Michael Wade provides another gem of being productive.
One important thing today, that will put this day far ahead of days when you hoped to achieve much but scattered your focus on trivial matters.
— If You Do … by Michael Wade
Me? I’m just looking to complete that one important thing a day.
Micro.blog has been getting some great updates over the last couple of weeks and I’m looking forward to seeing more improvements to come. In using Micro.blog to migrate some content from another blog, I’ve been compiling a list of features I would like to see added.
One thing that puts me off post to Micro.blog more frequently is that I have my account linked to Twitter so that it syndicates my posts to Twitter. Lately though I’ve felt that I don’t want everything to be published to Twitter, but at the same time I don’t want to turn off the cross-posting to Twitter as every dollar helps keep Micro.blog going.
In the interests of being able to comfortably post more often though, I’ve disabled cross-posting to my Twitter account. If I want something to show on Twitter, I’ll post it there myself.
All this though leads to one thing I would love to see in Micro.blog and that’s the ability to opt-out (or in) to cross-posting with each post that I write. This is perhaps the biggest feature request of the three as it involves changes on the web client and the two native clients.
A couple of weeks I decided to import over 1700 posts from my Ghost blog to Micro.blog. The import went fine and after seeing the posts on my blog I was quite happy for everything to sit there. The only problem though is that the archive is difficult to navigate with such a large volume of posts. Most people might not have this amount of posts, but it would be nice to have a search feature on the posts page in the web client to allow people to find specific posts that they want to update.
Micro.blog allows two types of posts. Short posts that are 280 characters or less and longer posts that can have an optional title.
It would be great if these types of posts could be separated in the generated micro-blog site with class names in the CSS for each type of post. These same class names could be used in the custom CSS section of Micro.blog to to override the styling of posts depending on their length.
Maybe these things are already being considered and maybe they’re not. I know Manton is always chiming in on his timeline and is very active on Micro.blog’s Slack channels as well. So this is me asking. So how about it @manton?
I think the Frontlines series might be a good read while I wait for the last two books in the The Expanse series.
Better writing fundamentals by Nicholas Bate.
Finally got my freelance website moved over from Ghost to Jekyll. 👍
A refreshing thought from Nicholas Bate.
We feel we need to add. In fact so often we need to simplify, to reduce, to let go of. We actually need to subtract.
Be nice if feed readers like Feedbin could detect similar headlines for the last couple of days and bunch them together. Yeah, I could follow less feeds as well, but where’s the fun in that!
I wasn’t aware of Monzo’s VC funding. However, I’m still closing my account now that their pre-paid card is shutting down.
I’ve been playing with Wordpress again over the last few days. So much more going for it than any other blogging platform I’ve used. Wonder if it’s time to move from Ghost to Wordpress?
Looks like I’ve for a few updates to do over the weekend. Bootstrap 4 is here!
I’m considering a few changes in the way I blog.
Micro.blog for personal stuff, quotes, snippets, links and the like.
Ghost for longer posts on working, ideas, products and writing.
It should be noted that Micro.blog was the trigger for this whole thing. A streamlined way of publishing small or large updates and then syndicating them through to other social networks and blogs. Damn it’s good at that.
I’ve started to think that my Ghost blog should be more of a professional site than anything else. I think that’s what it’s lacking. Longer posts that I’ve taken the time to write.
Curtis McHale’s blog is a great example of a professional site used for such a purpose.
My blogging habits have changed. From posts that are a mix of personal and work on the one blog, to using two blogs for a mix of both. Now I’m seeing that one blog is more for personal stuff and the other is for things I’m working on and working towards. The work stuff, the professional stuff. The boundaries aren’t clear on this at the moment though, but I think they should be.
@patrickrhone has a similar setup. A professional site and a personal micro-blog.
I’m 90% sold on the idea. The thought of moving more content around isn’t appealing though. It would be worth it in the end though. Right?
Inbox zero.
Yesterday’s two NFL games are what the playoffs area all about. High scoring games with plenty of action. 🏈
New updates to Faviconographer. Might give it another try.
FastMail rule added to delete the almost daily emails I get from Cloudinary for their Heroku addon.
Atom still trying to play catchup with the likes of Sublime Text. I can’t see it ever happening.
This is a great move for Feedbin. Rather than following a single collection of accounts, I can now subscribe to a core collection of users, lists and perhaps even some individual accounts.
You can start adding Twitter content to Feedbin the same way you would subscribe to a feed. Feedbin will recognize any Twitter URL that contains tweets. It also supports shortcuts for subscribing directly to twitter @usernames as well as #hashtags.
Best of all though is that I can read these tweets alongside my existing RSS subscriptions.
Today Feedbin announced a new feature to their RSS reader which allows you to subscribe to Twitter users, searches, lists and hashtags.
I've been looking at this for the last couple of hours to find a way that will allow me to continue to use Twitter, but without mhaving to check on my timeline as often. Here's just a few ways that I see me using Feedbin's new Twitter subscription options.
A few months ago I removed analytics tracking from my blog. It was a decision based on the fact that I'm not interested in the numbers anymore. I don't want to see how many people viewed my blog in the last 24 hours, and I don't want to see how many visitors I've had in the previous week. These numbers don't drive why I blog. It's the content that drives why I blog. It's about getting links back to my blog from other bloggers.
To do this, I have a saved search in Feedbin that only includes blog posts that contain my name. Sure it doesn't have the accuracy of analytics tracking, but through the blogs that I follow and the times that my name appears in this search, it's a great indicator of what other bloggers like on my blog.
Feedbin's new Twitter integration will allow me to broaden my reach so that I can use searches on Twitter to include tweets that either includes my Twitter handle or my domain name.
Twitter's lists have always been difficult to use. I'm not a big fan of reading Twitter on my mobile and changing between lists on other apps is not great either. Feedbin's new Twitter integration will make digesting lists a lot easier.
I have some accounts on Twitter I follow, but I would like to bundle into lists. I've tried in the past to do this, but I frequently forget to check these lists. Separating these accounts into lists makes my timeline much easier to follow.
With these new lists to follow through Feedbin, it is a lot easier to follow and scan through.
Right, so Twitter dropped RSS a long time ago, and since then it's been difficult to follow people through anything other than Twitter on the web or through one of the many Twitter clients that are available. So it's not RSS to the rescue but Feedbin to the rescue by providing a genuinely different way of consuming Twitter.
The next few weeks will see the accounts I follow tail off to perhaps around fifty or so accounts, but I'll continue to use Twitter for sharing content from this blog and my micro-blog as well as responding to replies on Twitter.
Michael Wade once again delivers a gem of wisdom:
Move more into the role of “Creator” and away from that of “Reactor.”
A few weeks ago I had an idea. A newsletter that would provide help and guidance for a particular type of organisation in using the Internet and social media to promote and connect with their target audience.
To make this happen, I decided to use MailChimp to handle the sending out of the newsletter. I’m already a subscriber to several newsletters that use MailChimp, so if it’s good enough for them, then it’s good enough for me.
I was able to put together a template for my campaigns over a couple of hours. One thing that I had to do some digging around for though was how to send welcome emails out to new subscribers. I eventually found this and was able to have that email setup in about half an hour.
The final task was to update the landing page with the correct form attributes so that email addresses are sent to MailChimp directly. Again, straightforward.
I spent a couple of hours over the holidays putting together a landing page where people can sign up; I just needed the MailChimp form to complete this. The first pass is pretty much on par with every other landing page I’ve seen for such newsletters, so I’m happy with the results. It will be tweaked over time though to encourage sign-ups.
I already spent a couple of hours last week writing the first campaign. After a further few passes at it and some feedback from Jen, I had an initial campaign ready to send out.
I spent about 30 minutes testing the two emails that get sent out. I spent a bit more time on the first campaign, tweaking parts of the email design and ensuring that I had all the correct information in the right place.
MailChimp allows you to preview email and include live merge tags in your preview so that you can see what your subscribers see, but the real test is in sending out a test email. A test email allows you to look at all parts of the email as the subscriber should see it. Great for checking that everything is in place and that it reads fine.
The next part of this little project is to send out a few invites to organisations that would benefit from this newsletter and invite them to subscribe. With the first campaign sent out, I have an example of the content available through the newsletter for organisations to see.
I’m not expecting a massive rise in sign-ups over January, but I’ve got a goal in mind, so I’m aiming for that.
I was surprised by how quickly I was able to get a mailing list up and running on MailChimp. Previous attempts using MailChimp have always resulted in me turning away from it. This time though, I kept it simple, so I just got the absolute essentials in place. A welcome email and a first campaign.
Over the next few weeks, I'll be spending a bit more time digging into MailChimp and seeing else it can help with in maintaining an email list.
This bug on Ghost is driving me round the bend. Every character you type in is registered as two keystrokes so ‘t’ becomes ‘tt’ and pasting from the clipboard doesn’t work either. Why am I using Ghost again? 🤔
I’m considering a set of wireless headphones for client calls and blocking out the kids whiles I’m working. Recommendations?
Damn. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Forgot about them. 🎵
When it comes to planning the day with bullet journaling, there’s one aspect of it that frequently throws me. Knowing when a block of work should finish, and a new block of work should start.
I’ve been using plan bars (both daily and weekly) to plan out my day. When it comes to working through the day though, I usually find myself losing track of time and working through a block of the day that I had reserved for a particular task.
The first and obvious solution here is to use a calendar with reminders to let me know when I have to switch tasks, but if I’m using a calendar app then what is the point in using the bullet journal?
Also setting up a calendar like this requires a lot of clicking and typing, which I’m not keen on doing.
The best idea that I’ve come up with this for this problem is to split the day into blocks and have recurring alarms set for the start of each block. This alert will give me the nudge I need to look up and switch tasks if I need to. Most days the blocks will start and end at the same time, but there will be days where blocks will change from the usual times during the day. The Reminders app on macOS comes to mind, but I'm wondering if there's something even more straightforward than that that I could use.
If anyone else has any other ideas for staying on track through the day with bullet journaling, then I would love to hear them.