Ghost & Unsplash
It’s good to see the Ghost team steadily adding features to my favourite blogging platform. One such addition is the vast library of Unsplash images, which is now available from the Ghost editor.
Taming the Twitter timeline
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.
The content creation device
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?
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.
Survive and thrive ...
... with the personal resilience guide from Nicholas Bate.
Deep book researching advice
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.
Erasing the past
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.
Time to kill the personal website?
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
Hello Ghost 1.0
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.