A new project from Chris Hannah where he plans to document his experience using an iPad as a main device.
I don’t use an iPad for much anymore — mostly just for video playback at the dining room table — but I am still curious of what’s happening on the platform. As someone who once used the iPad as a primary device, I’d like to know how others are getting stuff done on the platform these days.
➝ Source: journeysthroughglass.net
Chris Coyier:
I wonder if the term “blog” has too much baggage. Too much history for it to really catch on again and make a dent.
Maybe “publish your own feed” is a better framing. “Own your RSS.” A feed doesn’t care what it contains. It is content-style agnostic. It’s just timestamped HTML, in a way. Put some audio in it, and it’s a podcast. A feed could be exactly what you would have tweeted before tweeting became cringe.
I like the terms “weblog”, “web publishing”, and “online publishing”.
➝ Source: chriscoyier.net
Kev Quirk:
Secondly, Twitter isn’t the right platform for long-form content. If it was, it wouldn’t have a 280 character limit. It’s a micro blogging platform; and as we all know, micro means small.
Surely a much better way of sharing long-form content would be to write a single coherent piece on a blog, then post a link to it on Twitter so your followers can read it in its entirety.
This also has the added benefit of decentralising content away from platforms like Twitter.
If you have long-form thoughts, get a weblog and start publishing.
➝ Source: kevq.uk
As I continue to move my focus away from the centralized web, I’ve been exploring Micro.blog a bit. I’m still trying to really wrap my head around it, but it offers much of the social features you’d want to bridge independent weblogs together. And it’s delightful compared to Twitter.
A good client was a necessity, though. After testing just about everything available, I believe Gluon is the best. It’s still lacking in a few areas — line length is rough on the iPad and the app doesn’t appear to support publishing to a self-hosted site. But it excels in all the right ways.
➝ Source: gluon.app
Mazin Sidahmed, writing for The Guardian:
Two weeks ago, writer and artist Dennis Cooper was checking his Gmail when something peculiar happened: the page was refreshed and he was notified that his account had been deactivated – along with the blog that he’d maintained for 14 years.
This is why I advocate for a reduced dependence on services controlled by others. And, at the very least, keep regular backups.
I’m with Dave Winer on this. I’ve been writing on the web for nearly a decade and I can’t imagine putting my ideas anywhere other than on my own weblog. Don’t get me wrong, I tweet a lot, but anything that I feel is truly important and that I want people to read, I publish here.
Mark Armstrong, writing on the WordPress.com weblog:
Automattic — the parent company of WordPress.com — secured the rights to oversee and operate the sale and registration of .blog domains, a new and never-before available top-level domain. You’ll be able to purchase a .blog domain at WordPress.com or through our partner domain name registrars. And again, the .blog domain will be available to everyone, regardless of what kind of site you have or who hosts it.
I’m surprised that more companies haven’t been acquiring top-level domains like this. And if they have, why hasn’t anyone been writing about it?
(Via Venture Beat.)
The Swift Team:
This new blog will bring you a behind-the-scenes look into the design of the Swift language by the engineers who created it, in addition to the latest news and hints to turn you into a productive Swift programmer.
A little disappointed that they chose to use “blog” rather than “weblog,” but I suppose I’m one of the few holdouts.
Apple clearly thinks that Swift is the future of programming for their platforms and this is another step in the right direction towards convincing developers to adopt it.
