Google’s New Self-Driving Car
Google recently introduced a new self-driving car at Code Conference. This was slightly different than their previous self-driving cars in that they manufactured the entire car as well as the system that…
Blog
Posts, notes, and things worth sharing.
Longer thoughts, quick observations, photographs, and links. All in one place, newest first.
Kayaking with my nephew
Last Friday I was able to take my nephew out in my Oru Kayak for an hour or so. It was a blast.
The State of the WordPress Theme Industry
David Perel, of Obox Themes and SalesGenius, on The State of the WordPress Theme Industry: These days there is very little to choose from between theme companies. Themes look the same, have…
App Constellations
Fred Wilson on the growing trend of companies producing more than one mobile application, each that expose different sets of features from the same service: I have been calling this trend App…
Marco Arment on Good Portable Headphones That Aren’t Beats
Marco Arment: I haven’t tried every headphone on the market — far from it (much to my chagrin). But among those I’ve tried, there are some clear winners, and a handful of…
Seventeen People
Jon White: Unironically yapping about my love for this in 2014 is tricky, because my love for the series it belonged to has become so uncomfortably, uh, asterisk-laden lately. Back in those…
Litely
Cole Rise, whom I mentioned in What I saw this week #7, and Sam Soffes have collaborated on a great app called Litely. Litely is an app for editing photos using Rise’s…
Take time to focus on long term goals
In Caddy Shack II Randy Quaid’s character is famous for saying “Don‘t hit it long … No, no, wait. Don‘t hit it short … Wait, hit it long but let it go…
Make unread counts optional. Or, Brent Simmons ruined me and I’m OK with that.
There’s some conversation about whether or not applications such as Twitter, email, or RSS clients should have unread counts on their icons. I seem to think yes, but perhaps Brent Simmons ruined…
Let’s start talking again
For the past several years the trend has been swaying away from open, real, face-to-face communication — especially in tech culture. No meetings, remote work, less email, more chat. Over the last…
How we use Unmark
You may have read how I use Unmark, but here also is how Chris does, how Tim does, and how Kyle does. Update (October 2026): For the current version of this idea,…
Yes, it is more work to subscribe than to follow, but that is OK with me
Fred Wilson, in A Founder’s Notebook, describing how “hard” it is to subscribe to a blog that isn’t on Tumblr but is on the open internet. My only complaint is that its…
You should go to meetups
Last night I joined Kyle Ruane, Michael O’Boyle, and Bruno Galvao and drove two-and-a-half hours to Brooklyn — simply to attend a small tech meetup. If you’ve been subscribed to my blog…
Google’s Newspaper Archive
I don’t remember ever seeing this; Google’s Newspaper Archive. Wow. /via Coudal.
Systematic #89
I was very happy to be a guest on Systematic #89. Brett Terpstra and I discussed building things behind closed doors and in the open (which I’ve recently covered a little on…
CMS recommendations
There are a lot of CMSes out there now. So what should you use? Should you use just one CMS and live with it for every project? Should you choose different CMSes…
An example of how terrible Wix is
Sometimes we’re asked: “How do you compete with Wix, which is free, with Barley CMS?” My answer is usually “You get what you pay for.” If you need an example of how terrible Wix…
Crafting link underlines on Medium
Marcin Wichary, on Medium: Unfortunately, for all the advances in web typography we’ve seen during the years — better CSS properties, more support for internationalization, custom web fonts — underlines remained mostly as they were, with…
How I use Unmark
Update (October 2026): I now use Rinku, Unmark’s local-first successor. It keeps the same focus on working through links, with your library stored as Markdown files. Some have asked how I use…
Me on Happy Monday
Yesterday’s episode of the happiest of podcasts, Happy Monday, featured your’s truly. We talked about how I blame my mom for being a geek, 9rules, Barley, Spacebits, and much more. Thanks to my…
Evan Williams on online publishing
Evan Williams, at Fortune: It feels like we considered this area [publishing] done and we stopped working on it. Clearly there’s more to do. We agree. Ev also announced that Medium is…
Ron Husband, on Beauty and the Beast
In October of last year I mentioned Ron Husband’s blog in one of my “What I saw this week” posts. Man I miss composing those. With Unmark out, I really should get back…
Spacebits
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.
Move the web forward
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…
Brie Weiler Reynolds works from home
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…
Matt D. Smith on blogging
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,…
Fresh URL
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…
Slack changes the way you work
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…
The anonymity I know
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…
Using Image Capture to clear your Camera Roll on iOS
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…