain excess weight than a […]

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Gestimer is “for those little reminders during the day” and has a pretty cool gesture-based UI for setting short-term reminders. I think I’d like an interface like this if Gestimer plugged into Reminders. Neat idea. /via Matt Gemmell on Twitter.

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I’m happy to see Joe Casabona pick up the 100 words torch. Dark Sky, one of my most-used applications on my iPhone, got updated yesterday. The update is terrific. It has the same information as it had before — except it is far easier to digest. It also has the added benefit of being more […]

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Jason Fried in a post from September 2014: Remember that what you’re making is in a perpetual state of almost right up until the end. Great post. And boy is he right. Everything is a mess on a product until it isn’t. /via Jason Fried on Twitter.

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Paul Ford, in a tome-of-a-post for Bloomberg/Business Week: There are 11 million professional software developers on earth, according to the research firm IDC. (An additional 7 million are hobbyists.) That’s roughly the population of the greater Los Angeles metro area. Imagine all of L.A. programming. East Hollywood would be for Mac programmers, West L.A. for […]

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The best days are filled with variety. Variety helps to break up the day and keep me moving and productive. Today started with some programming to finishing up a client project. Then, I drove to two client meetings where I was able to do a little training and a little fixing. Then, lunch watching Casey. […]

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Yesterday I missed the opportunity to drop a James Bond joke. 🙁 For a over a year I’ve owned a GoPro Hero3. I love this little camera. However, for the passed 5 months or so it has sat in my home office doing little else than collecting dust. I took it out yesterday and shot […]

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I washed the dishes this afternoon and when I got to my least favorite dish to wash, the silverware, I was reminded of this post I wrote in March 2011. Rather than saving the silverware to last I should have started with them and figured out a way to make it fun. Or, at least […]

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For years, well over a decade and a half, I worked at night and on the weekend. Many people do this and they like to do it. However, several years ago — right around the time I started Plain — I decided not to work in the late evening or on weekends. I‘m willing to […]

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Jurassic Park was the first book that I read because I wanted to rather than because I had to. I was 11 when I read the book and 12 when the movie was released 22 years ago. I remember going opening weekend with family who had read the book. Since then I’ve been a lifelong […]

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Chris Sacca’s infamous blog post on What Twitter Can Be ranged from topics about its apps, the platform itself, and what Wall Street thinks of the company. There are several bits I plan to write about but today I’m focusing on his idea of a “Twitter Save Button”. So much of the time, Twitter moves too […]

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Yesterday Kyle and I had an outdoor lunch with a local entrepreneur who wanted to throw two ideas at us. The first idea was a throwaway. At least he thought so. When he began to describe the idea we provided our feedback, our ideas, and tried to lay out several paths that could help him […]

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I feel like there is a groove being hit. At Plain, Kyle and I are getting better at our work every day. With every improvement of our business comes a little bit less stress and worry. Rather than feeling uneasy in “the seat” I feel at home. With Barley, we’re rebooting it and it feels […]

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Isaac Newton’s third law of motion is: When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body. Paul McCartney, of The Beatles, wrote in their song The End: “And, in the end The love you take is […]

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What can be said in 100 words? I remember signing up for Twitter in November 2006 and wondering; what can be said in 140 characters? I had no idea tweets would be as versatile as they have become — especially when you combine those words with photos, hyperlinks, and hashtags. But this, this exercise of […]

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I was interviewed by Belle Cooper for the Zapier blog about Unmark — our open source bookmarking application: But, we decided to make it open source because we didn‘t want it to become like every other service we loved that ended up disappearing. If we built it in the open, it can live on forever […]

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Random notes from Apple’s WWDC Keynote today: Apple Music Radio sounds exactly like Top 40 radio and that is terrible. I hope it doesn’t end up being just “radio online” because that isn’t something I want and I doubt that is something “the kids” want.

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Kyle and I have decided we love Barley too much to let it die. So we’re starting over with it in hopes we can find the right fit for it in the market. That is why we are going to sharpen our product’s focus by starting over and we’re going to ask that you follow […]

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I’ve been using VS Code for a little over a month now. It is easily my favorite editor at the moment. Yesterday Microsoft released an update to the application but you’ll need to re-install it to get it. The auto-update feature in the app will not work. Check out the list of updates.

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Paul Adams of Intercom on Medium: In the last year I’ve reviewed a lot of product design work from job applicants and I’ve noticed a worrying pattern. Too many designers are designing to impress their peers rather than address real business problems. This has long been a problem in creative advertising (where creative work is […]

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Joe Betz at Coursera: We’d like to try a bit of an experiment here at Coursera. Instead of building a project internally and waiting until we think it’s fully polished to open source it, we’re going to “throw it over the wall” before we’ve even gotten going on the coding. We did the same thing […]

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A little over a week ago I wrote: They aren’t new. You can find them if you dig. But they aren’t “a thing” and I think they should be. I was talking about panoselfies. Well, we’re getting somewhere with this new way of taking a selfie and I’m glad to report a few bits of […]

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Facebook’s Instant Articles platform has us web people discussing the speed at which our pages load. It is excellent to see this discussion happening. Here are a few of my favorite tidbits from a few of the pieces I have read recently: Mark Llobrera on A List Apart: That’s my biggest takeaway from Instant Articles: we […]

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I saw a discussion on Twitter while laying in bed last night. You can catch up right here. Essentially, it asks… why is Woo Commerce, which has a larger install base, valued so much lower than Shopify by the public market? A bit of background; Woo Themes, the company that built and maintains the Woo […]

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In February Canalys estimated that there have been 720,000 Android Wear watches sold. Pretty good, I’d think, for a watch. Any watch maker would likely be proud of those numbers. Estimates for Apple Watch sales are all over the map. But recently KGI Research adjusted their figures and estimated that Apple will sell under 15 […]

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Alex King: I’m working on a web app now and it recently struck me how much more complicated things have become. I agree. While some of the tools we’ve added onto the process of building for the web have some incredible value — we’ve made the barrier to entry much, much higher than it has […]

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A few images from the weekend.

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A little something new. Another try at daily blogging. This is what I looked at most of the day. We’re putting in a fair bit of work on some new things for Barley this week and I’m pretty excited to get them out the door. Had lunch at Backyard Ale House and managed to stick […]

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Casey Liss on Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code: All told, Code may or may not be for you, but it’s working out really nicely for me so far. I definitely suggest giving it a shot. I too have been using Code as my primary editor since it debuted at Build. I’m enjoying it. It seems much […]

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Brent Simmons on his blog: But those aren’t my reasons for deleting my tweets. Instead, it’s because Twitter is a blogging (or micro-blogging, really) service that doesn’t meet my requirements […] Follow the link to read the rest of the post. This is very tempting. Ever since Jeremy Keith went Indie Web with his “notes” (read: […]

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Ed Bott, of the Ed Bott Report, reporting on ZDNet that Microsoft is shooting Windows Media Center in the head: That decision shouldn‘t come as a surprise. Media Center, once a signature feature of Windows “premium“ editions, has been on life support for years. The team developing Media Center features was broken up in 2009, […]

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