Blog
Writing helps me think more clearly. This archive is longer posts; quick updates now live in notes.
Topics: AI, blogging, photography, programming, projects, Signboard
Chris Lema, on how things have changed in the WordPress theme industry: Today people treat themes like IKEA furniture – easily replaced and never intended to last for years or decades. He makes some excellent points. In case you missed it, Lema’s piece is in response to this.
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 drives it. Liz Gannes, at Re/Code: The car — which was conceived and designed by Google, unlike the ones it previously modified — lacks many of…
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 very similar features and all offer decent support. If you look at the industry’s biggest market — business themes — you will be hard-pressed to know who built what. This…
Last Friday I was able to take my nephew out in my Oru Kayak for an hour or so. It was a blast.
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 models I haven’t tried seem worth consideration since they’ve gotten so much acclaim. He mentions more models in his blog post than I’ve ever owned in…
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 Constellations. Facebook now has a collection of mobile apps that share a single login and have app to app linking built in. Google has a collection…
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 halcyon early-00’s days, I loved The West Wing. We all did! And now that it’s streaming to boot, freeing me from fiddling with those box-set envelope-sleeves,…
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 Litely photo presets. I’ve been using it for a bit and I’m really digging some of the interactions and, obviously, the presets are great. If you’re…
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 short” So, which should you focus on? The long term or the short term? The somewhat obvious answer is that it is good to learn to…
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 me years ago. When he built NetNewsWire he never intended for people to think they had to keep up with every post from thousands of different…
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 few months our team has been working hard to create a coworking community in Scranton, PA. We’ve been reaching out to freelancers, creative people who work…
You may have read how I use Unmark, but here also is how Chris does, how Tim does, and how Kyle does.
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 not on Tumblr, where it would be an instant and easy follow. It takes more work to follow a blog when its on the open Internet…
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 for any amount of time you’ve probably seen that I go to a lot of meetups, even some that are 12 hours away, and I’ve had…
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 our company blog), about our favorite services shutting down, about watercolor painting, kayaking, and our three picks of the week. For those wondering, here is my…
I don’t remember ever seeing this; Google’s Newspaper Archive. Wow. /via Coudal.
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 based on the project your working on? My recommendations for CMSes vary and are biased (since I’m one of the team behind Barley CMS). But here they…
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 very little customization available to web designers. Marcin goes on to show exactly how they did the best they could to clean up something as simple…
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 is, check this out. A nice watercolorist named Stan submitted his art to my Watercolor Gallery to be featured. He tried to tell me his URL…
Some have asked how I use Unmark, our to-do application for bookmarks. We only just recently redesigned, rebuilt, and released Unmark so I waited a few weeks to write this post until my habits formed more clearly. Every link I see goes into Unmark On average I will see between 2 and 50 links per day. I’ll see…
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 good friend Josh Long and new friend Sarah Parmenter for having me on their show. It was a lot of fun to have a relaxing chat with…
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 to doing them. Ron Husband was a Disney animator and is blogging his experiences through the years. Just recently he published a post about working on…
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 coming to a mobile app. I’m sure a lot of people will be very happy about that.
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.