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.

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.