Saturday, 31 December 2011

“You’ve Got to Build Bypasses”*

“We’re way too dependent on the Un-Internet., which behaves somewhat like the Internet, but has chokepoints that can cut off the flow. The whole point of the Internet, from the point of view of the US Govt, was that it couldn’t be cut off this way.” – Dave Winer


* for those of you unfamiliar – the title of this post is a line from Douglas Adams’ brilliant Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Thursday, 29 December 2011

A Great Story of Free Speech @ UW-Stout

It’s unfortunate that a ‘climate of sensitivity’ was enforced so heavy-handedly. It’s unfortunate so many other players had to get involved to re-establish common sense. Especially at a campus that – at least when I was there – had gun lockers in the dorms for students. I trust the administration and police will be more sensitive in the future.

Saturday, 24 December 2011

Client Launches: ExperienceLife.com & FellowInc.com

I’m happy to announce two new client sites launched this week: one for Experience Life magazine and one for Minneapolis advertising and design studio .

Both sites are powered by a heavily-customized WordPress installation.

The Experience Life effort included the development of a system to migrate 10 years of archives, comments, assets, URLs (including shortened URLs) into WordPress. Additionally, WordPress was customized to be organized around monthly issues rather than blog post chronology.

The focus of the Fellow effort was in successfully merging the unique creative vibe of Fellow and the reliability of WordPress.

 

Thursday, 15 December 2011

Introducing Typerighter.com – The Minimalist Writing on All Your Devices

“the perfect web based writing tool.” – Patrick Rhone

On any given day, I’ll be interacting with 4-6 different internet-enabled devices (multiple laptops, a handheld, a couple of tablets) the only quality they share is a decent browser and I wanted a fast, simple way to update my writing across all of them.

All the existing apps I found were filled with distractions, didn’t work across all devices, required learning a wonky syntax, didn’t deal well with long form text, or some combination of thereof.

So, I built typerighter.com

Typerighter.com recreates the simplicity and unbiased opportunity of a blank sheet of paper.

Like a blank sheet of paper – typerighter.com has one feature – Save.

It works brilliantly on mobile devices like the iPad, iPhone, and even the HP TouchPad. There’s nothing to install, nothing to download, and nothing between you and your writing.

Monday, 12 December 2011

Saturday, 10 December 2011

Bottoms up product management

“Much of what made Twitter useful in the first place – Hashtags, @user and many other little Twitter specific conventions are hacks that were first adopted by users because Twitter didn’t support several key functions like groups or addressing a note to a specific user. Twitter has made the colossal mistake of trying to integrate these workarounds into the base DNA of their service.” – Ross Rader

Tuesday, 6 December 2011

Thursday, 1 December 2011

A Sure Sign of Goodness

I just notice two things:

  1. I haven’t written here in a while
  2. My browsers’ URL autocomplete for ‘garr’ defaults to the sub-domain of a mostly unannounced project I’m very excited about.

Boyd’s Annual Opt Out

“While I’m away, my lovely procmail file (aka “filtering software”) will direct all of my email to /dev/null (aka “the permanent trash”). I will not be reachable. The only person that I stay in contact with while I’m gone is my mother because it’s just too cruel to my mom to disappear entirely. Twitter and my blog will also loudly proclaim my MIA-ness. But the bigger issue is that I will return to a zero-inbox. Nothing sent to me during my email sabbatical will survive. All senders will receive a lovely bounce message saying that their message” – Dana Boyd

“I do feel guilty not personally responding to these people to say that I’m unavailable but that’s precisely the point… My boss gets it; my collaborators get it; my friends get it. And they like me a lot better when I’ve taken a vacation recently.” – Dana Boyd, How to Take an Email Sabbatical