This is a great idea for a plugin from Greg Reinacker. You set a minimum threshold for how many pageviews per minute would be “big” for you, and then if your site exceeds that threshold you get an email. It’s a clever way to wean yourself from that awful habit of checking your Mint stats every 15 minutes to see if you’re getting a spike of unusually high traffic or not.

And, if you don’t want to start checking your email every 15 minutes instead of your Mint stats, set the “send alerts to” email address to your cell phone provider’s text message address. This way you’ll get an SMS if you’re site starts getting lots of traffic, and so in the downtime you can stop thinking about it.

Yours truly is a guest on the latest episode of the Enough, the Minimal Mac Podcast. It was a blast recording this show (mostly because Patrick and Myke seem to catch all my dry, cheesy jokes).

Many thanks to The Escapers for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote Flux, their Mac web-design app. Flux is both a text editor and WYSIWYG editor for building and designing web sites.

A few other apps by The Escapers include Stor, a MySQL editor, and Stuf, a clipboard manager which syncs your clipboard history across different Macs on the same network.

For a limited time you can use the discount code “SHAWNBLANC” and get 20% off any of their apps.

Ben and I talk about News.me and related topics. This isn’t as fast-paced of an episode as we usually record, but it’s a very interesting one. We discuss a lot of thoughts on the topics of news publishing, personal curating, micro-patronage, etcetera.

Episode 9 is sponsored by United Camera.

Beautiful video.

Marco Arment on News.me:

The best part, to me — except the Instapaper integration in all of these, of course — is that this is a brand new market, created entirely by the iPad, that significantly benefits everyone involved: readers can easily find more content from a wider variety of publishers, publishers get more readers and a potential alternative to advertising revenue, and the market is so large that there’s plenty of space for many services to successfully connect them.

John Borthwick on the development of the News.me iPad app, including the the “see what your friends are reading, too” feature:

For the first version we wanted to simply take your Twitter stream, filter it using a bitly-based algorithm (bit-rank) and present it as an iPad app. The goal was to make an easy to browse, beautiful reading experience. Within weeks we had a first version working. As we sat around the table reviewing it, we started passing our iPads around saying “let me look at your stream.” And that’s how it really started. We stumbled into a new way of reading Twitter and consuming news — the reverse follow graph wherein I get to read not only what you share, but what you read as well. I get to read looking over other people’s shoulders.

I like it. You can find a few more photos on VW’s site here.

I’ve thought about packing up the laptop and heading over to the local coffee shop to work for a while, but it seems so cliché. I’m hesitant to put myself into such a stereotypical scenario: being the dude at the coffee shop with his cappuccino sitting next to his moleskin that’s sitting next to his laptop as he writes for his blog. I suppose I could not order a cappuccino.

(Via Rands.)

If you work at your computer, and your work involves typing at all, TextExpander is a must-have utility. Today’s update to this fine app includes AppleScript support and more.

(Side note about TextExpander: I was chatting with Patrick Rhone yesterday and we were talking about TextExpander, and we had this idea for a cool feature: random snippets. For example (and here is where I give away a secret), I get a lot of emails about typos on this site. I love these emails because I love to discover and fix typos. I have a TextExpander snippet for replying to people when they point out a typo.

I type “ttypo” and it auto-expands to:

Good catch. Fixed now. Thanks!

— Shawn

However, there are a handful of folks that are “regulars” at emailing me with typo discoveries. I don’t like replying to them with the same words every time. It’d be neat if I could assign 3 or 4 different variations of the above thank you note, and every time I typed in the TextExpander abbreviation “ttypo” a different snippet would be generated.)

Fascinating and extremely detailed analysis from Craig Mod about his Kickstarter project for re-publishing Art Space Tokyo:

A mere five years ago it would have been unthinkable to use social media to drum up $24,000 for the republication of a book. We accomplished not only that, but have been able to price the book sustainably, launch a publishing think tank, sell direct to our audience and buck traditional distribution channels. We are, undeniably, in an era shaping the future of publishing — how it happens, with whom it happens, and on what terms it happens.

My hope is this article helps at least fifty other creators accomplish something similar.

Craig wrote this article last July, but I’ve only just now discovered it via Chris Bowler. It’s jam packed with facts, figures, ideas, and good advice.