My Secret Sauce of Blogging This is where I give away all of my blogging secrets. I’ve decided to divest myself of any advantages Macdrifter has built over the past 12 years. My hope is that I will see fewer links to the Verge and maybe a few more new ideas from smart and funny people.
Secret 1 Save, literally, everything.1 There’s a ton of information on the internet and searching is a very poor way to remember things.
I nearly missed this new feature on Feedbin. I don’t use Micro.blog but I do really like Feedbin for RSS. This kind of thing is pretty nice for people that are trying to replace Twitter with a micro blog.
March is almost over and I’ve not written enough self-referential and congratulatory posts about myself. This should round out the month nicely.
When I moved to Pelican I designed this site to be readable and extremely fast. I’m not a designer (I actually like Hawaiian shirts and black socks) but I was pretty happy with the results. As a reminder, here’s what Macdrifter 2.0 gave me, in order of priorities:
My apologies for all the out of date posts today. I’m using some vacation time to clean up the site and migrate to a new faster server.
Here’s a tip: Always include a date stamp in the header of your plain text files, especially if you are then sending those to a static Web site generator.
Blogging about blogging. It's not that interesting but it might help someone and it will certainly help me when I need to do it again someday.
Look up there at that logo. Nice work by Aaron Mahnke at Wet Frog Studios. The next bit was to get the image into the WordPress header. I followed the guide here.
It worked for the most part, but I decided to try inserting the image using the PHP code rather than using CSS background image.
Edit: See this updated post for enhancements
This is for all of you Markdown and plain text nerds out there. You’re my people.
I’ve been tinkering with a simplified mechanism for posting to this site. Most of my posts are started in Simplenote. If it’s a long post then I’ll work in BBEdit but the document still resides in my Simplenote/NVAlt/Dropbox folder1. When I’m done with a post, I’ll preview it in Marked and copy the html.
I’ve got a crush on Stephen Hargrove now. His blogging setup is wonderful.
By way of Brent Simmons
Ben Brooks:
"...these are, I think, the same people that have great insight to add through emails that I receive."1
Again, I think this depends on your perspective. Some craft a site to be a megaphone. Some craft a site to be a discussion. Everyone is entitled to their own expectations for a site they run and pay for. In my opinion, if comments are all sequestered in an email inbox, they're not very valuable to anyone other than the recipient.
I always say, “to each their own” and think that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I also appreciate that people like Marco and Matt have a large number of visitors that are probably pretty vocal. More than I do, I’m sure. But I’m not a fan of killing off comments. I don’t mean unfiltered comments where every troll gets their say, but rather well curated comments are also part of the content.
I wrote about the Mac application “Fake”[1] awhile ago. From my very first use, I thought it was an incredibly clever tool. Fake is like a super-charged automator for Webkit. It makes automating interactions with webpages easy and simple. But why would I want to use Fake instead of Automator or curl or even a Python script? Here’s an example that I just started using.
If I want to add an affiliate link for a Mac or iOS app, I need to visit the Apple Link Maker page with my affiliate id as a get-parameter in the link.
