Matthew Lang

I'm still grappling with Micro.blog but what's reassuring is Manton dedication to staying the course for the platform with an eye to the long term.

I plan to stay the course. I’m inspired by the work of the IndieWeb, which was founded 6 years ago and is still gaining momentum today. I hope that the solar eclipse photos posted to indie microblogs today will last through the next North American eclipse 7 years from now, and longer.

— Flip the Iceberg by Manton Reece

Manton also includes a link to an article on AltPlatform that suggests blog-focused platforms could eventually become bigger than any of the existing social networks.

Open source tools like WordPress, 1999.io and Mastodon.social are creating many small networks of publishers, and popular tools like Twitter and Micro.blog could peer with them. If all of the social networks outside of Facebook interoperated at some level, they might eventually “flip the iceberg” and become the dominant form of social networking.

— How Twitter, Micro.blog & Mastodon could team up to compete with Facebook by AltPlatform

With so many different outlets and tools out there it can become difficult to decide on where to focus your energy.

I'll cover my reasons for not publishing on the different social networks later on in the week.

A while back, I read with disgruntlement about the change that Smile were introducing to their TextExpander product. It was the introduction of a cloud syncing change to their product which required a monthly subscription.

I wasn't too keen on the idea. The reason I wasn't too chuffed with the idea is that I only ever used TextExpander on my MacBook Pro and nowhere else. I decided to look for an alternative. I switched to aText and never looked back. Until now.

Last week I purchased an iPad Pro. I've spent the first couple of days getting the various apps I needed setup. Then I started working on getting together a usable development environment so that I could do everything on my iPad Pro that I can do on my MacBook Pro. Aside from some of the terminal hackery that I can do on my MacBook, I can do just about everything else on my iPad including web development work for clients.

With my new tablet of choice I started doing administration work last week. An invoice was outstanding so I started the process of gathering the work I did for the week and writing the invoice and email for the client. Invoice done, I moved to the email. After a couple of attempts at trying to generate my email template I then realised that I wasn't using my Macbook Pro which is why the auto-expanding snippet I use for this particular email didn't work. It was time to re-assess the auto-expanding snippet tool of choice.

So what's a familiar auto-expanding tool that let's me use a single library of snippets across multiple devices? Well, TextExpander of course!

Is the subscription price for this worth it now?

I think so.

Are you accountable?

It seems that I just can't let go of my Twitter timeline. Despite not been very active on Twitter for the last few weeks, I still like to read through my timeline and see what's what. Largely I mostly interested in web development news and updates from people but I'll read other bits that people have posted.

Lately though my Twitter timeline has been a storm of political updates about what Trump is doing, not doing and other news surrounding him. It's getting to the point where my timeline has become a channel for political news and lots of other updates from the US. To be honest my Twitter timeline isn't where I want to read about this.

What's happening in the US regarding Trump, prejudice and racism is important. There's change happening and that's good. What I find difficult to do is to follow my timeline with all of this going on.

I'm simply not interested anymore in these kind of updates on Twitter due to the fact that it's simply become too much to follow and digest.

I'm trying to get a reign on my timeline again by adding more topical filters to restrict what I see and block retweets from most of the people I follow.

It's not that I'm trying to create a bubble of the world I see. I know what's happening in the US and I'm aware of it through various news sites. I just don't need to see this in my timeline as well.

I honestly think this is the last chance for me and Twitter to get along. The last few months have seen me fall away from Twitter. A lack of tweets and activity on my part is due to the fact that I don't like spending too much time on Twitter these days. I see the value in what Twitter does for other people but there's already enough noise on it without me adding to it.

For the moment I'm just going to try and tame the timeline that I have.

Jack Baty has been using his new iPad in anger this week. The results are good!

I’ve been using the iPad exclusively while at home for more than a week and I have been continually surprised by how much I enjoy it. I’ve been emailing, managing projects, editing photos, drawing, tweeting, and generally carrying on like it’s actually normal doing stuff on an iPad other than reading social media sites and playing games. Who knew?

Surprise! The iPad is a Content Creation Device

I picked up an iPad Pro at the weekend that I'm currently using side by side with my MacBook Pro. The iPad Pro isn't intended to be my main development machine but it will be my portable development tool of choice. First impressions are good and Jack's blog has been a great read with his recent move to using an iPad.

... with the personal resilience guide from Nicholas Bate.

Cal Newport divulges his technique for researching books.

The key to my system is the pencil mark in the page corner. This allows me later to quickly leaf through a book and immediately identify the small but crucial subset of pages that contain passages that relate to whatever project I happen to be working on.

How I Read When Researching a Book by Cal Newport

Such a simple thing to do and yet I wonder why I haven't read of this before. I often fold down the corner of pages, but simply putting a line in the top of the page I can quickly thumb through a book without having to worry about folded corners of pages unfolding themselves and being missed.

Kurt Harden is concerned about the erasing of American history.

The first is that it strikes me as an effort to erase history. That never goes well. And I write as an Ohioan with absolutely no sympathy for the the Confederates memorialized in bronze, copper, or stone. The statues represent our past and they offer different reminders to different people.

Erasing history by Kurt Harden

I agree with Kurt on this one.

By removing these statues, the American people are removing part of their history. Yes, these statues represent a side of America that many would like to forget but it's in these statues and the history they represent that we see the progress that has been made.

Rachel Kaser over at The Next Web certainly thinks so.

Like it or not, social media provides an easy-to-use template that lets anyone make their personal information available — and most of those sites are a hell of a lot easier to use than even the mildest website creation software.

— It’s time to kill the personal website by Rachel Kaser for The Next Web

I can certainly see Rachel's point. With all the progress we've made on the web, the days of self-publishing means that you don't need to be tied to a domain or a way of publishing your thoughts online. Social media and blogging platforms make publishing online easy.

Where I disagree though is that while these social media platforms are easy to use, they require an investment of effort in order to be effective. In order to stand out you need to be publishing consistently and that requires investing time and effort in that platform. I'm just not prepared to make that investment in order to build my name when I can use a personal website.

Having my own website means that I'm only investing in the content at my own website and then optionally using social media to get my content out further. I not only control the content but I also having a simpler delivery method for people. I have a place where people can follow me without the pressures of social media timelines. You can visit my website or subscribe to my RSS feed. It might be less convenient than following me on social media, but when you consider that you can read my website in a less crowded environment, away from the timeline, then I think having a personal website is essential if you want people to actually read what you're publishing.

So following the footsteps of TextExpander and Day One, the writing app Ulysses is now moving towards a subscription service.

I've wrote in the past about subscription services. I get why people and companies are doing it. Subscriptions provide a more stable revenue stream and allow consistent development of the product.

If I was a keen writer and I used Ulysses on a daily basis then I imagine that I would take out the Ulysses subscription. For just under $5 a month I'm getting a great writing tool that I can use on all my devices.

$5 isn't a lot of money, but when you're working on the Internet on a daily basis, it won't be the only subscription service you'll have. You'll have other subscriptions for other products and services that you use and these all add up. With all these subscriptions, they can quickly mount up.

I used TextExpander for a few years until they announced that they would be moving to a subscription plan for their users. Many seen as it as a good move for TextExpander to support the business and I agree with that. What I don't agree with though is the pricing. Paid monthly, TextExpander is only 83 cents cheaper than Ulysses. Two vastly different products, but very similar in pricing. Are they priced right? Who knows. All I know is that I refuse to pay a monthly subscription service for a product that I only use on a single device.

I'll be interested to hear what Curtis has to say on this. I know he's been a long time user of Ulysses but we emailed each other recently and he did say he was cutting back on subscriptions. Will he cut back on this? I'd like to say he'll stump out for the subscription, but I'm not entirely convinced.

Lastly I also just remembered that Ulysses is available on SetApp. It will be interesting to see if Ulysses remains on Setapp as it only costs $9.99 per month and for that you get access to an increasing number of apps for OS X as well as Ulysses.

Update 2017-08-10: It looks like SetApp user's don't need to worry as Ulysses will be unlocked on your other iOS devices if you have already picked Ulysses using SetApp. Good to know!

In addition to those “big” arguments from above, there are bunch of smaller advantages, too. One example: if you use Ulysses via the Setapp subscription, we will now automatically unlock the iOS app as well. And the way we modeled and priced our subscription plans, now much closer resembles the value each plan provides, than a “pay once” model ever could.

— Why we’re switching Ulysses to Subscription by Max Seelemann

It's been a long time coming, but it's finally here. A couple of weeks ago the first major update to the publishing platform Ghost was released.

I was on holiday at the time so I decided to leave upgrading until I got home. It's been a few days now since I got back but this morning I decided to upgrade the two sites I have running on Ghost, this one and my DigitalBothy website. The upgrade process itself was straight-forward. Warnings were provided to indicate deprecated helpers in the themes for each site, but aside from that I didn't have any trouble upgrading.

The new UI is a welcome change and includes a number of beneficial changes but perhaps the most important change is the editor itself. Gone is the side by side editing and preview panes (although you can still use this if you need to) and instead there's a single pane for writing that is editable and displays your writing in a better format. Bigger, bold text for headings, links highlighted and many other improvements.

This is a welcome update to the publishing platform and I look forward to spending more time writing for my blog than I have done recently.

On a day where a Brit has won his fourth Tour de France, the focus seems to be more on Jordan Spieth's win at The Open. Why isn't Froome's success more of a talking point then?

There is no fluking a yellow jersey. Three weeks of physical attrition, of relentless mental calculations and stress, of staying ahead of a shifting mass of rivals ganging up to unseat you, of managing egos and efforts within your own team, of high mountains and cruel cross-winds.

And yet when Chris Froome won his third Tour last year, having run up Mont Ventoux in his cleats on his way to victory, he failed to even make the 16-strong shortlist for the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year.

— Tour de France 2017: Is Chris Froome Britain's least loved great sportsman? by Tom Fordyce for BBC Sport

I was a long time fan of cycling. Ever since I first seen Miguel Indurain capture his Tour wins, I was hooked. Every year I would watch the Tour. Then I started watching the Giro and the Vuelta too. I love watching the big cycling tours. It was the highlight of my sporting calendar. Only the Super Bowl rivalled it in terms of how much I looked forward to it.

Then there was the Armstrong period, and then after that a number of incidents involving other riders. That's when I started losing interest in the sport. Despite those many years of following it, I just couldn't watch it anymore.

I tried watching a stage of the Tour this year but I couldn't keep my focus on it.

I admire Froome's success, I can't help but think though that perhaps there are other factors in this. Is the UK is falling out of love with cycling? Do we have success fatigue with cycling? It's a terrible thought considering a British rider has achieved his fourth win of the Tour, but with all the recent success that Great Britain has had with cycling, perhaps it just doesn't have the same appeal it used to have.

Perhaps the Tour de France needs a change of format to make it more interesting? One thing that usually happens in the tour is that the winner of the yellow jersey holds onto the jersey for a number of days before the last stage of the race. The last stage of the tour is frequently a foregone conclusion. Does it need to be changed up a bit to make it more difficult for riders to hang onto the yellow jersey?

I don't know why Froome isn't getting more spotlight in the media for his success.

All I know is that my preferred sport to watch on the day is golf rather than cycling. So I settled down today to watch what I could of the golf and enjoyed every minute of it.

It's a tribal thing. I used to be part of the cycling tribe, but recently I started enjoying golf more. I still cycle every now and again but it just no longer has the pull that it had in the past.

Dave Winer ponders on the possibility of an open source version of the popular blogging platform Medium.

What if Medium had been designed from the start to be the Mother Node of a network of clones. The basic software would be available for installing on your own server, but if you want, there's a place you can put your document today, now, quickly, where everyone will be able to read it, now and for the foreseeable future.

— What if Medium were open source by Dave Winder

This is the kind of thing that I can get behind. I like Medium's approach to easy publishing but I dislike the fact that everything is on their network.

I've been a user of GitHub for a long time now. Ever since I started my career in Ruby on Rails I've had a GitHub account.

I'm looking again at alternatives to GitHub mainly out of curiosity. There's been some improvements to GitHub over the last few years and new features are gradually coming out but there are other options out there.

I did move some private repos to BitBucket a few years ago, but due to the lack of any extra features I moved these repos back. BitBucket just didn't have anything of added value that would keep me using it.

I tried GitLab a few months ago but I didn't really give it a fair go. I spent a couple of weeks using but I didn't really dig into it too much. I created my account there again to give it a try. I've been using it now for a week and I've moved a number of private repos over from GitHub. The nice thing is that as well as my repo GitLab has moved over my issue list for each repo. Another thing I don't have to worry about moving it across.

It's still early days to make a final decision on this but I've been impressed with not only what GitLab does at the moment, but the pace in which they are releasing new features.

The best thing and worst thing about GitHub is its community size. A lot of developers use only GitHub for source code hosting and although some people might see this as a good thing, it's like saying that Facebook is the only social network platform out there. Yes, there are a lot of people using GitHub but there are alternatives to it and I'm always willing to explore the alternatives to any development tool that I use.

Once I've spent another few months using GitLab I'll probably have a final decision on where I'll be hosting the bulk of source code. I won't be closing down my GitHub account if I do decide to use GitLab for hosting my source code. I still need a GitHub account for client work, but that's all it will be used for.

Just as it is important to set aside time to think, it is important to block out time for reading. If you believe that such time will be available later in the day, it is likely that you are mistaken.

— Reading Time by Michael Wade

I'm slowly getting back into a lot of things in the last couple of weeks. Blogging, writing and even reading. Churning through a few books at the moment, but plans are in place to make reading a bigger habit of mine in the future.

A sobering read about the future of the planet and what climate change effects could result in in a hundred years time.

Heat is just one of a number of problems we face in the future.

Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today.

— The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

And the problem of pollution doesn't get any better

Then there are the more familiar forms of pollution. In 2013, melting Arctic ice remodeled Asian weather patterns, depriving industrial China of the natural ventilation systems it had come to depend on, which blanketed much of the country’s north in an unbreathable smog. Literally unbreathable. A metric called the Air Quality Index categorizes the risks and tops out at the 301-to-500 range, warning of “serious aggravation of heart or lung disease and premature mortality in persons with cardiopulmonary disease and the elderly” and, for all others, “serious risk of respiratory effects”; at that level, “everyone should avoid all outdoor exertion.”

— The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

And finally there's the problem of the rising oceans.

Barring a radical reduction of emissions, we will see at least four feet of sea-level rise and possibly ten by the end of the century. A third of the world’s major cities are on the coast, not to mention its power plants, ports, navy bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshlands, and rice-paddy empires, and even those above ten feet will flood much more easily, and much more regularly, if the water gets that high. At least 600 million people live within ten meters of sea level today.

— The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

I've read about the recent attempts by scientists to create devices that trap and process carbon dioxide emissions but everything so far as been on a smaller scale. Reading this article on the NY mag website, I immediatley thought of the Aliens movie and the massive terraforming plant that features in that movie. Nevermind terraforming other planets, perhaps we'll have to terraform our own planet first in order to survive.

I'm not sure if Nicholas Bate is a comic books kind of guy, but I'm sure he'll make an exception for The Beatles: Yellow Submarine comic when it comes out.

Singletrack World are testing a new British built steel hardtail, the Trillion Prime 27.5.

I wish there were bikes like this 20 years ago. The mind is willing but the body is beyond the kind of shenanigans that this bike is built for.

I've been using Slack for a few years now. I use it more for work than anything else. I am part of a number of different client teams and it's through these that we do most of the day to day communication. I have to be honest it has become something of a necessary evil to have, but it is an easy way to stay in contact with clients. For clients that have only a handful of employees then I recommend that we just stay in touch with phone calls, emails and of course whatever project management tool that works best for the client.

Benjamin Pollack's post about his issues with Slack are good points and with more people turning to apps like Slack, it's worth remembering that Slack isn't a great tool and should only be used if there is a genuine need for it other than, "Hey I need this right now!".

Perhaps the greatest argument against using Slack isn't the filtering of communications or the notifications.

It's the version of Markdown that Slack uses for it's messages. It's just not Markdown.

5. Its version of Markdown is just broken

I’m going to use up an entire heading purely to say that making *foo* be bold and _foo_ be italic is covered in Leviticus 64:128 and explicitly punishable by stoning until death.

— Why I Hate Slack and You Should Too by Benjamin Pollack

What grieves me more is that there isn't a week goes by where I don't end up sending a message formatted incorrectly because Slack has it's own version of Markdown.

Slack isn't a necessary evil but teams should consider Benjamin's points before deciding if Slack is worth using.

Give me email and a phone any day of the week.

Day One's change to subscription pricing model is taking some flak but I think it's a good move for them and ensures that it will be around for a long time to come.

Subscription pricing isn't new to apps, but it's on the rise and this is largely in part because upgrade prices alone for apps are not sustainable.

A great example of app pricing in my book is the Todoist app. While the Todoist app itself is free, they also have a premium subscription which really adds value what you get from using Todoist. It's subscription models like this that are the way forward. Paying for the software you use on a regular basis. In a lot of cases the pricing is very reasonable and I certainly wouldn't argue over paying between $20 and $50 per year for software that I value and use on a daily basis.

David Sparks rounds up the changing landscape of app pricing nicely.

The traditional model for productivity apps was the upgrade price, where developers released a new version every year or so and everyone paid a reduced fee upgrade price. I know the App Store has made improvements over the last few years but, having zero inside knowledge, I can’t help but feel we will never see upgrade pricing in the App Store. In the meantime expect more quality apps to go to the subscription model and, if they are apps you love (or even like), I’d encourage you to support them through the transition.

— Productivity Apps and Subscription Pricing by David Sparks

It seems that a lot of the things I'm reading online point towards long-form blogging again.

Gregory Brown sums up the change nicely in way I didn't think of.

Instead, I thought about how it might be nice to have a couple hundred blog posts rather than thousands of tweets. How it might be nice to build a few dozen deep relationships with people who read my stuff here, rather than hundreds of shallow relationships in 140 character bursts.

— Bye Twitter, Hello Blogging! by Gregory Brown

Deep relationships through blogging. I've already met a number of great people through my blog. It's about time I started writing here again to keep those ties going.