We lost my beloved cousin Noah this week.
I don’t have the words yet. But Noah, you were wonderful, and we all loved you so much.
Ma used to say that she liked to think of everyone who was gone having a picnic on the beach and looking down at us. I ...
August 31, 2023
I was pleased to attend the Online Journalism Awards on Saturday night. Some winning highlights included:
The 19th won a Breaking News award for its coverage of the Dobbs decision, including some really great data journalism. I’m proud of, and very happy for, my friends there. By the way, you should ...
August 28, 2023
I’ve come away from the Online News Association conference with a really familiar feeling: somewhere between unsettled and frustrated. Not at journalists, I hasten to add, who are doing important, democratic work despite shrinking budgets and adverse conditions. But a little bit at the business sides of their organizations, and ...
August 26, 2023
I think it’s important to prefix this post with the obvious: I am not a fan or apologist for Donald Trump. I think he’s nakedly undermined the workings of democracy, and has used the authoritarian playbook to build a movement that is, at its heart, anti-immigrant, anti-inclusion, and anti-progress, and ...
August 26, 2023
Journalism is the bedrock of democracy. Newsrooms should skip the sales pitch. ...
August 25, 2023
Burning out personally feels a lot like burning out professionally. ...
August 23, 2023
I’m over halfway through writing my book. It’s not, technically speaking, my first — I published a technical guide to the browser geolocation API a long time ago, and self-published a short novel I wrote during NaNoWriMo — but it is my first really serious attempt at a novel. As ...
August 22, 2023
I’m thinking about diverging my website and newsletter.
Today, if you sign up to the newsletter, you get every blog post via email (although sometimes I wait until there have been several small blog posts and send them together as a digest). That means you can follow along on the web, ...
August 21, 2023
Publishers are between a rock and a hard place as they try and figure out where to devote their time and energy. The options are:
Mastodon: My favorite network to use, but not a good fit for publishers’ existing audience models. Mastodon has no effective cross-network search and blocks browser referral ...
August 18, 2023
How my career has ebbed and flowed through several reinventions ...
August 18, 2023
I’ve used DeleteMe to remove my personal information from search engines and information hubs, but it hadn’t occurred to me until recently that I needed to also remove information about my home from listings sites. It turns out there are full photos, including video walkthroughs, just about everywhere. Particularly with ...
August 17, 2023
One of the newsletters I subscribe to ran a sponsored post for Paintbrush, a firm that gives idea-stage founders a $50,000 loan to prove out their idea. The pitch on the front page is, “No rich aunt or uncle? No worries.”
My initial reaction was positive: I do think access to ...
August 16, 2023
A tool to help facilitate an open culture ...
August 15, 2023
Kate McKean describes how she’s writing her novel:
Right now, I am getting up early (6ish, not bonkers early) and leaving my house about 7am to go to a local coffee shop to write for an hour or two before my regular work day. I do this Tuesdays and Thursdays as ...
August 15, 2023
It turns out that Cheltenham Township, the municipality where I live across the northern Philadelphia border, incurs an extra earned income tax on top of the state and federal taxes that I’m used to paying. This would have been fine if I’d had any idea that such a tax existed, ...
August 10, 2023
Today was my best writing day in a while. I’m in awe of writers like Lancali who blithely post about hitting nearly 6000 words in a day. That is not me. That is very far from being me.
If I can hit a four figure word count, I consider it a ...
August 7, 2023
Update: Zoom has clarified its position in a new blog post which makes it clear that AI features are, in fact, opt-in.
Zoom’s terms of service now allow meeting content to be used to train AI, without opt-out:
What raises alarm is the explicit mention of the company's right to use this ...
August 7, 2023
As a (relatively) new parent, one of the questions that preoccupies me is: how can we show our son that anything is possible, and that he can be anything he wants to be? More specifically, how can we ensure that he knows that the templates and stereotypes laid out for ...
August 6, 2023
Code is cumulative overhead. The more you write, the more you have to maintain over time.
Self-hosted infrastructure is cumulative overhead. The more you configure and run, the more you have to maintain over time.
Always watch your overhead and keep it as light as possible.
The only code you should ever build ...
August 4, 2023
I’ve been absolutely laid out with a cold all this week. It feels pretty awful, not unlike how I felt when I had covid, but a million negative tests have let me know it’s not that.
Getting sick happens so rarely now (maybe once a year) that it comes with a ...
August 3, 2023
Interesting websites, articles, books, and media from the last month. ...
August 1, 2023