38: Sparkle

June 3, 2014

Hello, internet friends!
I have mentioned my new-ish experimental web-log (this is the origin of the word blog, kids!) in Monday’s email and I noticed something funny about using wordpress.com as a platform.

Even though I have not linked to or in any way promoted that blog, I suddenly began getting followers and likes. Quite a lot, in fact. I am sure, most of them came through some way of tag-tracking and maybe there is a page for new blogs – I did not really poke around more.
And while one or two of them were pretty normal bloggers, most of them follow a pretty predictable pattern: Premium users with their own domain, usually selling some kind of marketing book or lifestyle idea. These people are trying to *growth-hack* – which is the most gentle way I can say that they “follow” and “like” mostly to gently nudge people to their own blogs.
I don’t mind, really – maybe those people actually do enjoy my links to sparkly bat poop?
Anyway.
Sparkly bat poop.

Have a nice day,
Dominik

37: Input

June 2, 2014

Hello, internet friends!1
I am back again after a four day hiking weekend.

If I do that again – go to a weird and foreign country, especially with some time to waste in between activities, I now know not to think that “eh, those couple of MB of roaming data will be enough, right? Just the fact that I had to actively think of how much data I was spending made me grumpy at times.
Also: podcasts are huge beasts. Just downloading that one episode of IRLTalk would have easily cost me twice what the roaming would have given me.

Anyway, let’s get on with the show. I came home to about three thousand unread feed items, not quite as many unread emails and the nagging feeling that I missed a whole bunch of half-day micro internet scandals.
So, interesting links I have seen so far while playing catch-up:
Upcoming.org is coming back! This is, as they say, good news. The articles on The Verge and Engadget are worth reading, too. So is probably the CMD+Space interview, but I did not listen to it, yet.
This is kind of depressing. So why not listen to Chris Gethard how to overcome your programming and become a better man? If that’s not helping, how about Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds? Yeah, I’m learning a lot, lately.
In nerdier news(?) – I am tempted to build my own version of Jeremy Keith’s POSSE implementation. (You can click this link even if you have no clue, what a POSSE is – I don’t, really, but it seems doable.) Having an input field on top of a web page is really a “game changer” (ugh.) and I have been experimenting with that a bit over on my wordpress.com blog.

Thanks for reading, survive your monday!
Dominik

  1. Don’t feel bad about the “internet” part. It makes things better, not worse! ↩