On a similar note, many believe that blogging is making a return. Folks now seem to recognize the value of having your own little plot of land on the web and, although it’s still pretty complex to make your own website and control all that content, it’s worth it in the long run. No one can run ads against your thing. No one can mess with the styles. No one can censor or sunset your writing.

Not only that but when you finish making your website you will have gained superpowers: you now have an independent voice, a URL, and a home on the open web.

I'm optimistic about the state of blogs in 2018. I discovered a handful of new blogs thanks to Micro.blog and I don't want to leave them unread.

Crontab.guru is a great webapp to create (and learn) crontab schedules a bit easier.

Colin Walker writing about issues subscribing to RSS:

While RSS readers are making a bit of a comeback in certain quarters there's no doubt that, as Sameer puts it, "subscribing to feeds definitely has fallen out of parlance."

RSS is more than a decade old now, but explaining it to mere mortals still hasn’t really been solved. Podcasts apps are also using RSS technology in the background, but they usually have a directory of podcasts which gives you an easy way of subscribing in the app. This solves a lot of problems for average users.

Out in the open web, you have a feed URL and you need to know where to paste it. It's a big UX problem, but I'm not sure it is even solvable. We can build walled gardens or create a directory of blogs with a built-in RSS reader, but in theory, they still lock you into a service.

As a blog author, I still have to figure out the technical aspects of the IndieWeb and as a blog reader, you also have an obligation to find out how to follow blog over RSS. In this process, you can find a balance to lock yourself into a walled garden or choose something else which you can control, but give up some convince along the way.

Brent Simmons on why Micro.blog is different than App.net:

But if you think of the years 1995-2005, you remember when the web was our social network: blogs, comments on blogs, feed readers, and services such as Flickr, Technorati, and BlogBridge to glue things together. Those were great years — but then a few tragedies happened: Google Reader came out, and then, almost worse, it went away. Worse still was the rise of Twitter and Facebook, when we decided it would be okay to give up ownership and let just a couple companies own our communication.

Yes, it's pretty much sums up the last decade of the web. I want to get back the ownership of my content, that's why I'm posting from my blog nowadays and syndicate elsewhere. On the top of that, Micro.blog is a pretty great network with a lot of interesting people. As Jack Baty wrote:

I need to say it again… I love Micro.blog. It feels like something new and it’s pretty great. Sign up. Post stuff. Interact. Own your shit.

Robert Peake wrote about "daily to-do lists" on Next Action Associates:

To put a finer point on it: you are not a “good boy” or “good girl” for completing all the items on your short list any more than you are an unproductive person for not ticking off every item by the end of the day. It may well be that you focused on exactly the right things each moment of the day without striking through a single item on the sub-list. Simply having those short list options to hand can help you to validate that those choices you make which are not on the list are, indeed, correct – because you have consciously weighed them against that shortlist before acting.

This is a great mindset to have about the Today list functionality in Things. I like that Robert calls it a daily sublist which sounds way better than the "I have to do these today no matter what happens" list as people like to think about it usually.

I'm also in the habit of curating a weekend chores list from my main Home list into Things' Today view. I do this because my biggest problem with GTD at the moment is sometimes I forget to review my appropriate context lists on a daily basis or at the right moment.

Initial experiences with Snow Leopard weren’t as blissful as more recent commentary remembers. The troubled rollout of MobileMe, iCloud’s precursor, was still an open wound. Soon after release, a major bug was discovered in Snow Leopard that would cause the home directories of guest accounts to be wiped completely. The issue was prevalent enough that Apple publicly responded and later issued an update, 10.6.2, to address the problem.

Sure, Snow Leopard had it's problems too as almost all macOS up to this point. So I'm still not subscribed to this Apple software quality is in decline bullshit. Most of it just nostalgia, for example: I remember a lot of kernel panics on my old white MacBook back when it was running Tiger but I had not seen them since Lion.

Great episode of Hurry Slowly about why time management is a myth and why you should care about where you put your attention instead of focusing on time.

Casper Beyer on Electron:

I tend to call Electron applications web pages whenever I talk about them, which in turn tends to piss off a lot of web developers but really that’s all they are. There is nothing desktop like about Electron applications, they always feel out of place, even the simplest elements like the native menu bar is not available, it’s usually a custom alien looking thing if it’s even there. > Electron applications just don’t integrate with the operating system the way a native application is expected to do, is this not the reason that why we vowed to kill Flash and the Air Runtime in the first place?

This sums up exactly why Electron is the biggest piece of junk since Flash. Next time somebody ask me why I think about Electron this way as a "fellow" web developer, I'm going to direct his/her attention to this Medium post.

Unobstruct is one of the best content blockers for iOS. You can hide all kind of floating sharing bars and newsletters subscription pop ups which gives you a nice relaxing way to read a website. It's basically a pop up blocker fo the "modern" web.

You can also turn on Unobstruct in Safaris action sheet and hide floating crap manually. Great to remove annoying signup modals temporarily if you not registered on a particular social site with an f in its logo but stumbled into a link which goes there.

Nice updates coming to OmniFocus this year. I'm more than fine with Things, but I'm definitely going to beta test the new version when it arrives.

Mindfulness does indeed slows down the current moment:

One antidote might be mindfulness, the researchers suggest. People who try to live “in the moment” may better appreciate the uniqueness of those moments once they have passed, making it less likely that they’ll be swallowed up into a “chunk”. Meditation and engaging with art may perhaps also help, they write, since “these experiences have the potential to re-sensitise us to the satisfaction of simple things and, perhaps, counteract life’s quickening pace”.

Rands in Repose on writing:

Randomly think of a thing. Let it bump around your head a bit. If the bumping gets too loud, start writing the words with the nearest writing device. See how far you get. The more words usually mean a higher degree of personal interest. Stop when it suits you.

This is exactly what I should do more. I often have random ideas but never get them into Ulysses because they are just thoughts. Maybe I should keep way more drafts and see where they lead me.

(Instead of Agenda Ulysses can be used for journaling as well. Maybe I should keep everything in one app.)

Agenda is a very interesting app, but there is no iOS version yet. It would be a great alternative for a commonplace notebook and a work journal instead of Day One which starts to be a bit overwhelming for me. And I still don’t like that they switched to a custom sync backend.

I didn’t know about this:

Added in iOS 10, Emergency Bypass is a way to ensure that you will always be alerted by a certain contact’s phone calls and/or texts, even if the phone is in Do Not Disturb mode and even if the mute switch is engaged. But this feature is a little bit hidden, so here’s how to turn it on.

You can also exclude certain groups of people from ignoring by setting "Allow Calls From" under Do Not Disturb preferences. It does silence messages though…

Design+Code is really awesome resource with an equally excellent iOS app for anyone who interested in iOS development and design.

Fears of the IndieWeb:

Some of my favorite memories of writing online were during the early days of Blogger, prior to the Google acquisition. Personal journals were still a fairly new idea, with fairly few people publishing them. We were a community of people and of writers and we had a connection to each other and a desire to share, help, and enjoy unique content online. This feels like that.

Sometimes the IndieWeb movement feels like that couple of guys starting to learn WorsPress again.

From MacStories:

Type an RGB or HEX value or color name into each text field, and Aquarelo generates a range of colors between the two you entered. You can even drag a color into the app from the system color picker. One small quibble I have with dragging colors into Aquarelo is that you can only drag them onto the text fields in the app. I think it would feel more natural to drop colors onto the endpoint colors in instead.

You can have thousands of ways to represent a color. Since I've just started doing iOS development recently, I need to tool to convert hex colors into UIColor. Aquarelo just does that, and also looks nice.

Ben Brooks on social media:

And that’s what makes the end of 2017 stand out so much to me, because it was during this time where I read article after article about how negative social media as a whole is for people. That’s general people, meaning all of us. Social networks are not good, and have not been designed to be good for you. Sure, you could cherry pick arguments all day long, but there’s simply not been a compelling case made for these networks being good.

I haven’t really tweeted much for months now, and I have no desire getting back on Twitter. It’s big, crowded, full of annoying people and hate. And I don’t want to be a part of that. I’m not deleting my account as I did with Facebook, because I know a couple of people from the early days of Twitter and sometimes I receive DMs from them. But, I won’t be on it, I even deleted Twitter from my iPad and my iPhone back in October.

I was an initial Kickstarter backer for Micro.blog, but haven’t paid much attention to the service since then. As you can see I’m moving my stuff over to this blog — this is why I’m posting this much today — which is mine and I can use Micro.blog to share my content to a new community which at the moment feels like Twitter back 10 years ago.

Interesting choice that no follower count is present on Micro.blog. First I thought it’s annoying, now I’m start to getting it. Basically less shit to worry about.