skud

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

Just a quick post to note that Growstuff (my open source project for food gardeners) was selected as one of the winners of Pinboard’s satirical startup incubator program. I get $37 in funding, woohoo!

While the $37 won’t pay for much of anything — that’s the point, after all — I’m looking forward to Maciej’s advice and help with getting our name out there, and to getting to know the other winners. I’m pleased to see another food startup on the list (home baked goods via the Internet!), would love to be able to use the pre-hardened machine images for AWS, and can’t help but be excited that a sailing-related startup is amongst the winners. While I don’t play board games much, nor have a kid in school, both those projects sound useful and likely to succeed, too. Congrats to my co-selectees!

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

One of the biggest changes to my Internet use over the last year is that I no longer spend all day in the office sitting in front of a computer. It used to be that if something interesting caught my attention, I’d open it in a browser tab and in the next slow patch — perhaps over lunch, or during that long dark teatime of the soul that happens around 4:30pm when you’re watching the clock, or the far more pleasant beer-time of the soul that happens when you stay at the office after everyone’s gone and actually get some productive stuff done — somewhere in one of those times, if I felt the urge, I could easily whack out a blog post if I felt the urge.

These days, I mostly check Twitter on my phone, and just reading links that get posted there turns out to be a bit fraught, let alone actually doing anything with them. All too often, when I click on a Twitter link, I wind up on a page that’s been “helpfully” (please visualise my sarcastic airquotes) “optimised” for mobile users, which means I have to click through a suggestion that I install their special app (no thanks!) before winding up on a dumbed-down version of the site’s front page. Any link to the actual article I wanted to read in the first place is, of course, absent.

Assuming I can get to the article, what I can do with it is more limited, too. My Twitter client of choice includes a cut-down browser which is great for quickly checking out ephemeral links, but opening in “real” Safari requires a couple of clicks. (You can do it by default, but that is overkill for most links, so I choose not to.) Once in Safari… well, a mobile browser is no place to get real work done. Nevertheless, I spent a chunk of yesterday trying to bash my newly-mobile-centric Internet workflow into shape, and since I’m rather proud of it, I thought I’d post it here.

The key parts are:

• Pinboard — a bookmarking service which I started using as replacement for Delicious, and which has the feel that Delicious did back in the good old days, before anyone invented the term “folksonomy”.
  
• Instapaper — one of several “read later” apps (the main other contenders are Pocket and Readability); one of the features that endears it is that it integrates well with Pinboard and with other apps I use.
  
• WordPress — this blog runs on it, and I’ve got a bunch of handy plugins installed (and wow, sometime when I wasn’t looking, WordPress plugins got really useful).
  
• ifttt — “If this, then that”, a glue application that connects various online services based on triggers.