Matthew Lang

Beauty or beast?

via FGGT

A project plan should be built in partnership with your client. When they buy into the project plan you then start a scope and build a proposal/scope off of it.

— Components of a Good Project Plan by Curtis McHale

Quality stuff from Curtis.

This planning deficit is nothing unusual. It would be a tribute to Boeing engineers’ advance planning that the BUFF (Big Ugly Fat, er, Fella) is due to keep flying until at least 2040, when the airplanes will be octogenarians...except that the longevity has been achieved despite the best that military planners could do.

— The B-52 Just Keeps on Flying by Air & Space Smithsonian

Amazing.

Email is great. It's a reliable form of content delivery that can reach a multitude of devices and it's platform independent. Who cares if it's Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS or Android you're running? Email is the cornerstone of any platform, which is why it's the preferred delivery method for DailyMuse.

As great as email is though, I also like having alternatives to email, something as flexible as email but also accessible. I would open my DailyMuse email a couple of times a day, but quickly it became lost amongst other emails. I needed a way of seeing my DailyMuse message for the day without opening my email.

For a few weeks now there's been a Today view in the DailyMuse application. If logged in and you visited it you would see the last snippet that DailyMuse sent you. Fine and good, but it was rendered within the context of the application and I quickly realised that it became lost amongst the rest of the elements of the application. I needed a view of my snippet that was free of the context of the rest of the application.

This morning I added a link in the DailyMuse sidebar that will address this issue. At the top of the sidebar is a Today link that will render a colourful view of your snippet for the day that is free from the rest of the application so that you can have your snippet front and center on your web browser.

Here's my snippet for today:

{% img middle http://s3.matthewlang.co.uk/2015/dailymuse-today-view.png "The Today View" "A screenshot of the today view from DailyMuse" %}

Rather than sticking with default font sizes for all snippets, I've also tweaked the font size for snippets that vary in length. If your snippet is small in length the font size for it will increase so that it becomes easier to read.

This has been a planned feature for a while, but viewing the snippet within DailyMuse has never felt right. With this in place now, I'm happy with being able to view my snippet for the day in both email and in my browser.

Interesting in using DailyMuse? It's free for 30 days after which it becomes a budget friendly $2 per month to use.

Great to see DailyMuse making a positive change.

Those are the two things I’m using it for so far but I can think of many others — daily exercise ideas, healthy snacks and recipes, writing prompts, study of scripture or philosophy, etc. Basically, anything that would be good to have a daily reminder for would be a good fit for this.

— How I Use DailyMuse by Patrick Rhone

Interested in trying it out?

... are everywhere. You just have to look.

Who cares. Just capture.

A reminder that Twitter is the ultimate destructive distraction. Since returning, I've definitely not been as active as I was in the past and I'm hoping to keep it that way.

For me, from here on in, moderation is key. I've been calmer, happier, more present, and less anxious for the past few months. If I missed something on Twitter, it bubbled up to me in other channels. I'm going to remember that as I re-enter the network: no obligations, no robotics. This stuff is supposed to make my life better.
— The Great Twitter Unfollow by Gina Trapani

Medium's recent announcement that they will start allowing people to use their own domain names for their Medium blogs will be welcome to many, but is it enough to make me switch to using Medium for my blog?

Medium has attracted it's fair share of critics over the last couple of years including myself. A blogging platform where all the content is listed under the one domain. A constraint maybe, but this might be overlooked by the fact that the actual content of the posts on Medium can stand up on their own when the quality of writing resonates with a particular audience.

Despite my gripes with Medium as a blogging platform, I have read and bookmarked a number of well written posts on Medium. I've no problem with the content that people produce, it's more Medium's one size fits all approach to listing all posts under one domain and wrapped in one look.

I have owned my own domain name for almost ten years now. Along with a design, while not exclusively unique to my blog but definitely more unique than Medium's design, I can't see how I could switch to using to Medium as a replacement for my blog. Being able to switch to your own domain is great, but that alone isn't enough for me. Personalising your blog with a look that sets it apart from others is why I continue to enjoy using Octopress. I'm free to adapt and change my blog to whatever I see fit.

At the end of the day I can't say that Medium is a bad choice of publishing platform. It's not my idea of a good publishing platform but my needs and requirements are different from others. It is a good sign though that Medium is moving ahead with plans to allow users to host content on their own domains.

with Nicholas Bate.

I spent my teens and many years after reading through the Discworld books and now I'm passing them onto my oldest to read. It was too soon for such a remarkable author.

via XKCD

It's been quiet of late on my blog and for a good reason. While my daily posts have ground to an almost complete stop, I do have a good reason for it.

Today I'm officially (and nervously) announcing a micro-service of mine, DailyMuse. So what is DailyMuse? Well, let me first take you back to a post that Patrick Rhone made on App.net.

Maybe something like this exists but, if not, someone should build it: I want to type a bunch of things into a place and then have that place pick a thing at random and email it to me once a day.

I made a note of this post with the intention of building something, but I never got round to it. Patrick's tweet in October was finally the nudge that I needed.

"Making cool stuff for our friends that they would like" sounds like a solid, successful, business plan to me.

— on App.net by Patrick Rhone

Now while I don't know Patrick personally, having not met him in person, he is someone who is a great influencer on how I work. His books are great source of reflection and I've long been a fan and user of his Dash/Plus system. So having established that I'm not friends with Patrick in the traditional sense, I still wanted to make this "thing" for him.

Having toyed with a few ideas before the end of last year, I started putting something more concrete together that Patrick could use. After a couple of weeks I had the basics of the service working. After a brief introduction by email, Patrick became the first user of DailyMuse.

That's the story behind the idea, but what is it? I think it can be best summed up as this:

DailyMuse is your own personal email subscription. You're the curator and audience.

Using DailyMuse you can collect quotes, phrases, lists and links in your own collection of snippets. DailyMuse then sends you one of these snippets at random, once a day.

Snippets are written in plain text or using Markdown. You can tell DailyMuse to pick a snippet at random or to pick from a queue of previously unsent snippets.

Receving the same snippet on consecutive days doesn't offer much value, so I added the ability to pick from snippets that hadn't previously been sent. There is still a lot to be done with it, but with the it's core value in place and working, it didn't make sense to hold on to it and never ship it.

So if getting the right start to the day sounds like your thing, and you don't mind curating your own collection of content to start the day with, then why not give DailyMuse a try? It's free for 30 days after which you can subscribe for $2 per month or £20 per year.

via FGGT

Here you go.

Can't wait to see this being available. It will be interesting to see if snippets can be saved to other tools like Dropbox.

via Wired