Many thanks to Navel Labs for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote their iPhone app, ReadMore. It doesn’t matter if you read a lot or a little, ReadMore is a clever app that keeps track of your reading habits. It has all sorts of stats and facts that help and encourage you to actually read more. Because I’m assuming you do want to read more often, right? I certainly do.
And ReadMore is currently on sale for just a buck in the App Store.
Ben and I talk about which apps we would choose if we could only pick 5 apps to have on our Mac (and the OS counts as 1). Sponsored by Notesy.
For the latest of their Bootstrapped, Profitable, and Proud series, 37signals profiles Coudal Partners.
It’s a great story of how Coudal went from doing primarily client work to instead selling their own products (Jewlboxing, The Deck, and Field Notes). I thought this quote from Jim sums their attitude towards business up quite well: “Maybe you don’t have to sell to everybody. Maybe there’s enough people like us.”
Speaking of the new definition of “portable”.
It used to be that you’d have two computers because a laptop wasn’t powerful enough to be your main computer. But then, as the power of laptops grew and the price of them shrank, we began using laptops as our only machines — solving that horrible bother of with keeping the two machines in sync. But now, as it’s getting easier to keep things in sync (if our stuff isn’t all in the Cloud already), it seems there is this a migration back towards having a desktop and a portable.
Also worth noting is that the definition of “desktop” and “portable” is changing.
Last week Austin Kleon posted an article titled, “How to Steal Like an Artist (An 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me)”. There are things you read where you learn something new, and there are the things you read which shed a new light on what you already know and believe in. For me Austin’s article is the latter. And it is one of the best things I have read all week.
However, keeping with the Wil Shipley analogy of farming vs. mining, a better title for Austin’s article would be something along the lines of “How to Be a Farmer.” Because Austin primarily discusses getting off your butt, ignoring your doubts and insecurities, and doing the work you love to do.
As I was reading it I was getting all sorts of little lightbulbs and connections going off in my mind. Here are a few of those items:
One of my Shawn Today episodes called “Aren’t we all just 8th graders” on the topic that many of us feel like we’re just faking it and that’s okay because we’re all just folk.
Wil Shipley’s article on Farming vs. Mining and the difficulty of plowing a plot of land and slowly developing a strong and profitable foundation rather than trying to make a quick buck and then moving on to the next thing before what you made falls apart.
Merlin Mann and John Gruber’s SXSW session: “HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!”
John Gruber’s corresponding article to the above SXSW session: “Obsession Times Voice“
You see, there are those who look at a building a website (or a software program, or a business, or fill in the blank) as a way to make money. The project is simply a means to an end, and that end goal is bucketloads of money.
And then there are those who look at building something because they want to do what they love. And for them money is a tool. Instead of money being the end goal, money becomes the means to a goal — and that goal is doing things they love and creating something they’re proud of.
One of the new features of the site Inkstagram is that it’ll now generate a Twitter background for you based on your Instagram pictures. Very neat.
Today is the one-year anniversary of The Bro Show and I had the privilege of being a guest on episode 52. Myke, Terry, and I finally get to talking about Android, Amazon, and iOS miscellany after I chatter on for 20 minutes about things related to me taking shawnblanc.net full time this week.
I love Wil’s writing and his perspective. His analogy goes far beyond just software development. For example, it goes for writing and publishing a website as well…
The mining equivalent in Wil’s analogy would be (ironically) an obnoxious content farm. One which scrapes from other sites, writes as many posts as possible, uses egregious headlines, and all for the sake of maximizing page views to get more revenue from their punch-the-monkey ads.
The farming equivalent in Wil’s analogy would be thoughtful, intentional writing done by people who care about their topic, their craft, and the time and attention of their readership.
There are sponsorship opportunities for the upcoming episodes of the B&B Podcast. It’s a great way to promote your product or service to an audience of designers, developers, Mac nerds, and coffee nuts.
Sponsoring an episode comes with quite a wide range of exposure (you can check out the sponsorship page for all the info) and is priced extremely reasonably. Some of our past sponsors include Instapaper, Due, Typekit, and Instacast.
Danny Iny shares his story of how he landed an interview with Guy Kawasaki. It’s a pretty encouraging story and Danny gives some genuinely great advice at the end. I completely agree with what he says about being appreciative, cultivating relationships, and working hard. But what I especially love about this story is how Danny actually did those things — he worked his tail off getting ready for the interview:
I spent about fifteen hours preparing for that interview. I read the book from cover to cover, and took notes along the way. Then I thought about what might be valuable to showcase about the book that most interviewers wouldn’t ask about.
In the best-case scenario, my goal was to make the interview so good that Guy would want to tell everyone he knew to listen to it—but at the very least, I wanted to be absolutely sure that I didn’t blow it with Guy, or make him feel like he wasted his time. The work paid off, and turned out to be a pretty good interview.
Kickstarter project to keep your coffee hotter for longer:
Coffee Joulies work with your coffee to achieve two goals. First, they absorb extra thermal energy in your coffee when it’s served too hot, cooling it down to a drinkable temperature three times faster than normal. Next, they release that stored energy back into your coffee keeping it in the right temperature range twice as long.
Mandy Brown writing (very well as always) about how and where we look for and read the news. There are so many fantastic lines in this article that quoting just one or two would be a disservice. Besides, they all go together, and so I suggest you go read it in its entirety.
An odd and creepy bug that will make you think twice before tweeting from the smallest room in the house:
Some of the images that have been coming up on mine are from times and places when I know without a doubt that I haven’t been using facetime.