Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire fame has been saying smart things about Google Reader and Feedburner for a long time.
In February 2011
Two paragraphs of the announcement are about taking your data and moving elsewhere, which is laudable — data export is super-important — but this is the second Google Reader announcement in a row to make such a big point of it. I hope I’m making too much out of that.
Marco is awesome. Suck it, Feedburner.
Allow me some drama and tin-foil hat speculation. Over the weekend, Feedburner started it’s death spiral. Actually, I began to notice problems with Feedburner stats last year. Gross fluctuations that seemed impossible or at best specious. But this weekend many feeds went silent.
Back when I dumped Google I committed to dumping everything “Google” and that included Feedburner1. I accepted that I would not have accurate feed stats, but my rationalization was that I didn’t trust Feedburner stats anyway.
Over on the Sublime Text blog, Jon Skinner shares his Python script for generating an animated PNG and companion JS file. The Sublime Text website uses animated images rather than Flash or video elements. The goal was to make the videos universally accessible but the side effect is that they are very small. So cool.
Occasionally I receive emails about this site. The vast majority are written by kind and considerate people. Some are just to say “thanks” and others are pointing out errors. I appreciate both and make it a priority to respond and hopefully address the issues. I like well considered comments from smart people.
Then there are those few that take exception with my opinion or style. Most come from fake or temporary email accounts of cowards and are very passionate about being assess.
The built in dictionary in OS X is great, but sometimes I want a little more. Agile Tortoise, maker of Terminology and Drafts app, also provides a very good dictionary lookup Web site called Term.ly.
I created an Automator service that allows me to select some text and then pop open the Term.ly definition as a small pop-over panel. I can then select a word in Term.ly and it will replace the selected word in my document and add the new term to my clipboard.
A handy utility to convert a Unicode character into the HTML code. I have no idea why the OS X character viewer doesn’t do this.
Brett Terpstra invited me on his awesome podcast Systematic to talk about keeping a blog, text editors and blogging platforms. I had way too much fun.1
Is it weird that I have a Brett Terpstra cardboard cut out? Totally normal, right? See, mom! ↩︎
The truest measure of the modern man may be his Twitter favorites. Browsing favorites is one of my leisure activities.1
uh hum.
Consider this post my official cry for help. ↩︎
These posts make me both happy and sad.
The OmniGroup Celebrates 20 years
The Founding of OmniGroup
I’m happy for the success of the OmniGroup because they do good work and have succeeded because of it.
I’m sad because Wil Shipley had to set the record straight. I honestly do not think OmniGroup would exist today without Wil’s contribution and both the first press and update to the blog post did not do him justice.
