Matthew Lang

With Journalong still fresh in my head I thought I would list a few of the features that I am planning to add to Journalong over the next three months. Development on Journalong has been slow over the last year and for that I apologise. It's no way to keep a product or service going and more importantly, making it useful for you. So if you're a user of Journalong, here's a few new goodies that you might like to see introduced to Journalong.

Viewing of journal files

This has been sitting in my list of planned features for months now. The reason for this is that I always said that I wouldn't display a substantial portion of journal entries through the interface. The reason for this was simply down to privacy. The idea was to allow the user to click on the month they wished to view in the sidebar and just display it, or display the current month's journal after you write a journal entry.

However, I have in the past thought this would be a particularly nice feature to have, especially when your journal can be easily converted to HTML to support formatting, links and images.

This feature will be optional and you will have to turn on the appropriate setting for this when it is released. If you don't fancy having your journal being displayed through Journalong, then leave the setting off. I would much rather customers opted in on their own accord than having them to opt out something they don't want or need.

Journal counts for each month

This just came to me last month. It's only a minor thing, but I envisioned a list of the last 12 months of journal entries, grouped by month, showing the number of journal entries per month in the sidebar.

In order to do this Journalong will scan your journal for the number of entries. Again, your journal is your and yours alone. I won't be scanning or retaining any information from your journal while doing this.

Journal from Draft

Draft is awesome, I love writing in Draft. All my blog posts start off in Draft. It has become my go to place to start all my writing. Why not journal from here too then?

I'll be honest, I'm no designer. The user interface to Journalong is simply what I have been able to do on my own with the help of a CSS framework and some JavaScript. I've tried to make it as pleasing an interface to use for people writing to their journals, but others might want to journal from other places.

These other places that I hope to include will start with Draft. The plan is to use Draft's WebHook URL setting so that you can write your journal entries in Draft and automatically save them to your journal.

via FGGT

While the rest of the family were getting ready this morning, I sat at the edge of my bed and checked out the two websites I quickly look at every morning. The BBC News website and the Hacker News website. After quickly scanning today's headlines I moved on to the Hacker News website. I noticed a submission for Alfred 2 workflows. Mental note made, I must check that out later on.

Once the house was empty, I grabbed a coffee and looked at the Alfred 2 workflows. All good stuff and should help me on a day to day basis, but then I noticed a workflow for something called Dash. Another tab opened and there it was, an offline documentation manager for various languages and frameworks that web developers use. All the documentation I need to do my job without having to go near the browser and I can even work offline if needed, safe in the knowledge that most of the docs I need are accessible.

I could have done with knowing about this months ago. Late to the party again.

It's okay though, because that's what learning and experience is all about. Picking up the tools and knowledge as we go along. Sure we can get a head start by reading someone's tool list and start using all their recommendations but I've yet to read one of these lists where the person has all the tools that I need to use as a web developer. No one person has all the answers.

Okay so you're late to the party with an application or service that would have made your job easier in the past, but the past is gone. Ahead lies the future and with it plenty of chances for you to use that new tool to make your job easier.

You might be late to the party, but it least you made it.

Yesterday I read a blog post about a LinkedIn user who was unhappy with the service and had opted to delete his account. I've been here before as well.

Back in my previous job as an ERP developer, I wasn't actively using my LinkedIn account and the only emails and connections I got were from recruiting agencies.

Why am I on this network and what is it for? I simply couldn't get my head around the right way to use LinkedIn. I spoke to a few people about it and all of the said you must be on LinkedIn, even if it's just to have your details there and you never use it again.

Rather than going with the advice of many I spoke to, I deleted my LinkedIn account.

A couple of years rolled by and I changed jobs twice. It wasn't until the end of last year that I re-created my LinkedIn profile due to the fact that I had been paid off. I wanted to broaden my scope for a job so wide that I was willing to go back on LinkedIn and have my profile searchable by everyone there.

Now that I am grudgingly back on LinkedIn, I'm back to where I was previously, what is LinkedIn for? I understand that as a network, LinkedIn does require some time to be spent on it updating your profile, making new connections, sharing interesting links, taking part in LinkedIn's groups, but I tend to forget about doing this and it's only when I receive a notification that I end up spending five minutes or so reviewing my profile, maybe adding a skill to my profile that I have picked up in the last couple of months.

Faced with the prospect of deleting my LinkedIn account again or just sucking it up and trying to invest some time in my LinkedIn profile, I've decided to opt for the latter. I should be using LinkedIn to market myself as a freelance Rails developer, but how do I go about doing this? Here's one idea I had:

Sharing Rails How To Guides - In order to attract clients to my profile, I should write a number of "how to" guides on using Rails and share these on LinkedIn. These won't be small blog posts, but in fact detailed guides to some aspect of implementing a generic feature in a Rails application that will demonstrate my knowledge of Rails and what I can offer in terms of knowledge as a developer.

I'm still slightly perplexed by LinkedIn as a network and what I can do to make better use of it. Perhaps you have some idea on using LinkedIn effectively? If so, contact me with your thoughts on using LinkedIn. I'd like to get more out of LinkedIn rather than it just sitting there not doing very much.

I want to be a good developer and develop applications that are thoroughly tested but when was the last time you just hacked on a bit of code to try something out?

There's definitely a time and place for testing your code, whether you're part of a team or building a revenue generating product or service on your own, testing frameworks can give us the confidence we need to ship code on a frequent basis.

If I know enough of the framework and language to get by then I don't bother writing tests. I would rather roll my sleeves up and get into the parts of the code I know or even try new things with a part of the language or framework I haven't used. Just fiddling away with a simple script until I can get it working to validate an idea or a thought can be so rewarding. It might take me an hour to come up with something or half a day, but if that's all it takes then why bother getting all the correct bits in place to test it?

Exploring problems with just the code, trying things out, making it work as I go along. Yes it might take a few attempts to get there, but I always get there in the end. And that's the fun part of programming, getting it to work. I'm all for tested code but every now and again I like to just throw away the tests and just code and have some fun.

I've seen some whacky swings at the driving range, but most of the time the swing has the desired affect. The ball hits the intended target. Steven Pressfield is definitely onto something here.

The concept of the Authentic Swing is that each of us is endowed from birth with our own gift, our own style, our own unique talent and point of view. Our job is to find it and bring it forth.

— Furky swings Authentic Swing, shoots 59 by Steven Pressfield %}

Steven's new book looks to be another addition to the list.

Another one for the playlist.

Curtis' post gave me the kick I needed yesterday.

You are choosing to do other things instead of the goals set out.

— No time for whiners by Curtis McHale

I admit, I haven't made a lot of progress on a couple of projects since the summer, and I am choosing to do other things first. In some cases not the right thing. It's definitely something I need to rectify.

via PedalConsumption

I first discovered James Shelley through Patrick Rhone's Twitter account just a couple of years ago. Having checked out James' blog, I was intrigued. I subscribed and I have remained a faithful subscriber since.

James doesn't blog very often, but when he does it's worth waiting for. The quality of his writing is one of the best amongst my RSS subscriptions. In a world of fast paced, quick hit updates, it's refreshing to see James put so much thought and effort into his writing.

James is also the author of the fantastic Caesura Letters, a daily email subscription that will feed your brain with fresh thoughts and ideas.

Thinker and writer. Two words but two words that describe James Shelley and his blog perfectly. If you cherish quality over quantity, then this is definitely the blog for you.