Matthew Lang

Last night I shipped the ability to search your bookmarks in Markcase. With over 1800 bookmarks in my collection, finding anything was beginning to get a bit frustrating.

The search query will match any term in a bookmark’s title, description or URL and will only search through your own bookmarks.

I want to be able to search over URLs as well, but the results for your search may yield more results than you would like depending on the term. URLs can be quite lengthy and therefore can be included in the search results when you might not expect them to be there. For now, I am going to leave searching over URLs in. I haven’t used it enough to see whether it will be useful in the long term or not.

The next step is the importing and exporting of bookmarks. I’ve put this off long enough, but it’s the next best feature to implement to entice a few more subscribers to the service.

Once importing and exporting is in place, then it’s on to billing. I’ve always said that Markcase will be a paid service, but for just now I’m happy to let people use it for free. I’m hoping to have billing in place by the summer which will then let me focus on performance and usability improvements for a few months.

A study commissioned by Microsoft found that since the year 2000 – or about when the mobile revolution began – the average human attention span dropped from 12 to 8 seconds, which places us just below a goldfish, which tends to stay focused for an entire 9 seconds at a time.

— Slack Is Not Where ‘Deep Work’ Happens

Wow. In almost 20 years we’ve become less focused than a goldfish.

I get ticked off by Slack as a platform, but not for what it is, but how it’s used. Instead of restricting channels to specific actions or topics, Slack allows any channel to be openly used and abused without user’s even knowing that they are distracting others. Why have one firehose channel when you can have ten?

I do miss the days of freelancing where I could get in a few hours of deep work in the morning and then catch up with clients and meetings in the afternoon.

I would love to see Woods win at Augusta today. It’s taken a while but he’s finally back to winning form. As a fellow Brit, I would also like Poulter to win as well. He’s a Ryder Cup legend but he’s due a major win.

Throw Schauffele into the mix as well as I drew him out the hat for the pro shop raffle and I have a dilemna for the final day of the masters.

Whoever wins though, it’s going to be a great day for watching the golf.

This wasn’t intentional, it just kind of happened.

With a week off work, I’ve been doing other things rather than sitting in front of a screen. The boys and I have been enjoying a few days of golf. Drew has been going to a golf camp for the younger kids in the morning, and Ethan and I have been hitting the course this week. By the time afternoon rolls around, me and Drew are happy to leave Ethan at the club and head home for an afternoon of chilling.

The results have been a quieter than usual blog. It’s not been a bad thing though, because yet again I’ve been toying with the value of my blog and whether it’s worth continuing with. It seems that every few months I question this and inevitably continue posting. This time the decision is still the same. I’m sticking with the blog.

Regular posting should resume shortly.

Maybe it’s the books that I buy, but I don’t see many books with illustrations in them. In books the illustration is a visual indication of where the story is but in the case of older books, I would say the illustration is much more of a labour of love.

These illustrations for “The Tempest” by Arthur Rackham are a great example of this.

I only know of Arthur Rackham as it was his illustrations that were included in my edition of “A Christmas Carol”. There is something about his illustrations that set them apart from other illustrated books.

I would love to see more illustrated books in stores.