Fancy a new bike?
Get over to the Robin Williams bike auction and get your bid in. Some truly classic bikes!
The NFL season has been great so far. What a finish in the #DENvsSD game last night.
Twitter has gone electoral map crazy.
The Red Bull Foxhunt
Star Wars Rogue One Trailer #2
Seriously. Why isn't it December the 16th yet?
The last year has been a real struggle here on the blog. Inconsistent posting and a lack of direction is to blame. Or so I would think.
Over two years ago I was churning out a post a day on this blog and not just random stuff either. There was a general theme of topics around writing, technology, freelancing and a few other things. Not a day went by without hitting that publish button.
Today though it seems I've lost that daily nudge to just write.
When I was publishing daily I started to think that I needed to start scheduling posts ahead of schedule. It got me thinking about structuring my blog and managing it a bit better.
Truth is I simply made the blogging process even more complicated. It's taken me over a year to see this.
My blog is a marketing tool, but it's also my little private corner of the Internet. What should it be though?
As a personal site it should be nothing more than a scrapbook of links and posts entered around the topics that have my interest at the time.
No more scheduling of content, no more obsessing of schedules. If I want to create a site around a particular group of topics with more of a structure then I'll just create a new blog and structure my writing for that.
In the meantime though, I'm going to loose the reins of my blog and see where it takes me again. I'm just going to blog more.
I’m not actually in London. Twitter web client just thinks I am.
Drew’s chasing the window cleaner round the windows of the house. I hope he doesn’t make him fall off his ladder.
Dictators beware!
Good to see technology being put to good use.
A Swiss journalist has created a Twitter bot that tracks dictators’ flights to and from Geneva, as part of a crowdsourced effort to shed light on potentially shady dealings. The bot, called GVA Dictator Alert, tracks planes registered to authoritarian governments and automatically posts their arrivals and departures to Twitter.
— This Twitter bot is tracking dictators' flights in and out of Geneva by The Verge
Naughty dictators!
The DailyMuse Facelift
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.