The Bear
“The Bear” is a kitchen nightmare where frazzled chefs constantly clash, only to realize that their toxic behavior not only takes a toll on their well-being but also hurts their business.
21/6/2024
The last good vibes social media platform
I have a theory that every social media platform is destined to descend into chaos. It shouldn’t come as a surprise when we gather millions of people in one place and encourage them to share their opinions on everything.
Posts.cv is the exception that proves the rule. Unpretentious, with a focus on design, digital art, and career development, and featuring human curation, the most controversial posts I’ve seen in months are from people frustrated with companies ghosting them after job interviews. Even those are rare and have a mild tone.
At first glance, Posts.cv looks like a clone of the late Twitter, right down to the button placement in the UI. Features like mentions, likes, and DMs, which are expected in these environments, are all there. Let’s face it, it’s hard to escape the infinite scrolling, even if, due to the low number of users, getting to the end of the feed isn’t a difficult task – unless you get lost admiring others’ work and photos.
And that’s where Posts.cv differs: the content and the people. The Highlights tab, which showcases the best of the network, features digital UIs, personal projects, artistic experiments, discussions about Figma and other graphic tools, and – of course – pictures of food and beautiful places.
If your really think about it, every single…
If you really think about it, every single productivity and enterprise software is a fancy and/or multiplayer variation of spreadsheets, plain text editors, or to-do lists.
24/5/2024
Buttondown: Newsletter software for people like you and me
Like many digital entrepreneurs, Justin Duke thought he could create a better newsletter service than TinyLetter, the one used to send news to friends and family.
In 2016, driven by the continual shortcomings of TinyLetter, which by then was already owned (and forgotten) by Mailchimp, Justin launched Buttondown.
Originally crafted for personal use, a year later Buttondown became a service available to others. This transition was prompted by requests from others who had seen screenshots and comments about the product that Justin shared on Twitter.
In an email conversation, Justin mentioned that “the dirty secret” of the industry is that all newsletter or email tools do 80% of what people expect from them—composing and sending emails, managing subscriptions, etc. The differentiation lies in that last 20%.
“For Buttondown, the 20% we care about is the small stuff”, he explained. “Buttondown doesn’t work well if you’re an e-commerce platform sending to 200,000 subscribers daily, requiring many coupons and plugins. However, we focus on ease of use and the ability to concentrate on writing or your business without fussing around with yet another tool, ideal for single authors or small teams.”
The appeal of Buttondown is readily apparent.
18/5/2024
My Blogging Workflow
Let’s talk about blogs!
Mine is made with Jekyll and hosted on Fastmail — yes, on Fastmail’s virtual drive; more on that in a second. I mix medium-length articles with images, quotes, and short notes/asides (which we used to know as “tweets”), which makes my blog, in fact, a tumblelog.
Post ideas are registered in a list in Apple Reminders and developed on the computer. To write, I always use the standard macOS TextEditor, in plain text mode.
After putting the front matter in the file, I save it in the posts directory of my local copy of the blog and run an alias command in the terminal that serves as a shortcut for four commands:
bundle update, to update Jekyll dependencies;jekyll clean, to delete the local copy of the static site;jekyll build, to generate a new copy of the static site; andrclone -v --progress --delete-excluded-checksum --exclude ".*{/**,}" sync ~/Sites/Notes/_site/ fastmail:rodrigo.ghed.in/files/notes/, to send the blog files to the Fastmail drive using rclone.
It sounds complex, but to be honest it’s not. (I’m not a developer or anything like that, just a random guy a little curious.)
I run the same workflow in my pt_BR blog, and both of them work like a charm!
This post was inspired by Robb Knight, Barry Hess, Robert Birming and others who shared their blog publishing workflows. See all of them on Robert’s blog.
15/5/2024
Taming “read later” apps
When smartphones became popular, a new kind of app emerged to address the limitations of the small screen and the mobile nature of these devices that keep us in constant contact with interesting content.
“Read it later” apps, such as Instapaper and Pocket, serve as private repositories for articles we save throughout the day when we don’t have time to read them immediately.
I’ve always had one of these apps on my phone, but I’ve never been able to stop the number of unread articles from skyrocketing.
Can anyone manage it? The cycle is always the same: I download a new app or revisit an old one, start adding articles faster than I can read them, and before I know it, my reading list is in the triple digits. At that point, I declare bankruptcy and restart the cycle.