2025.01.13.

2025.01.06.

I just love the Gibberish UI for drafting ideas

I subscribed to Gibberish again. It’s a pretty simple app with a weird idea: you can write blog posts by typing out your thoughts in a text messaging-style UI. Each message represents a paragraph.

Why that’s great? The messaging UI somehow triggers me to spit ideas into a chat thread, which I can revise later. Well, the “revise later” part is not the strongest suit of Gibberish, but creating the first draft is the best I found for me.

I just love this chat UI for capturing ideas. It’s not coincidental that people text themselves a lot. Also, it just makes sense how the app calls drafts “thoughts” and published stuff “posts.” I love small touches like this.

Though these are not posts, and I’m not writing a blog here, since I have to publish a post to get the “Copy Post Text” menu working, I figured, why the hell not? I’m not going to share the URL of my Gibberish “blog” since it is just a side effect of using the app “wrong,” but because I love this way of drafting things, I’m going to keep it around. I don’t care if people find it.

Since I’m using the app just kinda right (I don’t care about the blogging part), I wish it was just a private thing that syncs over iCloud (or whatever) with better support for exporting my “thoughts” into other apps like Drafts. As mentioned, I only publish my posts there to get the “Copy Text” option working.

So, essentially, I just want an app that I can use to ramble about stuff and then export to revise the content somewhere else. Gibberish would be an awesome app for collecting thoughts without having a blog behind it.

2025.01.04.

I’m back on Mastodon and Bluesky

After years of focusing on my blog and staying off social platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky, I’ve decided to set up profiles there. Why now? Here’s what’s changed.

I’ve mostly set up Mastodon and Bluesky profiles to publish my posts to social media platforms. This could also be a way to have conversations around my content. I might occasionally post short status updates, but the main way I’ll share ideas will continue to be through my blog.

I also want to try out new iOS apps like Ivory, Croissant, and Reeder which are integrating with these services.

If you’d like to follow along, here are my profiles:

Feel free to follow me, say hi or share something interesting.

The blog will remain my main hub for new posts, which are also shared to Mastodon and Bluesky via Micro.blog and replies to these posts should appear as comments here on the blog too.

Why do I have so many posts today?

Well, I was reading Simon Willison’s post about his blogging process, and I realized that I often write about weird ideas, thoughts, and things I discover online, but I usually keep them in a private journal.

Some of these things are available publicly on my Zettelkasten as notes or annotations, but not here. I think I’m going to change this habit.

While I don’t always have interesting content to blog about, I shouldn’t keep these thoughts to myself either. Most of these ideas are just ramblings, but if you visit any blog or social media platform, you’ll realize that it’s mostly people rambling about random stuff.

On the other hand, you can find interesting sparks for ideas, peculiar thought chains, workflow tips, and bits and pieces that I actually enjoy more than coherent and lengthy blog posts.

So, I’m going to publish more of these fragmented ideas that I’ve kept private until now.

2024.11.21.

2024.10.03.

Read “Re: How I find interesting blogs | Loren’s Blog”

I’m relatively new to the indie blogging, so I’m always on the lookout for new blogs to follow. What works best for me is when I come across a blog that references another one I almost always click through, check out the “About” page, and skim the article archives to see if their content interests me. If it does, I’ll add their blog to my RSS feed.

This is exactly what I do as well. I have never used any directory to find interesting blogs—okay, maybe once—but the point is that linking to other people is a natural way to discover exciting things.

I love it when I have ten tabs open related to a topic and browse the web as we used to.

Using the web for discovery feels like how time was presented at the end of Interstellar. The past, the future, and the now exist all at once, and you can go anywhere on the timeline.

2024.07.07.

Read “Blogs as Modern Commonplace Books”

I rarely feel an urge to write about things I fully comprehend. More often than not, such regurgitation feels like a chore. I might do it to spread awareness on an issue, but rarely for its own sake.

Instead, I find it more exciting to write about things I don’t yet fully understand, where new information has become available or where I want to clarify my thinking. In other words, to “write so that I know what I think,” or to “write what I need to know.”

2024.04.01.

2024.03.18.

2024.03.16.

Read “Building a Stronger Web Without AI”

If we all build our own places, we can live the dream of the web, now. We can create the web that was always meant to be. By connecting our websites together by—spoiler alert—linking to the people who inspire us, we build a stronger web than a search engine can index, one that won’t be littered with content we can’t control.

Amen!

2024.02.22.

The new version of the ActivityPub WordPress plugin lets me reply to comments coming from Mastodon and federate them back as standard replies. I just wanted to install an instance this morning to have a profile that I can use to reply to incoming comments, but this one is way better.

Again, you can follow me on Mastodon by searching for my profile (zsbenke@decoding.io) from your instance.

2024.02.18.

Building my own web

I’m very disappointed after reading comments on this article: How Twitter’s descent into chaos is paving the way for a new web

I don’t want to see this divided mentality (especially politics) under articles that are talking about cool indie projects. The mainstream web has gotten into a state where people just inject politics into everything. If I want to have a place that I like, I have to build my part of the web.

A Zettelkasten and a blog can help with that. I can make my blog cozy, write about what I like, and then browse that from time to time to rediscover things.

2023.12.24.

Read “Jack Baty | I won’t be joining RSS Club”

Mostly, though, it’s that blogging itself has enough problems with adoption. I’m not sure it’s a great idea to be “hiding” blog posts. Good blogs are hard enough to find these days. Why limit your writing to only those people who’ve already discovered you?

These are exactly my thoughts about this RSS Club thing. I don’t want to make my readers search for hidden content on my site (there is hidden content on my site, but it won’t be accessible by RSS), I want them to find my stuff easily.

It is already annoying that social networks, like Twitter, hide otherwise free content behind a login page; bloggers shouldn’t force readers into subscribing to something (maybe this is why I wouldn’t say I like newsletters too).

If you enjoy hiding your content, that’s fine, but we have a sparse number of good blogs these days. I want good content to be more discoverable, not hidden behind login pages and RSS feeds.

2023.12.13.

Read “No Influence | skoo.bz”

Speaking of social media, that’s a very distracting place to post to. You see the feed before anything. It’s far too easy to get sucked into that feed before you remember why you came on there in the first place. At that point, I question what my purpose is being on there at all. You’re there to get attention. Bar none.

2023.12.04.

Read “How I Take and Publish Notes – Jim Nielsen’s Blog”

Jim writing about his reading note publishing process:

I like to let my notes sit for a couple days (or even weeks). I find that if I come back to a note and still find it interesting/insightful that means it’s worth keeping, so I put in the work of cleaning it up and publishing it.

I don’t do this. If I see something interesting, I usually publish it immediately (like this post). On the other hand, I have a Zettelkasten site, which contains more in-depth notes that are also coming from reading notes. However, that site is so new that I haven’t really published anything that counts as reading notes there yet.

2023.11.27.

Read “Neil Gaiman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Internet – Cal Newport”

Between 2012 to 2022, we came to believe that the natural structure for online interaction was for billions of people to all use the same small number of privately-owned social platforms. We’re increasingly realizing now that it was this centralization idea itself that was unnatural. The underlying architecture of the internet already provides a universal platform on which anyone can talk to anyone else about any topic.

2023.04.08.

Twitter Has Stopped Working in NetNewsWire

Looks like Space Karen caught up with NetNewsWire too:

Twitter suspended NetNewsWire today because, according to Twitter, “This App has violated Twitter Rules and policies. As a result, it can no longer be accessed.”

I still have a couple of feeds in Reeder, which are working for now, but I don’t expect them to be around that long.

Honestly, I don’t care about Twitter (or social media in general) anymore. I can do everything I want with this blog regarding publishing my stuff on the web.

I still POSSE my blog posts to Twitter using Micro.blog because some people still follow me there. I may turn that off one day because very few people are coming to this blog from Twitter.

2023.03.22.

Ultra-mobile writing environments

So one thing I consider a compelling use case for a big iPhone and a small iPad mini is using them as a mobile writing environment. I could easily publish an essay from my iPhone or iPad mini just by thumb-typing. I want to explore this use case in more detail in the future.

We have had people doing this for years now, watch and read the following stuff from Patrick Rhone or Yuvi Zalkow.

I have a MacBook Pro and iPad Pro to write, so why am I interested in this phenomenon? I like when people think outside the box regarding their device usage.

The iPhone and the iPad mini are considered content consumption devices by almost everyone, which I’m afraid I have to disagree with. I create all kinds of things using these devices. I take photos, write notes and blogposts, sometimes create/edit Shortcuts, and SSH into remote servers to fix issues. Heck, I even edited an entire podcast episode on my iPhone using Ferrite while I was sitting on the train. It was actually quite fun to do. Being an owner of a big phone like the iPhone 14 Pro Max, I’m even expecting myself to use it more to create rather than consume.

Thumb-typing lengthy notes and blog posts on these devices maybe seems to be an ineffective way to write. Still, there is a focused environment to be found here—especially if you set up iOS to send only essential notifications—so even a smartphone can be a device that makes you focused.

I’m not going into details on notifications here, but let me just tell you, it’s not your smartphone that makes you distracted. It’s your laziness to set up notifications properly that makes you distracted.

2023.03.19.

Notational Velocity and Twitter as Birdhouse for Mac

This is an old post about how we can select text in any app and send it to places:

Here’s an nice solution to something I’ve been wanting. I love Birdhouse for iPhone, which stores tweets until they’re ready for publication. There’s no Mac alternative, so I’ve been putting potential tweets into Notational Velocity, and then copy-and-pasting them into Twitter when ready.

Today, MacStories points out that Twitter for Mac adds a contextual menu item that lets you tweet nearly any text you’ve selected in Mac OS X. You see where this is going: I can call up Notational Velocity with a keystroke, right-click on a tweet and send it off via the contextual menu. Awesome!

Translating this into the blogging world: we can publish micro posts directly from The Archive – which is the modern version of Notational Velocity – (or any other Cocoa app) using MarsEdit’s new Micropost feature.

2023.02.16.

2023.01.20.

I was thinking about installing a new Mastodon instance and creating a new account. Still, this blog is already capable of RSS and ActivityPub, so I’m not sure if I need the social aspect of yet another social network. I simply want to blog. It’s an easy to follow concept, and I have comments open if you want to leave a reply.

There is a way to follow me on Mastodon, though; you can do it by pasting the following handle into Mastodon’s search bar:

@zsbenke@decoding.io

Twitter Officially Bans All Third-Party Apps

Twitter today confirmed that it is no longer permitting third-party developers to create Twitter clients, with the information quietly shared in an updated developer agreement that was spotted by Engadget. A new clause under Restrictions says that developers are not able to “create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications.”

The continued genius of Space Karen just impresses me.

This is the final nail in the coffin of Twitterrific and Tweetbot. These were great apps!

2023.01.16.

2023.01.11.

Re-reading 43folders.com

I recently started making read/review-related GTD projects to be more disciplined about consuming websites and books. I do this because I want to extract information from them and not just read and forget it.

The current one is 43folders.com, which is old, but still contains many valuable tips and tricks regarding Mac productivity. I’m unsure if there is anything like that today like the Mac blogging scene was from 2003-2008 – maybe MPU Talk — when everybody was obsessed with GTD, QuickSilver, Mac OS X, and productivity. Good times!

Anyway… I started to archive interesting articles linked on 43 Folders into DEVONthink. Sadly, many of those blogs are no longer around, but archive.org has them saved.

Screenshot 2023 01 11 at 11 46 54

2022.12.23.

Blogging with Bike

  • I had this short post from a couple of years ago, where Dave Winer showed how he could blog from an outliner in a video. Basically, he edits an OPML file that gets synced to his blog—the website also looks like an outline.

  • I still like this outline-based blogging approach. It is so easy to change and publish. I wanted to have this for myself too.

  • Jesse Grosjean (the guy who did TaskPaper) recently released an outliner app called Bike, which I often use. Since Bike is just using HTML behind the scenes, it occurred to me that if I feed that into a Ruby script, I could create something similar to what Dave has.

  • So, I created two scripts.

    • One is called publish_from_bike.rb, which accepts a Bike file and pushes changes to my blog.

    • The other is a simple AppleScript which starts the Ruby part, saves post permalinks into the Bike outline, and does some general housekeeping.

  • I have a small system to publish from my blogging outline. I use the following format.

    • 2022-12-23

      • 10:40

        • Posts with a timestamp are a published.

      • DRAFT

        • I can create drafts by marking them as DRAFT (or IDEA).

      • SKIP

        • I can also add notes or just bullets which will be skipped with the publishing script.

  • Here’s a video in action.

  • Plans

    • I want to have a proper toggles for these outline type posts, like Bike does.

    • It would be nice to mark them with a custom icon, like my other post formats has.

    • I may release these scripts if there is a need and they are well tested.

2022.12.19.

2022.01.31.

Portable thoughts is a website built using a single HTML file.

It simply uses URL #fragments and the :target CSS selector to show and hide “pages”. The result is a self-contained website, digital book, interactive document, or whatever you want to call it.

So, you have a single HTML file that contains everything and is easily navigable without any JavaScript by just showing and hiding sections via CSS. This is smart.

I don’t know what I’m going to use this idea yet, but it will be useful one day.

2021.12.21.

So this is my workflow for blogging from Craft at the moment. It is fine, but I’m eager to write an extension that does this automatically, maybe with post formats and image uploads too.