An online notebook
I sent out a newsletter this morning.
These daily notes are going well, I think, in that I am keeping up with them and it’s really helpful to keep a record of the good stuff I am coming across. But am definitely just posting links, and not really saying much else. I’ll try and fix that – unless, of course, people like the links, and don’t like my wittering.
Design for audiences or topics and tasks? – good stuff from the team in Bristol and always good to see the blogs I host being active!
I wrote a post about simple things for leadership types to bear in mind when thinking about technology.
WordPress for Enterprise looks a very useful guide. Strange it’s a PDF though and not also available as web pages (although as Steph mentioned to me, PDFs are very ‘enterprise’).
What is inclusive design and why is it important? “‘Inclusive design’ and ‘accessibility’ are often used interchangeably, but they are different things.”
One of the advantages of daily noting in MarsEdit is… tags!
Setting the ambition for Future Councils – been looking forward to seeing some outcomes from this work. Will write up my thoughts once I have had a proper mull.
Text of Bill Thompson’s recent ‘state of the net’ style talk – “The network and its many applications have had a massive impact on our lives, but the tools they gave us were unable to resist the incursions of predatory capitalism or hold back the worst excesses of human toxicity and hatred.”
Roger Swannell describes his way of subscribing to online content – mostly RSS feeds – using Slack. Eccentric, but interesting.
As part of my switch back to Mac on my desktop, I’ve started using NetNewsWire again as my feed reader of choice. It’s old school, it’s free, and it’s open source. What’s not to like? I’ve also abandoned using (and paying for, more importantly!) Feedly to sync up what I have read and not read across devices. I read my feeds on this desktop, or not at all. It’s weirdly liberating! But also, occasionally, real old feeds come back to life for no reason, and a blog not updated since 2011 suddenly downloads 10 articles from 12 years ago. I’ve no idea why this happens.
The end of the Googleverse – “For two decades, Google Search was the invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online content. Now, for the first time, its cultural relevance is in question.”
This is insane. I don’t fully understand it, but… blimey:
One note for the whole week as I haven’t been working. Instead, had a week at home having fun with the family. However, I did occasionally look at a computer, hence the below.
So Twitter/X finally took Tweetdeck away from me, which has made the site a bit less useful. However, I still get way more use from it than any other social site, with the possible exception of LinkedIn, which for people like me is the real winner from the Twitter/X meltdown, I think. Bluesky seems to be picking up members, but it is still very quiet. Mastodon remains Mastodon.
Am back on a Mac now, as my daily driver, and it’s lovely. More on that in a proper post. But one change as a result is that I am now writing these notes in the venerable MarsEdit, which is a great improvement on Simplenote and means I can hit a button to publish them, and not have to faff around copying and pasting.
Fab work by Tewkesbury Council, going live with their new – WordPress powered – website.
“Catching up on the weird world of LLMs“. Great resource from Simon Willison.
Alan Wright’s blog is chock full of brilliantly useful articles, like this one on splitting product teams.
Two days in a row out of the house! First time that has happened in a while. Today, I am knackered.
“Digital proof: where one service ends, another begins” https://www.dxw.com/2023/08/digital-proof/
“Team memory, organisational sharing and serendipity in distributed workplaces” https://emilywebber.co.uk/team-memory-organisational-sharing-and-serendipity-in-distributed-workplaces/
Been watching a lot of films at home recently. Finally saw Dunkirk last weekend, and thought it was ok. Seemed very disjointed to me. Then over a few weeknight sittings, got to the end of Heart of Stone, on Netflix. Gal Gadot as Tom Cruise in a Mission:Impossible type thing. Entertaining enough, but hard to care for any of the characters that were still alive at the end.
This looks a great online event about data stuff: https://lu.ma/roots-of-data-for-ngos