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, see Rinku, my local-first successor to Unmark.
Blog
Longer-form posts and essays.
Writing helps me think more clearly. This archive is longer posts; quick updates now live in notes.
Topics: AI, blogging, photography, programming, projects, Signboard
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 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…
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 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…
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 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…
Google’s Newspaper Archive
I don’t remember ever seeing this; Google’s Newspaper Archive. Wow. /via Coudal.
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 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…
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 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…
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 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…
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 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…
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 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…
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 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 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 coming to a mobile app. I’m sure a lot of people will be very happy about that.
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 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…
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 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…
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, 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…
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 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…
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 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…
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 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…
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 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….
Non-nerds missing out on RSS?
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…
A readable Wikipedia
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,…
Making remote teams work
The excellent Mandy Brown, CEO of Editorially, on Making remote teams work: One of the most unexpected things that I’ve learned from working remotely is that it isn’t just about accommodating different lifestyles or taking advantage of technology’s ability to compress long distances. Remote working encourages habits of communication and collaboration that can make a team objectively better:…
Communication for America
Jeremy’s title. Not mine. Jeremy Keith chimes in about remote work (see last post) and the advantages the “time shift” can have when working on large client projects: As it turned out, it wasn’t a problem at all. In fact, it worked out nicely. At the end of every day, we had a quick conference call, with two or…