Manton Reece: Weblogs

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 More
November 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 More
November 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 More
July 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 More
April 15, 2005 07:59 PM

NetNewsWire unread count

Or: How I learned to stop worrying and ignore the blogosphere guilt trip.... Read More
April 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 More
March 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 More
March 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 More
March 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 More
March 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 More
February 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 More
March 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 More
December 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 More
December 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 More
July 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 More
May 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 More
March 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 More
March 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 More
January 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 More
September 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 More
September 26, 2002 10:55 AM

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 More
March 9, 2002 10:27 PM