Family guy and web developer
... on Planet Earth. Let's start with the first one.
Celebrate more often: you've got a place on the planet, the one consistently rated the best in the known universe. Don't let a day go by without remembering that. That irritating e-mail is just a tiny grain of sand in the enormity of it all.
— 22 Things to Do on Planet Earth by Nicholas Bate
21 more things to do courtesy of NB.
It’s been a while since I updated my daily email service, DailyMuse. It’s a year old now and I’m finding it to be a great start to the day. If you’re unfamiliar with it, then here’s the gist.
DailyMuse emails you single snippet of text from your own collection of snippets. Think of it as your nudge for the day. In the past year I’ve collected a number of quotes, lists and nudges that I keep here. Every day I get an email from DailyMuse with one of these snippets.
For the last year thought the service hasn’t unchanged. It’s not through lack of work on my part. I’ve built three different features and trashed them on the basis that they’re not suitable or too complicated for DailyMuse. The last thing I want to do is complicate DailyMuse but I do want it to be a more powerful nudge in the morning, and not just for me.
Here’s a few ideas I’ve been pondering on for DailyMuse.
I recently read Paul Graham’s Top of Your Todo List post in which he talks about 5 commands that sit at the top of his todo list. It’s a nice idea but I don’t have space at the top of my todo list, but getting something like this in all my DailyMuse emails would be a nice idea.
Rather than having the commands at the top though, I thought about including it in the footer of the email. That way once you’ve read through your nudge for the day, the last thing you’ll read will be your commands.
Call it commands, a daily mantra, a motto. It could be anything, but lots of people live by this in some form and a daily reminder of it couldn’t hurt.
One of the trashed ideas for DailyMuse was adding the ability to organise snippets using tags. The daily email from DailyMuse could then send a snippet from a specific tag on different days. After testing the idea though I realised that tags allowed for a huge number of ways of organising your snippets. It was overkill.
Tags was too granular for organising snippets. I needed something broader, something simpler. Rather than organising snippets into tags, how about organising them into categories? One category per snippet is much simpler and with a limited set of categories to play with it means that people have a simpler way of organising their snippets.
There’s one thing that has irked me since I built DailyMuse and that’s the use of the word snippets. I don’t like the word snippets, but it seemed like the best way to describe the information you collect for your DailyMuse emails. Maybe it’s my developer background that swayed towards this, but it isn’t the right word to describe what these snippets are. I had to get away from the programmer influence for this.
If DailyMuse was a paper-based service that didn’t rely on computers then how would it work in the real world? Well, every day you receive your snippet in the post, but it wouldn’t be on a letter because that’s for long form writing. DailyMuse is all about getting a short burst of information every day. It would need to be on something smaller. A card. An index card.
What wasn’t obvious in the past when I built DailyMuse now is. Rather than using the term snippets, I should have used cards.
This is one change to DailyMuse that is happening. A change in the terminology should simplify what DailyMuse is and encourage more people to sign up for it.
DailyMuse is still a side-project. While it does have a number of paying customers, it’s just enough to cover the hosting costs for most of the year. I’m taking my time with it and allowing it to a grow at a steady pace.
Not everything I build for DailyMuse get shipped. I’ve trashed more features for DailyMuse than I’ve added. I’m trying to keep it simple and easy to use. Burdening it with features isn’t going to make it anymore useful but it does have some space for improvement. I just need to find the right features that fit that space.
For six months now I've been writing my morning pages every weekday morning. The idea of morning pages is to write three pages of longhand writing every day. Weekends are precious in our house, so until the boys are more independent in the morning I chose to just write during the week.
So far I've been mostly consistent. There has been the odd weekly break every month, and there's some days I've been too rushed to do it. I have written morning pages on more days than not over the past six months though, so I think that's quiet an accomplishment.
The tools of the exercise are a pen and notebook.
Right now I'm using a Lamy Safari fountain pen and Volant Moleskine notebooks. The Lamy is great for this exercise as I find it comfortable to hold. I choose the Volant notebooks as I wanted a notebook that would last me more than a month but still be comfortable to write in. It does the job well.
Today marks the start of the fourth notebook. I'll be reviewing my writing over the last few months to see what's fit for publishing. It's not all gold, but there's the odd gem in there, and that's exactly the whole point of this exercise for me. To get some writing in and find the stuff that's worth telling the world about.
I seen this very nice wallet on Tools and Toys and the first thing I thought was, "There's no place to slide in a small pen like my Fisher".
Complete. Pen. Snob.
Update: I stand corrected. There is one!
Anyone got any pointers to finding topics to blog about from a web dev perspective?
I love this idea of paying a subscription fee for using Twitter, but I fear that it might be too late for Twitter.
Before you scream at me to tell me I’m a dope for suggesting this to Twitter, let me give you this tease: Like anything in this world, in the most efficient economies, you get what you pay for. There’s a bright side in paying and that’s a better user experience. It’s why there are so many apps in the Apple Store that have a regular version, which you get for free, and a Pro version, which you pay for.
— My $4.5 Billion Gift To Twitter by Darren Rovell
I've not been a fan of the whole Twitter experience since signing up again and I'm getting little in value from it. This is largely because the people I follow (who were regular tweeters in the past) are no longer that active. There are some benefits, but most days I never check my timeline and instead steer towards a couple of curated lists I have.
There's little doubt that the world wants free online services. Darren Rovell's poll on Twitter might not be completely unbiased as it was conducted on Twitter, but the results of the poll are clear. People want free stuff.
When it comes to online services and apps, I tend to favour those that come with subscription plans or a one-off cost for a license. Why? Well, because I want to support the team behind the software and the money they get from me helps towards keeping that service alive and running.
The pitfall of a free service though is that once you've dug that pit and put a sign up saying it's "It's free!", everyone wants to jump in. It then becomes hard to get those people back out and into paying for the service.
There are exceptions to this rule, such as companies that offered the right incentives to get customers to pay or services that rely on ads to subsidise the free service. These are the exceptions though and success in their service doesn't means that others using the same method will be successful as well.
Traditional businesses (retail e.g.) never give anything away for free. You always pay for something. It's simple numbers. If you want something you have to pay for it. More and more online services are realising this and bootstrapping their service from the beginning. It's good to see. I just wish more of the services that I love to use online would have stayed clear of the "It's free" pitfall from the beginning.
