Blog
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The first month of Things I Saw This Week, the magazine, and onto Year 1.
Four weeks ago I decided to follow in Om Malik and Heather Armstrong’s shoes and create a digest of some of the more interesting things I saw throughout the week. After four consecutive weeks of creating these posts, and really having a great time putting them together, I plan to complete as least 52 of […]
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What I saw this week #4: September 13, 2013
Vacations are weird. We work really hard before vacation so that we can, you know, go on vacation, and we work really hard after vacation. I’m doing the latter part of that this week by trying to catch up from being a week away. I’ve been successful! Now, onto this week’s links. Whisky tour of […]
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My take on iWork being free, iOS 7 & the two new iPhones
In case you missed it, Apple just held a press event to showcase the updates to iOS coming next week, two new iPhones, and the fact that iWork for iOS is now free with all new iOS devices. Here are my thoughts on each of these announcements. iWork for iOS being free for all new […]
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Coast, a browser for iPad by Opera
Coast is a new web browser built for the iPad by Opera. (App Store link) Why is there a back button in iPad browsers? The iPad is, after all, designed for touch. You swipe, drag and use gestures to move around. Bringing Chrome or Safari from the desktop to iPad always felt like bringing a […]
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Collaborate on documents using Editorially – a simple web-based Markdown editor
For the last few months our team at Plain has been using Editorially to collaborate on blog posts, newsletters, magazine columns, interviews and much more. Now, we can’t live without it. Editorially is a Markdown editor; which means a simple text-based markup language that allows you to add just enough emphasis and style to your […]
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Things I saw this week #3: September 7, 2013
I’m vacationing on the beach in South Carolina with family so this week’s post is a day late and a little lighter than usual. I’m looking forward to getting back at it next week. Video: The new trailer for Gravity. I’m very much looking forward to this movie if for no other reason than to […]
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It isn’t the medium, it is the content.
This one is an instant gem, folks. Matt Gemmell writes about how the medium through which we devour content has changed from print to web and how publishers seem fixated on ways to push the medium rather than focusing on what is truly most important – the content. We’ve become lost whilst trying to work […]
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Things I saw this week #2: August 30, 2013
This has been a busy week. We’ve just turned on the sales engine at Barley and it has been interesting to go out and talk to potential new customers, resellers, and partners. Even with this busy week, though, I managed to find some interesting things on the web. Here are some of them. I’m on […]
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Relentless Quality by Kyle Neath
My friend Kyle Neath at GitHub writes about Relentless Quality and how shipping early and often doesn’t have to mean a sacrifice of quality. Quality isn’t something to be sacrificed. Move fast and break things, then move fast and fix it. Ship early, ship often, sacrificing features, never quality. Bingo. The entire post is perfect. […]
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An extensive profile of Marissa Mayer’s rise to be CEO of Yahoo
Some of this we’ve read before, but a lot of it we haven’t. Nicolas Carson published a "biography" of Mayer for Business Insider: On Monday, July 16, four days after Levinsohn’s last board meeting, Yahoo made it official: Thirty-seven-year-old Marissa Mayer was Yahoo’s new CEO. It is fascinating to see this type of stuff go […]
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One-third of the apps available on BlackBerry World are from a single developer
John Paczkowski in 120,000 Apps in BlackBerry World (Spoiler: 47,000 Made by One Developer) for AllThingsD: That means more than a third of those apps were published by S4BB, a developer for whom quality doesn’t appear to be a priority. I wouldn’t think they’d be able to focus on quality with that many titles in […]
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What I saw this week #1: August 23, 2013
Inspired by Om Malik’s What I’m Reading Today and Heather B. Armstrong’s Stuff I Found While Looking Around comes my own series of posts; What I saw this week. Video: CarChat with Don Dethlefsen of The WerkShop about the 1970 BMW 3.0si Estate Wagon – If I ever have the resources to restore an old […]
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\”What I am reading today\” by Om Malik
Remember when I said we need more ways to find good blogs and blog posts? Here’s one… the always excellent Om Malik of GigaOm has a series on his personal blog called "What I am reading today". Here are a few of his recent lists. August 20th, 2013
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\”What I am reading today\” by Om Malik
Remember when I said we need more ways to find good blogs and blog posts? Here’s one… the always excellent Om Malik of GigaOm has a series on his personal blog called "What I am reading today". Here are a few of his recent lists. August 20th, 2013
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\”What I am reading today\” by Om Malik
Remember when I said we need more ways to find good blogs and blog posts? Here’s one… the always excellent Om Malik of GigaOm has a series on his personal blog called "What I am reading today". Here are a few of his recent lists. August 20th, 2013
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\”What I am reading today\” by Om Malik
Remember when I said we need more ways to find good blogs and blog posts? Here’s one… the always excellent Om Malik of GigaOm has a series on his personal blog called "What I am reading today". Here are a few of his recent lists. August 20th, 2013
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\”What I am reading today\” by Om Malik
Remember when I said we need more ways to find good blogs and blog posts? Here’s one… the always excellent Om Malik of GigaOm has a series on his personal blog called "What I am reading today". Here are a few of his recent lists. August 20th, 2013
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\”What I am reading today\” by Om Malik
Remember when I said we need more ways to find good blogs and blog posts? Here’s one… the always excellent Om Malik of GigaOm has a series on his personal blog called "What I am reading today". Here are a few of his recent lists. August 20th, 2013
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Paying attention by not automating too early
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, here is Jason Fried from this past July on Why we’re doing things that don’t scale on Signal vs. Noise: But automation can also lead to myopia. And premature-automation can lead to blindness. When you take human interaction out of a system, you’re removing key opportunities to see what […]
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We need more ways to discover great bloggers and blog posts
The Zemanta Tech Circle: Tech Circle is a simple way to recommend highly related content from its members to the whole Circle. We’ve long been fans of a well curated blog roll, but with the shift to content streams and mobile consumption, often the blog roll simply never gets seen. This isn’t really new and […]
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\”What I am reading today\” by Om Malik
Remember when I said we need more ways to find good blogs and blog posts? Here’s one… the always excellent Om Malik of GigaOm has a series on his personal blog called "What I am reading today". Here are a few of his recent lists. August 20th, 2013
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Scaling your business by doing things that don’t scale
Paul Graham in Do Things that Don’t Scale: The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can’t wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them. The entire piece by Graham is a must-read […]
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Starting your career on the Internet
Pasquale D’Silva on Medium in Starting your career as an Artist on the Internet: Your immediate goal should be getting a good foundation of work in your portfolio. You don’t have clients to report to yet. Learn as much as you can. Experiment. It’s freedom, embrace it. The same should be said for just about […]
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Why I speak at conferences and meet ups
Like Pamela Fox, speaking at conferences and meet ups has generally been part of my job description to help spread the word about the product or company that I’m working for. But also like Pamela I never really stopped to think about why I speak and whether or not I get anything out of it. […]
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How Windows Phone can gain on Android and iOS
Related: I’d love to see Windows Phone become the third horse in the smartphone OS race. Marco Arment in Google Blindness: Developers aren’t fools. We aren’t swayed by charismatic figureheads who try to convince us to develop for their platforms. The formula is quite simple. We’ll develop for a platform if: We use it. A […]
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I’d love to see Windows Phone become the third horse in the smartphone OS race
Fred Wilson, on _Android and iOS_: But I find myself rooting hard for Apple now. I sense the danger they are in and I don’t want either smartphone OS to be so dominant that we lose the level playing field we have now. It’s very important for startups, innovation, and an open mobile ecosystem for […]
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Bret Victor: The Future of Programming
Bret Victor: The Future of Programming is a presentation he did for Dropbox’s DBX conference earlier in July. Victor goes back-in-time to 1973 to give his presentation on what the future of programming could be. A perfect illustration for all of us that work on computers to know that we simply have not figured everything […]
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Everpix
I’m always on the lookout for new ways to deal with my ever-growing library of photos. It used to be that every time I upgraded my camera I had to worry about losing more and more space with each photo I captured. Each update to my camera created larger and larger filesizes making it very […]
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I’m doing terribly. A follow-up to my post on being less distracted by online services.
Two months ago to-the-day I wrote about turning off Push Notifications on my phone, tablet and laptop. In this area I’m still doing really, really well. I recommend this for anyone. I still do not have any applications that send me any notifications. Only if my wife calls me does my phone even ring. And when […]
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Investors; dream, research, bet.
Dave Winer in Solving problems sometimes requires work: I sent my ten steps to first post list to a VC friend. But clearly after the first step (which was go to fargo.io) he ditched the list, and made it up himself, and never got to first post. Now that would be fine if VCs weren’t […]
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Support and build services that are interoperable
Marco Arment finishes Lockdown, his piece on the war Facebook started and its latest casualty Google Reader, this way: We need to keep pushing forward without them, and do what we’ve always done before: route around the obstructions and maintain what’s great about the web. Keep building and supporting new tools, technologies, and platforms to […]
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Slow down. Read.
Late last week we started looking to fill two positions at Plain and wrote a blog post explaining what we were looking for, who would be eligible, and how to apply. We’ve gotten some great responses so far from people all over the world; Europe, South America, and the rural US. It’s great. Exactly what we […]
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Time & attention stole our RSS feed. Or, change your role models for a better web.
(I couldn’t decide on the title. Sorry.) Jeremy Keith wrote a really great piece about how companies like Twitter and Facebook feel threatened by data interoperability and how this is setting a trend on the web: Once Facebook had proven that it was possible to be the one-stop-shop for your user’s every need, that became […]
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Marco Arment on iOS 7
Marco Arment paints a picture full of opportunity in what Apple has done with iOS 7. I appreciate that he kept his opinion of whether or not he liked the design of iOS 7 to himself and rather decided to focus on the opportunity this big of a change creates. This big of an opportunity […]
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Jason Santa Maria on innovation
Jason Santa Maria, on a great piece on his not-updated-often-enough blog, on innovation: What people sometimes mean when they say innovation is actually iteration—continually building on good thinking and assumptions, then, most importantly, believing in the equity of those decisions enough to keep revising upon them. That is Barley. The next logical step. Not an innovation […]
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Greenville Grok was different and better
This past week Kyle Ruane and I drove to Greenville, South Carolina for the Greenville Grok – a half-week long string of events and activities put together by the great folks at The Iron Yard. Grok is unlike most conferences in a number of great ways. Most conferences focus on providing headline speakers to bring in a crowd. […]
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WordPress turns 10
I remember the first time I ran WordPress on my local computer. It was amazing. Within a few moments I was up and running with just a bit of PHP that could power hundreds of blog posts. Before I was using b2 (the name WordPress sort of had before that project became WordPress) I was copying and pasting HTML […]
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Focus on building your company as much as you do on your product
Starting a new business requires you to do many things that you may not enjoy doing. You may end up spending a lot of time focusing on tasks that you feel are mundane, unneeded, and downright archaic. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you but you’ll have to do these things. You’ll have […]
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Turning off Push Notifications worked. Now to go one step further.
On March 14th I turned off Push Notifications on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I no longer get interrupted by text messages, calendar notifications, tweets, email messages, or software updates. If I want to see if I have any new messages I have to check myself. At first this may seem like a recipe for missing very important notifications […]
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Say hello to the Lehigh Valley Tech audience
Tonight I had the privilege of presenting Barley during the Lehigh Valley Tech Meetup. I thought I’d take a photo of the audience. Are you in the photo? Tweet about it!
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Start-ups in Ireland face similar challenges to those in the rural US
Last year I linked to Inc.’s article about Dublin’s apparent growth in successful start-ups, investments, and the general tech scene. In contrast to that post is Patrick Collison’s post from October of last year showing the challenges that start-ups face in Ireland. The interesting question is probably “how hard is to start a successful start-up in Ireland compared to […]
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Matthew Smith on faking it until you make it
Matthew Smith in his interview with the always excellent The Great Discontent: Then people started asking me to build more things, like customer databases. I would nod in agreement as if to say, “Of course I can do that,” and then I’d get off the phone, crap my pants, and go do research on Google, ask questions […]
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Jason Schuller sees it too
Jason Schuller on Promising Solutions for Simple Websites and Blogs about our just-launched first product Barley: Barley is already beautifully branded and is dubbing itself as a “this-generation content editor” which I have actually bought into just from the teaser. From what I’ve read, it will be a hosted solution geared toward non-technical people (in other words, an […]
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Visiting the Keystone Observatory 2013
I try to get to the Keystone Observatory at least twice a year in the spring. It is only a few miles from our home and a great way to think about all things extraterrestrial. Last night I took my nephew Ethan. We saw Jupiter with four of its moons (one of which was transiting Jupiter), Saturn and two of its moons, Castor and Pollux (binary stars part […]
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Early stage investors should pay their own way in most cases
Bijan Sibet: For as long as I can recall, both as an entrepreneur and a vc, startups have been asked to pay their investors legal expenses related to their investment. Whether the company raises $500k or $5MM it has become “standard” that the company foots the investors legal bill. I didn’t understand it then and […]
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Fred Beste on Ben Franklin TechVentures
Fred Beste, on Ben Franklin TechVentures in Bethlehem, puts it best: I am not aware of any facility that matches this place. I’ve stated it this way: This is the building that every mayor wishes were in his city. It doesn’t get any better from an economic development standpoint. This is where you get the intellectual […]
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Jake Lodwick on PandoDaily – \”An acquisition is always a failure\”
Jake Lodwick, co-founder of College Humor and Vimeo, writes about how poorly the acquisition process can go and how it seems to happen over and over and over in our industry in An acquisition is always a failure: The party ended in 2006, when we sold our company to IAC, a conglomerate owned by media mogul […]
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Jake Lodwick on PandoDaily – \”An acquisition is always a failure\”
Jake Lodwick, co-founder of College Humor and Vimeo, writes about how poorly the acquisition process can go and how it seems to happen over and over and over in our industry in An acquisition is always a failure: The party ended in 2006, when we sold our company to IAC, a conglomerate owned by media mogul […]
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Jake Lodwick on PandoDaily – \”An acquisition is always a failure\”
Jake Lodwick, co-founder of College Humor and Vimeo, writes about how poorly the acquisition process can go and how it seems to happen over and over and over in our industry in An acquisition is always a failure: The party ended in 2006, when we sold our company to IAC, a conglomerate owned by media mogul […]
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Jake Lodwick on PandoDaily – \”An acquisition is always a failure\”
Jake Lodwick, co-founder of College Humor and Vimeo, writes about how poorly the acquisition process can go and how it seems to happen over and over and over in our industry in An acquisition is always a failure: The party ended in 2006, when we sold our company to IAC, a conglomerate owned by media mogul […]
Writing helps me think more clearly and to form or transform my opinions. I write about what interests me such as blogging, photography, technology, social media, and my personal creative projects.
Series archives: Diversions, WIS, typicalday