First drafts on iPad
Iain Broome on iPad writing, via John Chandler: "I can, and do, write regularly with my iPad. But, to be perfectly honest, I rarely use it to edit, because I find it kind of clumsy to move the cursor around... Read MoreApril 5, 2011 09:08 PM
Brent on baked blogs
My post on free apps was linked from Daring Fireball a few days ago. Tons of new traffic, but my site didn't go down. Why? An ancient but reliable version of Movable Type spitting out static files, with just a... Read MoreMarch 21, 2011 09:51 AM
EE tweets
I submitted my new iPad app to Apple earlier this week. It hasn't been reviewed yet, but Ryan Irelan has been using the beta to curate a collection of ExpressionEngine conference tweets over on the EE Insider blog. The app... Read MoreOctober 2, 2010 12:53 PM
New blog design
I've been blogging here since 2002, and I started Riverfold in 2006, but it's taken me a while to realize something pretty obvious: traffic flows back and forth between my personal blog and the company site, and I should stop... Read MoreNovember 24, 2009 10:08 PM
Macworld review for WebSentinel
This month I've been lucky to have Clipstart featured in both the US and UK print editions of Macworld. It's great to see the product in print. Around 1996 to 1998 I worked for a small Mac software company called... Read MoreJuly 16, 2009 05:34 PM
Dan Benjamin turns it up
Dan Benjamin did something interesting several weeks ago: he took his popular blog Hivelogic, where he's been posting since 2001, and rebranded the content under a new domain, danbenjamin.com. Apparently that was just the kick he needed to get even... Read MoreJanuary 4, 2009 05:00 PM
Favorite essays
The best essays are the ones that contain some truth or insight that doesn't go out of style months or years later. As I return to regular blogging (12 posts in September compared to about the same number of posts... Read MoreOctober 8, 2008 03:09 PM
MarsEdit guilt trip
In which I am the last person to point to the MarsEdit 2.0 release. I figure if James Duncan Davidson is just now purchasing MarsEdit, I don't feel bad waiting so long to say good things about 2.0. (Rumor has... Read MoreNovember 4, 2007 11:39 PM
How I use Twitter
Twiterrific 3.0 is out, with a new price of $15 or free to use with ads. The ads are very effective and difficult to ignore, but really they don't take anything away from the Twitter experience. The new version is... Read MoreNovember 2, 2007 11:20 PM
Weblog design update
I just rolled out some design tweaks and realignment to this site. The original design (if you could call it that) was whipped together several years ago and hasn't really changed much since then. It even used HTML tables, a... Read MoreJuly 29, 2006 01:20 AM
How podcasting saved RSS 2.0
Dan Cederholm asks the relevant questions about weblog syndication formats: “Will we forever continue to support multiple RSS formats as well as Atom? Is Atom succeding as a successor to RSS? Will this stop people from using the term ‘RSS’... Read MoreApril 15, 2005 07:59 PM
NetNewsWire unread count
Or: How I learned to stop worrying and ignore the blogosphere guilt trip.... Read MoreApril 14, 2005 12:11 PM
Podcast Shuffle
Discovering new podcasts is still an awkward process, despite some great podcast support in newsreaders such as NetNewsWire 2.0. I thought it would be interesting to randomly pick individual podcasts and aggregate their latest posts into a special feed. After... Read MoreMarch 14, 2005 01:32 PM
SXSW: Simplicity, Ta-da, and XFN
Jason Fried has been talking a lot lately about keeping your product simple. His SXSW session on Saturday continued this theme of doing more with less — “constraints encourage creativity.” One example he cites is how Ta-da List’s lack of... Read MoreMarch 14, 2005 12:44 PM
Year three
It’s now been three years since I started this weblog. Here’s last year’s post, the one a year before that, and the first post. I like that the anniversary date falls around SXSW. It serves as a convenient reminder, and... Read MoreMarch 9, 2005 01:22 PM
Elements 7
If you’ve been wondering what all the podcast hype is about, Ryan’s latest Elements episode has a few of the things that make podcasts great: music, interviews, uniquely non-mainstream, and told with a fresh perspective that you can only get... Read MoreMarch 7, 2005 10:15 AM
Blogging full time, and Cartoon Retro
I hope Kottke’s decision to blog full time without advertising will be a success. He’s got a large reader base. I stopped reading Kottke for most of 2004 but have re-subscribed so I can follow his progress. The interesting question... Read MoreFebruary 23, 2005 09:36 AM
Two years blogging
Today marks the two year anniversary of this weblog. It’s been a good experience, and even if the content is not always fresh it’s still a worthwhile endeavor and will continue. Expect the posts to ramp up to at least... Read MoreMarch 9, 2004 06:11 AM
XHTML Friends Network
After SXSW earlier this year, I posted that Tantek wanted a way to add meaning to blogrolls, something with less complexity than FOAF. Apparently he and others have been churning away at this idea since then, and the resulting specification... Read MoreDecember 26, 2003 05:58 PM
Feed protocol
NetNewsWire 1.0.7 adds support for the feed protocol. Wes has suggested that MIME types and helper apps are the correct way to handle this, but modern browsers seem to have practically given up on good integration between MIME types and... Read MoreDecember 24, 2003 12:08 PM
Veen and cycling
I often subscribe to a weblog because I trust that person's opinion on a certain subject. I know that they worked at a company I have respect for, or wrote software that I like, or created some art or film... Read MoreJuly 25, 2003 12:01 PM
The battle for RSS
At SXSW I told Mena Trott that RSS 1.0 was dead or dying, because it was too complicated. Turns out I was partially wrong -- it's very much alive, but perhaps only because it's the default in Movable Type. Six... Read MoreMay 10, 2003 09:42 PM
NetNewsWire as a platform
There's an opportunity for Ranchero if they act soon. We are still in the early stages of RSS readers and aggregators, both web-based and desktop apps. Over the next year, we are going to see even more tools for managing... Read MoreMarch 27, 2003 10:33 PM
scriptingNews format to RSS
Dave Winer from 1999: "Compare RSS with scriptingNews format, which is richer, it includes enough information to do an elegant syndication-based search engine (coming later today). Netscape's and Slashdot's formats are basically equivalent, neither is as rich as our format."... Read MoreMarch 17, 2003 07:41 PM
Pepys Diary
A great new blog to start off 2003: The Diary of Samuel Pepys. What an innovative use of the weblog format. "This site is a presentation of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the renowned 17th century diarist who lived in... Read MoreJanuary 3, 2003 02:40 PM
Falling asleep over RSS
James Duncan Davidson echoes a complaint I have also raised: "The most annoying thing from a user perspective is the different ways that RSS feeds work. Some provide just a few sentences of the post. Others a paragraph, and yet... Read MoreSeptember 29, 2002 10:59 PM
Moving to NetNewsWire
I finally made the jump from Radio Userland's news aggregator to NetNewsWire last night. It's good software, and it's been fun watching how quickly it has matured. I have about 40 RSS subscriptions, but I migrated to NetNewsWire in just... Read MoreSeptember 26, 2002 10:55 AM
Brent Simmons: "If you're not
Brent Simmons: "If you're not syndicating your site as RSS it might as well not exist." So true. The non-RSS sites I read now can be counted on one hand.... Read MoreAugust 22, 2002 08:44 AM
Kottke.org increases the text in
Kottke.org increases the text in RSS files to around 80 characters per post. Excellent. It's as if he read my mind.... Read MoreAugust 20, 2002 11:01 PM
This site was down for
This site was down for a server move over the weekend... Thanks to David and the Interactive Ensemble gang for their generous help and bandwidth.... Read MoreAugust 20, 2002 12:05 PM
I registered on BlogTree. Hey,
I registered on BlogTree. Hey, everyone else was doing it. :-) In other blog news... There are very few sites that I read now that don't have RSS feeds. Two on that short list were PeterMe and Kottke.org, which in... Read MoreAugust 6, 2002 10:21 AM
Mark Pilgrim has a great
Mark Pilgrim has a great idea for RSS auto-discovery: use the <link> tag to point to the XML version of the page. I've made the change on the template for this site. Hopefully it won't be long before we see... Read MoreMay 31, 2002 02:04 PM
SXSW Interactive started today
SXSW Interactive started today. Seems an appropriate time to start a weblog, as if there weren't enough in the world already. Welcome, and enjoy.... Read MoreMarch 9, 2002 10:27 PM
