Matthew Lang

Nicholas Bate with a run down on being happy. Writing daily is just one simple part of it.

Write daily about what is working so that you observe, notice and appreciate it.

— Basics 7: How to Be Happy by Nicholas Bate

A common observation around the slow uptake of RSS readers is that RSS is still something that people don’t understand.

RSS readers often rely on the user to add the feeds that they want, but unless users know where to look then users may be turned off by an RSS reader. A blank page with no suggested or recommended feeds in it isn’t going to demonstrate what an RSS reader can do.

I’ve noticed that podcasting apps like Overcast and Pocketcasts include discovery sections that show you podcasts that you can subscribe too. They provide recommended and categories sections that people can click and find out more information about that podcast. If they like it they can subscribe.

Perhaps it’s not only about adding subscribe buttons to our sites but also making RSS readers more user friendly by adding RSS discovery so that people can find the content they want.

_If my memory serves me right, Feedly does include such a discovery feature, so thumbs up to them! _

Last night I finally pulled the trigger and moved my Ghost hosted blog to Jekyll. While the cost of running a managed blog was the most significant influence on the decision, there were other factors as well.

Easier writing

Ghost had been a promising idea when it started a few years back. A blog where the focus is on the act of writing. And it started well. The two-pane design with the plain text on the left and the rendered post on the right was great and allow you to see the post in real-time. In a recent change though, the Ghost decided that using a single pane with a WYSIWYG writing pane was more beneficial. The old two-pane environment was still there but just hidden away.

I’ve been looking to do more with my iPad Pro. I’m already using it for remote development work and a fair amount of writing, reading and listening. Unfortunately, a down-side of Ghost’s new writing pane made using the iPad Pro impossible. Characters were rendered twice with each keystroke, and I was unable to even copy and paste a blog post from another app such as Bear or Ulysses. In a recent update to Ghost this bug is fixed, but such a breaking change made me question why I was reliant on a product that prevented me from writing.

With Jekyll I can write anywhere with any app that I use daily. I can even write the post straight into my GitHub repo through my browser and save the changes which will automatically publish to my blog. The only thing that will stop me writing and publishing is whether I’ll have a connection to the Internet and in this day and age, that’s becoming such a rarity.

More control

With a move to Jekyll, I’m also able to make changes to the layout of my blog in a much easier way than if I was using Ghost. With Ghost, you need a local working environment first to make your theme changes. Setting up a local environment is reasonably straightforward, but keeping it up and running is not as simple as Jekyll. With just a single command I can have my blog up and running on my browser, and I can make any changes I need to the layout. There’s a small number of dependencies to getting my blog running, and it only requires some flat files for content.

I’ve also got more control over the photos I use on my blog and where I host them. I can either include the images in my blog directly or upload them to another hosting service like Amazon S3 where they’re still in their original format and I can export them if I need too.

Tried and trusted

My days of being wowed by-products such as Ghost are probably over. Tried and trusted products that are simple to manage and let you own your data are two significant factors for me. Ghost looked to be simple, to begin with, but even now there’s still a large number of features that many other bloggers take for granted from their chosen CMS. I’ve tried Jekyll in the past, and now I wonder why I didn’t stick with it.

Data is always a significant factor with me. The export facility of Ghost is excellent, and they were able to allow me to download all the images for my blog through a separate link as well, but I don’t think that’s enough. A single zip file containing all data including images would make things so much easier.

Manton Reece has an idea for this, and it looks promising, but getting the more prominent companies to adopt this is another matter.

With Jekyll though, I can always trust in the fact that my data is there in the purest form needed and that’s in plain text files.

The subscribe button used to be everywhere on the Internet. It’s about time it made a return

Every blog should have a Subscribe button. In an open ecosystem this is a problem, a problem that silos don’t have. Which is the advantage Twitter (a silo) has over the open web.

— Scripting news

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.

Optional cross-posting to social media

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.

Posts searching

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.

Post length separation

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.

You don’t ask, you don’t get

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?