Bringing Back the Magic

Anil Dash wrote what is probably today's most poignant piece, regarding the state of today's social web versus that of yesteryear.

"[The tech industry and its press] seldom talk about what we've lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be."

This is a topic I find myself thinking about more and more as I become more involved with the blogging community. Anil is nicely articulating thoughts that have been bubbling under the surface of my mind for a while.

I sometimes wonder if the social web's golden age peaked during the early- to mid-2000s, a time when Flickr was king and lots of exciting things were being built, including a myriad of blogging platforms. A lot of this stuff happened before I took a serious interest in the web, and in retrospect I feel like I missed out on so much.

This is why I like occasionally poring through the archives of my favorite blogs. It's the next best thing to time-traveling back to when these people were having those thoughts and ideas, whether or not they're still relevant today.

It's also why I relish the fact that Flickr may become popular again. Flickr is one of the few communities from that era still chugging along, and I'm excited to potentially be a part of the same community that loved it originally.

Am I living in the past a bit? Maybe. But the web could use a little more magic again, and if bringing back these older communities is what it takes, then count me in.

Ignoring Big Media in Favor of the Little Guy

As time goes by, I find myself depending less and less on big-name sites to stay on top of matters in the world of tech. At one point or another I've subscribed to them all: Ars Technica, Engadget, Gizmodo, The Verge, Macworld, AllThingsD, The Next Web, TechCrunch, Wired...I'm sure I'm forgetting a few.

The problem with these sites is that they're too broad in scope. They attempt to cover every possible thing, they compete to post scoops first — sometimes to their own detriment — the sheer number of articles in their RSS feeds can accumulate at a seemingly exponential rate, and most of these articles are low-content or cover events I simply do not care about.

["Oh, some Android OEM has decided to shit out yet another phone, just like they have several other times in the last week? How novel and interesting!" - something I have never uttered]

I don't want to keep up with this deluge of information. I want stories. Tech writers are encouraged to slap together several "articles" a day on every possible bit of news that hits their inbox. I just can't stretch my interest amongst that much content.

Because of this, I've unsubscribed from all the big-name publications and started exclusively reading what I call 'personality' blogs. I'm talking about places like Daring Fireball, ShawnBlanc.net, Curious Rat, The Brooks Review, 512 Pixels, and a bunch of others. Without editors and advertisers standing over their shoulders, these blogs have the luxury of publishing at a much slower rate, which typically leads to more thoughtful pieces. A stark (and rather refreshing) contrast to the postpostpostpostpost mentality of the big players.

I'm not saying the larger media outlets don't write great pieces every now and then, but I've found it to be a pretty rare occurrence. Also, these 'diamonds in the rough' will usually be shared around by others anyway, so that I don't have to dig through the garbage myself.

All of this applies to magazines, as well. I can't remember the last time I renewed a paper magazine subscription. Not only is it a gigantic waste of paper, but I feel like I'm getting better mileage out of publications like The Magazine and the Read & Trust Magazine.

Going a step further than simply unsubscribing from the big sites, I've also become a paid member of some smaller sites because I believe it's important to support independent writing. That's where the truly interesting stuff is published, and I want to make sure more of it gets put out into the world. If I ever turn this site into a full-time job, I would hope that people find it in the hearts to support what I do. Why shouldn't I do the same for the sites I love?

The Periodical Co

Earlier, Ben Brooks brought this project to my attention, and I'm already deeply interested.

Essentially it will be a CMS platform that allows non-coders to publish The Magazine-esque content to iOS Newsstand and the web, simply for a tiny cut of the subscription fees. The developers have been partially inspired by Craig Mod's Subcompact Publishing piece that I mentioned (and loved) the other day.

It would seem that Marco's early success with The Magazine has prompted somewhat of a 'gold rush' in self-publishing. There's been a lot of discussion on this topic going around lately, and I think we're going to be seeing a lot of micropublications coming out of the woodwork in the next year or two, especially as more of these publishing tools are released.

People are beginning to see how viable it is for a small-time operation (e.g. one or two people, rather than entire media corporations) to regularly publish fantastic content for just a few bucks a month and still make a tidy profit. Of course, writers have been doing this kind of thing on their blogs for years, but we are a mobile-centric readership these days, and the introduction of iOS Newsstand has seeingly reinvigorated the industry.

It may be that some readers — not myself, mind you — will more easily stomach the idea of an official 'magazine' subscription rather than some blogger's weekly newsletter, even if the content and pricing are similar. Either way, it's an exciting time for publishing and I can't wait to see what's around the corner. I only hope that publishers avoid the temptation to copy The Magazine's overall style and functionality, as may happen if they follow Craig Mod's subcompact manifesto to the letter:

• Small issue sizes (3-7 articles / issue)
• Small file sizes
• Digital-aware subscription prices
• Fluid publishing schedule
• Scroll (don’t paginate)
• Clear navigation
• HTML(ish) based
• Touching the open web

According to Hamish McKenzie over at PandoDaily, Periodical Co's product isn't quite ready for release yet but should be in public alpha by next week. I signed up to be notified, and I recommend everyone else do the same. I have a feeling this is going to be huge.

'Blogging Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry'

Harry Marks gathered together some of the "update" statements made by several tech blogs yesterday, after they were fooled into publishing information on a false press release:

"Notice anything about those update statements? Actually, let me rephrase that - notice anything missing from those update statements? Maybe, I don't know, an apology? A promise to verify a story before reporting on every press release that crosses their desks? I'd even settle for a declarative, "We were wrong," in big letters at the top of each post."

The race to say "FIRST!" is an ugly one.

Another New Era in Publishing

The history of the publishing industry is a fascinating subject. With the invention of the printing press in 1440 and its subsequent adoption throughout Europe, ideas could spread faster and farther than they ever could before. Nearly two centuries later, somebody took this idea and applied it to the current events of the times, inventing what would later become known as a "newspaper."

For most of the 20th century, people were still relying on newspapers, books, and magazines for information. In the late 1990s though, something called the "internet" (you might've heard of it) came along and gave people another tool to spread their ideas: the blog.​ Blogs have become a wonderful resource for all sorts of information. They can be about current events, the happenings in someone's personal life, reviews of products, helpful information on any number of subjects known to man, archives of history, and much more. These are incredibly powerful tools.

We've even found that a miniature form of blogging (i.e. Twitter) can still be enormously useful, especially because even someone in a 3rd-world country whose only access to technology is a dumbphone from the 90s can still use it. Never in history has it been easier to make your voice heard across the globe.

And now, we've entered another phase of idea-sharing that involves both content curation and self-publishing. As for curation, I'm not talking about people who call themselves curators just because they run linkblogs. I'm talking about a few specific projects that have been unveiled in the last several months (like Evening Edition, The Brief, NextDraft, and Circa) who are making a point of taking long-form news articles and/or other topics, and condensing them into more digestible form for readers who want to keep updated on current events but may not have the time to read long articles from multiple resources constantly.

With self-publishing, we have projects like The Magazine and the Read & Trust Magazine, which are monthly publications that require a small fee from the reader. Rather than curating content from elsewhere, they contain collections of articles submitted every month by a group of paid writers.

Sounds like any other magazine subscription, right? But there's a BIG difference: these projects are organized and published by individuals (in this case, Marco Arment and Aaron Mahnke, respectively) rather than entire media companies or news outlets. The internet, and tools such as Newsstand, have given people the opportunity to become their own publishers and make decent money without having to work under someone else's editorial vision, all from the comfort of their home.

I'm excited about what people are accomplishing on their own in the world of publishing, and hope to see more efforts like these in the future.

'Implementing Smart App Banners'

Helpful tip by David Smith, ​showing web developers how to show an iAd-style banner at the top of their mobile sites that point to their companion app, rather than using a popup message that has to be dismissed.

“That’s it. Anyone visiting your site will now get this clean and context aware banner. If you are an app developer please take the 2 minutes needed to implement this. Gaudy popups promoting your app were detestable before but are now downright inexcusable.”

Hopefully more companies will start using this method of advertising and quit doing this:

Web Annoyances

If you're doing any of this stuff on your website, you're doing it wrong:​

1. ​As I scroll down an article, and about halfway down, a box appears in the lower-right corner, trying to recommend other things to me that I'm not interested in. All you did was distract me from reading.
2. The little 'Feedback' button that appears on the left-hand side of lots of websites these days. How many people are really using that thing to leave feedback to you? All I see it doing is getting in the way of other stuff on the site, so thanks for that.​
3. Adding extra content to the clipboard when the user copies text from the site. "Discover more content here! [link]" Not cool.
4. A smaller margin for your actual content than what's being used for advertisements.​
5. Navigation toolbars that wait until you've scrolled down a little, then whiz down to wherever you stop at. Haha! How quirky and cute and not annoying at all!
6. ​Infinitely-scrolling pages that keep adding more content as I scroll, when I'm just trying to reach the navigational links at the bottom of the page.
7. If I go to your site from my phone, and it pops up a "CHECK OUT OUR IPHONE APP!" ad that I have to get rid of before reaching the site itself, that's an immediate sign that whatever I was about to read is worthless and I close the page immediately.
8. ​More than two share buttons (preferably none, though).
9. "Slideshows" that are really just 9 different pages that each have a meager description of the photo, just so you can get more pageviews.​
10. ​Such bad adherence to basic web standards that even Instapaper and Evernote can't parse your awful website into something legible.

There, I feel better.​

Welcome to the New Unretrofied

​I have a habit of tweaking this website a lot. I just can't seem to settle on a given "look". Why on Earth did I pick that typeface? Why are those colors not matching? Is my site actually easy to read? These are the questions I'm asking myself all the time.

​Today, I did more than just tweak. I've moved Unretrofied from Squarespace v5 to Squarespace v6. Doesn't really sound like a big deal now that I'm typing those words, but I assure you, the stuff happening behind the scenes is very different. This is a totally new platform. Versions 5 and 6 are entirely incompatible, so it's not as easy as clicking an 'upgrade' button. This site has been completely rebuilt from the ground up. My hope is that I can make the site a bit more minimalist but still a bit unique.

​Here's what the site looked like before:

Obviously, the new site has done away with the two-column layout in favor of a nice, wide single-column format. I feel that this change alone makes my posts more pleasant to read. I've also opted for more line spacing and larger typography. The end result is that the site's text actually has a chance to breathe a bit. I was inspired to do this by Benjamin Brooks' current blog design, which is even more minimalist than mine.

​Another obvious change is the lack of red post titles. I originally made it that way so that if someone were scrolling through the page, they could quickly and easily pick out each entry. The problem with that is that it leads to the site feeling more busy than it needs to be. I've found that I don't really need a bunch of glaring text to achieve this effect. Instead, I've simplified the color scheme, added more space between each post, and increased the size of the post titles themselves. Looks much nicer and still allows the reader to easily discern each post while scrolling.

​Also new is the navigation menu bar at the top of the site. This replaces the 2nd column that existed in the previous design, and it's still easily accessible at all times (it stays on-screen while the site simply scrolls "behind" it). This is also where the site kept a little of that red color, in that whatever page you're currently viewing is shown in red on the menu bar. All links on the site also show in red on hover. I guess I just couldn't bring myself to part with it entirely.

​Images within posts are now larger than before, something I've wanted to try for a long time but couldn't because of the constraints of the old design. I love looking at big, beautiful photos on the web. In fact, this change in design may be the encouragement I need to get out my old DSLR so I can capture great images to use on the site.

One thing I'm excited about is that v6 allows for mobile-formatted pages, and now I've got a very nice-looking ​mobile website. I haven't been able to test it from any other phones but my own, but on my iPhone 4S, everything looks very nice (Update: After writing this post, I had a chance to test the site from a few Android devices. Looks great there, too).

​On this mobile site, the top navigation bar is hidden under a 'Menu' button. Tapping that button gives you a nice little "sliding down" animation, revealing a drawer containing the hidden navigation links. Tap 'Menu' again, and the drawer slides back closed. Pretty neat.

With this change, and with the two-year anniversary of Unretrofied coming up in October (wow, I can't believe it's been that long already), it seems like as good a time as any to start writing some more long-form opinion pieces and product reviews, much like the ones you'd find on Minimally Minimal. Up until now, most of my posts have been links to content elsewhere on the web, but that's not very fulfilling creatively. I would rather blog less often but produce higher-quality content than be a lazy 'curator'-type. Quality always beats quantity when it comes to blogging, and it's about time I started showing it.

​Whatever happens next, I hope you guys enjoy the improved design and I encourage any constructive feedback you'd like to give. Hit me up on Twitter and let me know what you think!

​Note: Due to the site change, it was necessary to change the URL to my RSS feed and subscribers will need to update their readers accordingly. Apologies for the inconvenience.

IFTTT is Fantastic, and You Should Use It

I'm pretty late to this party, but I am falling in love with task-automation service ifttt (if this then that). Basically this service allows you to create "recipes" of behavior using "channels", which is just a codeword for the list of different services involved, such as Facebook, Evernote, Instagram, Dropbox, Twitter, Youtube, SMS, email, and a LOT more.

The idea is that you can have ifttt check one of these channels for a certain type of activity, and then trigger a second channel in a specific way. For example, I have a recipe that checks for any new photos I post on Instagram, and then saves those photos to a folder of my choosing in my Dropbox account. Another recipe watches my Unretrofied RSS feed and auto-tweets any new entry it sees.

These are two simple uses for the service, and aren't even considered a drop in the bucket of what ifttt is capable of. There are currently 47 channels available, and most (if not all) of them have multiple trigger types, AND there are more being added all the time, so the number of possible combinations is staggering. Luckily, you can already see some of the interesting things people have come up with on their public recipes page.

I recommend at least checking it out and seeing if you can get something useful out of it. There's a little something for everyone.

ifttt

On the SOPA Blackouts

Tens of thousands of websites, including big names such as Wikipedia, Google, Reddit, Wordpress, and Mozilla, have blacked out their pages today in protest of the SOPA/Protect-IP bills that are being pushed through the US Senate despite massive opposition from just about everybody else.

I support the idea behind the blackouts, but I also agree with this piece by Joe Brockmeier over on ReadWriteWeb:

The dirty little secret of SOPA is not that the entertainment industry has far more influence than it ought to have on Congress. Anyone who pays attention already knows this. The dirty little secret of SOPA is that almost nobody pays attention to what Congress is doing 99% of the time.

[...]

Most of the SOPA/PIPA tools have to direct people to their representatives because they don't know who they are or how to contact them. Think about that for a moment. It's good policy for a political organization to make it as easy as possible for voters to act, of course. But, without instruction, a large swath of the voting public has no idea who to contact or how. Worse, unless you make it as easy as humanly possible, they won't bother.

I'm glad that the big guys are raising awareness about this issue, but I have to wonder, will this really spur public activism on a widespread scale? Most people I've talked to have no idea what any of this SOPA stuff means or why it will matter to them. These are the people who don't follow technology matters all the time and will simply be annoyed that their favorite website has been shut down, even if for only one day.

It also seems a bit odd to me that people are protesting so hardly about something that would be pretty easily circumvented even if the bill passes. But what about healthcare? Remember when everybody got outraged about our healthcare system and cried out for reform a few years ago during Obama's election?

Now you hardly ever see it come up in public discussion, at least not on the same scale. The general public has a very short political memory and I can only assume that the same thing will happen with SOPA/PIPA. It will be all over Twitter, Facebook and plenty of blogs for a little while, and then people will move on to the next bandwagon cause. And so it goes.