Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

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.

Curtis McHale has the three step process for marketing your business. Blog, podcast and meet people.

The primary thing you need to do is blog. Write for your own site at least weekly. You write because when people have issues, what do they do? An internet search. And search engines index your writing. People will land on your site and start to get to know you. Getting to know you is the start of the sales process.

— A 3-step marketing plan for your business by Curtis McHale

The one thing I think I couldn't do is podcast. I could write all day if I had the chance. Meeting people certainly isn't an issue, but I think putting your voice out there is something that will take me a while to do.

Share Your OPML?

Dave Winer may be kick-starting an old service. Share Your OPML.

In 2006 I had a web service called Share Your OPML. It was fun. It was a way to see what other people were subscribed to, for news and podcasts. But we hit scaling walls, and the project fell into disuse, and eventually I took it down.

Now we know how to scale much better than we did then, and the community is growing more slowly. So I thought it would be interesting to try it again and see what happens.

So here's the question -- if I put up a web app that asked for your OPML would you upload it?

— Would you share your OPML, again? by Dave Winer

I'd love to see this happen.

Leo Babauta at Zen Habits has the lowdown on how to write every day. And it all starts with a reason.

Most important: Have a great reason. The rest of this doesn’t matter if you skip this step. Answer this question: Why do you want to write every day? If it’s because it sounds fun, sounds cool, sounds nice … you’ll abandon it when you face discomfort. If you want to do it to help someone else, to make the world a better place, to lift someone’s spirits, to reduce your pain, to find a way to express your deeper self … then you can call on this deeper reason when things get difficult.

— How to Write Every Day by Zen Habits

I've been rebooting a few habits and processes over the last few weeks and one emerging trend from all this is that I'm going back to basics.

Instead of putting my tasks in Todoist, I'm capturing them in a pocket notebook. I don't need a another task manager app. I can capture the task in my notebook just fine.

Instead of using a 3rd party calendar app on macOS I'm using Calendar. I don't need another calendar app. I can outline my day in the macOS Calendar app just fine.

Instead of writing everything in Ulysses, I'm writing this post straight into the Ghost editor. I don't need another editor to write it in. I can write it in the Ghost editor just fine.

When you see the tools that are available to you, it can be easy to make yourself jump through hoops to justify the use of these surplus tools. All we're doing though is adding extra layers to get one thing done. When you remove those layers, it can be surprisingly simple to do just that one thing. And that's just fine.