Interesting post from Jim Nielsen about interoperable apps, although I’m not sure that’s the right term. When I first saw the title and screenshot I thought it would be a post about apps which work together well. Instead it’s more a post about flexible standards allowing for flexible user choices when interacting with that data.
I love RSS for this reason. I use Feedbin to hold my data and then I can choose any RSS app I want so long as it allows me to sign in to Feedbin.
It’s a dark mode day. Outside is gloomy and grey, it’s raining, and everything feels like it’s in dark mode. There’s been a few of these kinds of day recently, normally they coincide with extrovert days at work, when my calendar is chock full of meetings and there’s no room to actually Do The Work.
Today is a bit different.
Whilst it’s a dark mode day outside, and consequently a dark mode day on my Mac I only have a couple of calls today so I have chance to find some flow.
Barry Hess in a post about the state of his task manager makes the point that he is DDoS’ing himself with To-dos and Reminders. Essentially there is so much stuff in his task manager and he has lost trust in the way it works to ever see the right things at the right time.
I feel his pain. I have been bouncing around task managers for, at least, the last 6 months trying to find a way that works for me to see what I need to do at the right time.
One of the most active blogs in my feed reader is by Louie Mantia. He has an interesting point of view that sometimes differs from mine (mainly politics) but I like what he creates and find it inspiring. In his recent post titled Learn to Code, Don’t Learn to Code he states this:
Both parties can understand the other’s limitations without learning how to do it themselves. And—in my opinion—you can more easily push the limitations without learning it.
At work we’re doing a team visibility piece to help others in the business get to know us. We’ve been asked to answer some questions and I thought it would be fun to share them here…
Favourite movie: It would be a three way fight between The Usual Suspects, Shawshank Redemption, and The Dark Knight.
Tea or Coffee: Coffee, but not any coffee… my friends would say it has to be “snobby”!
I generally don’t comment about politics on social media, or really in life in general. I find the whole topic to be divisive and alienating especially as someone who is not liberal enough for the left and not conservative enough for the right, it is a hard topic to broach.
What I can say is this: I am very disappointed in the current state of politics both in the UK and USA.
I have this weird stumbling block with my blog. I want to blog, when I do it I enjoy it and when I get into a good rhythm posting regularly I enjoy it even more. I should then be doing it regularly, and in fact I want to do it regularly, but I have this weird block. I’m a designer. I don’t like using things out the box and prefer to have my own design on my own website, so when I don’t have one it becomes a blocker and I don’t want to invest time in blogging until it’s design is my own.
Life is odd. Sometimes it seems to just pass us by, each day sliding into the next, the week begins and ends before we’ve even had time to catch our breath. At other times the days are slow and packed with things, little moments that create memories or that build up to make a week to remember. Lately life seems to be passing by at a great rate of knots, it whizzes by in a string of meetings, groceries, tv shows, and sleep.
This is a post which I’ve had brewing in the back of my mind since September. This year marks the end of my 3rd decade, September will be my 40th birthday the end of what has turned out to be quite a hard decade. A look in the mirror and I can see how hard it has been.
At the start of the year I weighed myself and had a little bit of a shock.
One of my aims for this year is to try and develop some more healthy foundations or habits in my life. For many years now I’ve wanted to blog more regularly like I did in the very early days of discovering what the small web could be. It was a place of individuals sharing their lives and thoughts on their own websites. Comments were on, people linked to each other, and a feeling of community developed.
I’ve begun the long process of adding in some of my old posts from previous iterations of this site. My apologies if this triggers a load of posts in your RSS. I’m working backwards, and I’ve now added all the posts from 2023 and 2022. It will be a slow process as I’ve decided to add each post manually, importing from the markdown file I have saved. Initially I am just adding the more formal posts but may go back and add all the link posts I’ve made at some point.
It’s been about one month since I restarted my blog back on Wordpress. I say restarted rather than moved because so far I’ve yet to add all my old posts to the archive, something I still plan to do, but which I’ve yet to find the time for.
The change was triggered by a combination of things, but the chief ones were ease of posting and familiarity. I used Wordpress for well over a decade on this blog and a number of other websites I’ve built over the years.
I really like blog posts that give a behind the scenes for design changes. I’ve just written an internal post for my work on the reasoning I’ve made changes to a key part of our user experience.
This is an interesting look at the effect of a new icon design for Foodnoms has increased downloads. I wish more developers and designers would be this transparent about their work. It’s great evidence that shows how important the users are in our design considerations.
When I started this site, I was just a 19-year-old looking to have fun on the internet. After all the twists and turns, I’ve come back around to a very similar place. Now, I’m a 31-year-old who’s still looking to have fun on the internet, share my thoughts and experiences, and make friends. That’s what this blog is for, and I’m really happy with where it’s landed. Devon Dundee posting about his journey with his blog tells a similar tale to the story of my blog.
This is a fascinating read that presents the idea that calendars should be multi layered.
We tend to think of calendars as 2D grids with mutually exclusive blocks of time, but as this example shows, not all events automatically cancel each other out. Depending on their characteristics, they can be layered on top of each other. This means we manage time in three, not two, dimensions. Think of a meeting you need to travel to.
Back on Wordpress. It’s been a few years and many attempts to revitalise my blog, but I’ve decided to move back to Wordpress. The ease of posting from any device using apps has trumped everything else. Things will be a bit rough over the next few days and weeks as I get old posts back but stay tuned for more.
Just saw a a post on Threads from Figma… describe your creative process in three words or less.
My attempt: Steal, splice, iterate.
Maybe I should elaborate?
Steal: Be inspired. Steal ideas from others, but also from your past. At the start, or even in the middle of, a project I tend to ask myself two questions. Have I solved a similar problem in the past and has someone else solved it?
I’ve seen a few posts from people sharing where they’ve been and thought it was interesting. So I’m sharing the countries I’ve been too as well:
Denmark 🇩🇰 France 🇫🇷 Switzerland 🇨🇭 Israel 🇮🇱 Italy 🇮🇹 I’ve also stepped foot in Belgium and Luxembourg but they were both on the way to Switzerland so I don’t count them.
When I was growing up we had most of our family holidays in the UK and I think I’ve visited nearly all the counties in England, most of Wales, and a couple in Scotland.
I’ve been looking at some of the things Google announced this week. Whilst some of the things are quite interesting – like the Pixel Tablet and stand – others are just plain puzzling.
I understand that Google was is trying to flex and show off their AI abilities, the new Magic Editor that they announced doesn’t sit well with me. I take photos to preserve memories. I can look back through my photo library and memories are triggered by the visuals, even the ones that are less than perfect.
This post was written when this blog was based on Jekyll before I moved back to Wordpress. I have kept it as part of the history of this blog.
It’s taken me a long time with lots of googling and trial & error, but I finally have tags working on this site.
Out of the box Jekyll provides a tagging function. You can define tags at the start of blog posts along with the other data you wish to add, but annoyingly Jekyll doesn’t automatically provide archive pages.
For the last few years 99% of my personal computing has been handled on the iPad Pro. For the most part it was ok. Sometimes I would need to jump through some hoops to do things and occasionally I would fall back on my work Mac. The only item that has suffered in that time has been my ability to work on my personal website.
I tried several times to build workflows in shortcuts to enable me to do what I wanted, but most of the time they were buggy or didn’t quite work how I needed them too.
I’ve been feeling the desire to create more since the start of the year. I’m not sure if it’s just because it’s a new year which often brings with it a fresh vigour or whether it’s seeing some people I know have their artwork displayed in a local gallery. It creates a spark in me. A desire to create things.
I’m inspired.
Except.
When I sit down with my notebook and pencil or my iPad and Apple Pencil I don’t know what to draw.
I’ve been feeling the desire to create more since the start of the year. I’m not sure if it’s just because it’s a new year which often brings with it a fresh vigour or whether it’s seeing some people I know have their artwork displayed in a local gallery. It creates a spark in me. A desire to create things.
I’m inspired.
Except.
When I sit down with my notebook and pencil or my iPad and Apple Pencil I don’t know what to draw.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about social media and the open (indie) web. As people are fleeing Twitter and flocking towards Mastodon in an attempt to find a new way of doing social media some of the things that social media gets right keep cropping up in my feeds.
The first is that social media made it easy to follow people. Mastodon is not intuitive in how it handles following people across it’s many instances.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about social media and the open (indie) web. As people are fleeing Twitter and flocking towards Mastodon in an attempt to find a new way of doing social media some of the things that social media gets right keep cropping up in my feeds.
The first is that social media made it easy to follow people. Mastodon is not intuitive in how it handles following people across it’s many instances.
A little under four months ago I made a decision about my blog and moved it to use Ghost with the aim of building a more regular posting habit. Needless to say it hasn’t really happened. So I’ve decided to make another decision and go all in on Micro.blog.
Recently I’ve been on a slow and considered drive to simplify things in my life mostly in the digital realm, but not all of it.
The last few years has seen the prolific rise of the content creator the people who create content for other people to consume. I dislike this phrase. I don’t like it for a few reasons, but the primary one is I don’t consume content and I hate to break it to you, but neither do you.
If you read books they are written by an author, someone who has taken a lot of time and expended a lot of energy in dedication to writing.
The last few years has seen the prolific rise of the content creator the people who create content for other people to consume. I dislike this phrase. I don’t like it for a few reasons, but the primary one is I don’t consume content and I hate to break it to you, but neither do you.
If you read books they are written by an author, someone who has taken a lot of time and expended a lot of energy in dedication to writing.
For the best part of the last year I’ve been all in on Obsidian for my note taking. I’ve enjoyed writing in it, seeing it evolve, and playing with it’s theming engine (a bit too much sometimes) but recently I’ve been finding a few issues that have been getting under my skin. The experience of using it on my Mac is fine, in fact it works very well especially when paired with my large external display.