Glenn Fleishman responded very well to my semi-controversial tweet about Medium from the other day:
I’ve written a few things on Medium (not paid) because I liked the experience of their writing tools, their statistics, and their reach. I think two of the three items I wrote became featured and had several thousand reads. It’s a wonderful way to write and a wonderful place to post.
But it’s not mine. It’s theirs.
Bingo.
You can use someone else’s software, but still have your own “platform”, if you’re hosting it from a domain name you control and are able to easily take your content and traffic with you to another tool or host at any time. You don’t need to go full-Stallman and build your own blogging engine from scratch on a Linux box in your closet — a Tumblr, Squarespace, or WordPress blog is perfectly fine if you use your own domain name and can export your data easily.
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
👓 Still Blogging in 2017 | Tim Bray
Not alone and not unread, but the ground underfoot ain’t steady. An instance of Homo economicus wouldn’t be doing this — no payday looming. So I guess I’m not one of those. But hey, whenever I can steal an hour I can send the world whatever words and pictures occupy my mind and laptop. Which, all these years later, still feels like immense privilege.
👓 The Beauty of Amazon’s 6-Pager | Brad Porter
Imagine for a moment that you could go into a meeting and everyone in the meeting would have very deep context on the topic you're going to discuss. They would be well-versed in the critical data for your business.
👓 A Great App for Recording Podcasts | Allen Pike
A year ago I wrote about the modern era of podcasts. In that article, I made a forward-looking statement:
With all this growth, what improvements are we seeing in the tools? As of this writing, a horde of developers are building podcast listening apps. Podcast recording apps, on the other hand?
Well, more about that soon.
In the intervening year, we’ve seen the launch of Castro, Overcast, and the acquisition of Stitcher. It’s been a big year for podcast listening software, but not so much for podcast recording software.
👓 Chrome and Firefox Phishing Attack Uses Domains Identical to Known Safe Sites | WordFence
Update on April 19th at noon Pacific time: Chrome has just released version 58.0.3029.81. We have confirmed that this resolves the issue and that our ‘epic.com’ test domain no longer shows as ‘epic.com’ and displays the raw punycode instead, which is ‘www.xn--e1awd7f.com’, making it clear that the domain is not ‘epic.com’. We encourage all Chrome users to ...Read More
👓 Why Some Farts Smell So Much Worse Than Others | Thrillist
Sometimes a fart escapes without a sound or a smell, but other times farts smell remarkably like rotten eggs. Here's why that happens.
👓 12 Words Black People Invented, And White People Killed | The Huffington Post
Let's not forget to give credit where credit is due.
👓 ‘The Great Shame of Our Profession’ | The Chronicle of Higher Education
How the humanities survive on exploitation.
How Hollywood Remembers Steve Bannon | The New Yorker
He says that, before he became a senior adviser to the President, he was a successful player in the film industry. But what did he actually do?
👓 Butterick’s Practical Typography
I’ve claimed throughout this book that many bad typography habits have been imposed upon us by the typewriter. Here, I’ve collected them in one list.
- Straight quotes rather than curly quotes (see straight and curly quotes).
- Two spaces rather than one space between sentences.
- Multiple hyphens instead of dashes (see hyphens and dashes).
- Alphabetic approximations of trademark and copyright symbols.
- ellipses made with three periods rather than an ellipsis character.
- Non-curly apostrophes.
- Pretending that accented characters don’t exist.
- Using multiple word spaces in a row (for instance, to make a first-line indent.)
- Using tabs and tab stops instead of tables.
- Using carriage returns to insert vertical space.
- Using alphabet characters as substitutes for real math symbols.
- Making rules and borders out of repeated characters.
- Ignoring ligatures.
- underlining anything.
- Believing that monospaced fonts are nice to read.
- Abusing all caps.
- Thinking that the best point size for body text is 12.
- Ignoring kerning.
- Ignoring letterspacing.
- Too much centered text.
- Only using single or double line spacing.
- Only using the line length permitted by one-inch page margins.
👓 Inside the Instagram Algorithm | Social Media Today
A software engineer from Instagram recently provided some new insight into how their feed algorithm works.
👓 Welcome Back! Let’s fight for an Open Web | Michael McCallister
Michael McCalllister (Notes from the Metaverse)A few weeks ago, I was preparing a talk on WordPress at a local university. I knew that posting here at Notes from the Metaverse was on the erratic side in recent months. Yet it was something of a shock to discover that more than a year had gone by!
Colin Walker (colinwalker.blog)The ideals behind the #indieweb and, to an extent, Micro.blog are about ownership and control: you own your content, not the network, not the platform, not a silo. But let me play devil's advocate for a moment. I wrote ...
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)Brett recently laid out his reasons for keeping his own web site in the age of powerful, easy-to-use alternatives like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Twitter. He do...
👓 The duality of microblogging | Colin Walker
Further to the points I made in "Self-hosted microblogging - where does it fit?" I've been having more thoughts on how best to use Micro.blog and fit it into my own online ecosystem.