Development of my DailyMuse service has been lagging in the last year. Sure I've shipped a few features for users, but other than that I've just not had the urge to develop it further.

It's still a valuable service to me and is to others as well. People are paying good money for it so why not improve it in any way I can?

In the last three months, I've been silently shipping little improvements and updates to DailyMuse in preparation for a big application update. Last night I shipped the latest update for DailyMuse which includes migration to Rails 5 and the use of Bootstrap 4 for the front end.

These two big updates have been on the DailyMuse backlog for a long time. In the last few weeks I've been chipping away at both of them to get them production ready.

A More Welcome Landing Page

The final result is a much more professional and welcome landing page.

Gone is the stark landing page, replaced with an interesting background and a better description of the DailyMuse service.

There's still room for improvement here though. I still think it's looks basic and could do with an illustration or graphic to accompany the description of the service. Also the form sits on the right hand side of the page as more of an afterthought. Would it flow better if the form naturally followed the product description?

Lots of to think of here and it will change over the next few weeks.

Application Foundations

Within DailyMuse itself there's be a big update to the look and feel of the service.

Instead of the two column layout I had before, it's now three columns with greater scope for adding contextual information in the far right column. It was always a problem trying to fit everything into two columns, but after looking at a number of other web applications, three columns proved to provide more space when needed.

Bootstrap 4 now includes the card component which I thought was a great way to highlight cards in DailyMuse. Not only does it offer a great way to encompass the card, but it also allows me to add extra information to each particular card.

There's still a number of changes to make to the front end though.

• Gradually migrate away from the obvious Bootstrap 4 look with my own look for DailyMuse.
• Make better use of the three columns with widgets for today's card, upcoming cards, and cards sent on this day in the past.

Let's Not Forget Features!

There's also a number of features due to be shipped in the next few months.

• Card delivery by RSS. Email isn't everyone's cup of tea. RSS was the next obvious choice to receiving DailyMuse card.
• Promote cards in the queue so that you can decide what to send in the foreseeable future.
• Better randomising of cards to reduce the possibility of a card being repeatedly sent over a few days.
• Collections being an idea where you can add cards to a collection of cards. These can be added to your DailyMuse email so that receive multiple cards at a time.

I'm not worried if DailyMuse doesn't make it as a service that has millions of users, but it would be nice to make it to the thousand user goal. It's a great service for me to exercise my Ruby knowledge and also hone a few other skills and certainly helps with it's daily email. I’m certainly looking to expand it into a better service over the next few months.

Curtis McHale has the three step process for marketing your business. Blog, podcast and meet people.

The primary thing you need to do is blog. Write for your own site at least weekly. You write because when people have issues, what do they do? An internet search. And search engines index your writing. People will land on your site and start to get to know you. Getting to know you is the start of the sales process.

— A 3-step marketing plan for your business by Curtis McHale

The one thing I think I couldn't do is podcast. I could write all day if I had the chance. Meeting people certainly isn't an issue, but I think putting your voice out there is something that will take me a while to do.

Dave Winer may be kick-starting an old service. Share Your OPML.

In 2006 I had a web service called Share Your OPML. It was fun. It was a way to see what other people were subscribed to, for news and podcasts. But we hit scaling walls, and the project fell into disuse, and eventually I took it down.

Now we know how to scale much better than we did then, and the community is growing more slowly. So I thought it would be interesting to try it again and see what happens.

So here's the question -- if I put up a web app that asked for your OPML would you upload it?

— Would you share your OPML, again? by Dave Winer

I'd love to see this happen.

Leo Babauta at Zen Habits has the lowdown on how to write every day. And it all starts with a reason.

Most important: Have a great reason. The rest of this doesn’t matter if you skip this step. Answer this question: Why do you want to write every day? If it’s because it sounds fun, sounds cool, sounds nice … you’ll abandon it when you face discomfort. If you want to do it to help someone else, to make the world a better place, to lift someone’s spirits, to reduce your pain, to find a way to express your deeper self … then you can call on this deeper reason when things get difficult.

— How to Write Every Day by Zen Habits

This is wrong. A blatant mis-use of technology.

I've been rebooting a few habits and processes over the last few weeks and one emerging trend from all this is that I'm going back to basics.

Instead of putting my tasks in Todoist, I'm capturing them in a pocket notebook. I don't need a another task manager app. I can capture the task in my notebook just fine.

Instead of using a 3rd party calendar app on macOS I'm using Calendar. I don't need another calendar app. I can outline my day in the macOS Calendar app just fine.

Instead of writing everything in Ulysses, I'm writing this post straight into the Ghost editor. I don't need another editor to write it in. I can write it in the Ghost editor just fine.

When you see the tools that are available to you, it can be easy to make yourself jump through hoops to justify the use of these surplus tools. All we're doing though is adding extra layers to get one thing done. When you remove those layers, it can be surprisingly simple to do just that one thing. And that's just fine.

Netflix's fourth superhero series will air in March 2017.

I started watching Luke Cage last night, but Daredevil is still my favourite.

... from Michael Wade.

Working on Friday right down the to wire again and then a quick turn around to get ready to go out for dinner and celebrate my Dad's birthday. Caffe Royale was tonight's choice and it didn't disappoint. Italian theme restaurant with a great selection of food. Highly recommended.

We've been looking at purchasing a "nearly new" second car for quite some time, but nothing has shown up that matches our price point. A car showed up on the web through the week, but no pictures meant we had to go down to the showroom to get a closer look. Glad we did. Found ourselves a great little runaround car within our price point. Later on, went to church with Ethan and then headed home for dinner and few hours in front of the television catching up with the golf.

The weather on Sundays has been terrible over the last few weeks. Ethan did have a medal scheduled for Sunday but he's been loaded with the cold. He wasn't up for a full round so I took him out for nine holes just to get out the house for a while. He's playing well with his new Ping clubs and I'm sure by the start of the season next year he'll be ready to slash his handicap down.

Rounded up the weekend by finishing my sketchnotes for the Ryder Cup and then watching the final matches come in. Europe didn't play their best and the USA did. You can't argue with a simple point like that, but hats off to each of the European players for a good effort. It's not always going to work out on the day and it didn't for some of the European players but that's just the way golf is.

I haven't done any sketchnotes for a while but seeing Mike Rohde's great Packers game sketchnotes got me curious about doing the same for the Ryder Cup. For a first attempt it wasn't bad.

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Still love these movies.

via The Verge

... from an essential blog to follow. Of course it's Nicholas Bate.

Still don't own a Raspberry Pi, but the benefits of having one are far outweighing the drawbacks now. Especially with this new look and feel for the Raspbian desktop.

A Game of Thrones is now available on iBooks. A must buy!

Curtis McHale on the placebo that continually changing your productivity tools offers and why it's best to stick with the basics.

For a time a new system feels great and we do get more done. But then the problems surface and the problem is how we use the productivity tools. A new productivity tool or strategy is almost always a placebo for your poor productivity habits. The only utility in these new tools is often that they let you think you’re doing better when the cruft hasn’t built up yet.

— Why you shouldn't change productivity systems by Curtis McHale

Over the last few weeks I've been looking at themes for Wordpress and Ghost.

Now it's easy to say that Wordpress has a clear advantage over Ghost. It's a CMS that's used by millions of people all over the world. Wordpress has been around since the early days of the Internet and it's still the goto CMS for many people and rightly so. It's extensible, stable and has thousands of themes available for it.

The Wordpress marketplace for themes is huge. There are thousands of themes available for all different types of sites. From minimal themes for bloggers to highly customisable themes for organisation sites. There's something for everyone.

Ghost is still relatively new when compared to Wordpress and while it is more specifically a blogging platform as opposed to a CMS like Wordpress, it's still gathering a steady number of fans.

The Ghost marketplace for themes isn't so big but that doesn't mean there should be a shortage of themes.

There are a number of themes available but there's two problems I see with most of the themes available for Ghost:

1. Image heavy themes - It seems that most themes for Ghost see having images as a neccessity in their theme. While looking for a theme for my own blog I found it difficult to find a theme that didn't feature a full width banner and images for every post. Their themes probably do allow imageless posts but they never show that in their previews.

2. Out of date themes - Ghost is on version 0.11 but many of themes available are falling behind in terms of compatibility.

It seems there's a gap in the market for Ghost themes that don't need images everywhere and stay compatible with the latest versions of Ghost.

The number of people using Ghost isn't in the same realms as Wordpress but I do find it much easier to use as a blogging platform. Ghost as a product is generating revenue and with an open source option available, there's definitely a growing number of people using it.

With the right marketing a designer/developer could do well with a number of themes that focus on minimal blogging rather than images.

I released a new version of the Ghost theme I use for this blog last night.

In an effort to kickstart the blogging habit again, I looked at my blog and ways that I think it could be improved in terms of readability.

Improved readability

The previous version of Daring had a default font size that was far too small. Even on my MacBook Pro at 1280px wide the font size difficult to read. I've bumped the default size up to help.

I've also made the width of the content area slightly wider and reduced the padding of the content area. I'm trying to use as much width as I can without pushing the sidebar column and the content column too close together.

More themed elements

I've also included a number of themed elements for the blog. The bar at the top is nothing more than a bit of decoration on the page and there is additional styling for submit buttons you might have on a contact form.

This is just another step towards producing a quality Ghost theme for people that don't want to use huge banners and images for their blogs.

After a week of considering closing this blog and starting afresh elsewhere I've decided against this move. I'm trying to kick-start the blogging habit for October and so this week is a spell of light blogging to get me started. Expect more frequent writing here from now on!