Moonshots Beyond the Cloud

One year ago today, on 15 July 2019, I returned to Google Blogger and started a new blog . It was the conclusion of a journey that began over a dozen years earlier with my first blog on a self-hosted platform. I later published another blog on Blogger. Next, I left blogging for a few years. For several more years, I used Google+ as a blogging platform. Finally, I briefly tried the IndieWeb, which is not ready for prime time but intriguing. The Blogger dashboard of my blog Moonshots Beyond the Cloud. What was my first year on Blogger like? Uneventful. I chose Blogger because it’s a simple tool which doesn’t get in the way of writing and publishing . It does all I need and lets me focus on content. Google has been refreshing Blogger with a gradual redesign for the past couple of years. They’re rebuilding the platform on foundations rooted in a modern, mobile friendly design language and infrastructure. However, the new Blogger doesn’t provide much in the way ...

Ten years ago, in July 2010, I left traditional print books for ebooks, and I haven’t looked back. Over the past decade, I bought about 300 ebooks and half a dozen print books and read around a hundred free ebooks. Of these print books, two were very interesting but unavailable in digital format. I bought a couple other traditional books because friends wrote them or I contributed to works, so I wanted a tangible artifact as a memento or signed copy I could hold in my hands. Finally, I got the last couple of print books to give as presents. My first ebook reader, a Bookeen Cybook Opus e-ink device. My transition to ebooks and digital reading happened almost overnight. I never had regrets or second thoughts. I regularly shared my experience with ebooks on Google+ and later on this blog where, in 2019, I posted a retrospective of my first 9 years with ebooks . The 10th anniversary is a suitable occasion to tell in some detail how the transition happened, what my exper...

The cloud IDE Repl.it was redesigned to improve the user experience on mobile devices. On smartphones, now the focused REPL pane takes up most of the screen. The redesign takes advantage of native mobile design patterns and lets you switch to a different pane from the bottom navigation bar . There are panes for the code editor, the console, and the output. A Python REPL in Repl.it on my Pixel 2 XL phone. Tapping the code in the editor brings up a contextual menu with some options of the desktop version. You can select, search, or paste text, or open the full command palette. On my Pixel 2 XL phone in Chrome, lines with up to 42 characters fit in the editor’s width. The editor wraps longer lines. But most of the code usually keeps the original indentation and its structure is still clear at a glance. The console pane wraps text, too, so no horizontal scrolling is required. You can get an idea of what Repl.it looks like on mobile by opening the browser on your ...

Indie writer David Gaughran published the ebook Following: A Marketing Guide To Author Platform . It’s a free bonus you can download by subscribing to David’s weekly book marketing newsletter . David Gaughran’s Following ebook in Google Play Books on my Pixel 2 XL phone. The book brings clarity on the confusing issue of building an author platform writers and authors face, especially when going indie and self-publishing. Its greatest value is a concise and clear definition of what an author platform is and what it's supposed to do, along with a prioritized roadmap. Although you’ll find practical advice in Following , the book comes with an online resource section David keeps up to date with how-tos, step-by-step guides, videos, lists of service providers, and more. David presents a framework grounded on two pillars, an author website and a newsletter . You can add other activities and online presences modularly on top of those as your time and resources allow....

To get the RSS feed of a newsletter hosted at Revue , enter the URL of the newsletter’s sign up and archive page into your feed reader . This returns a partial feed with an entry for each issue. An article in the RSS feed of my Practicing Google Newsletter in Feedly. If the reader doesn’t recognize the feed, add ?format=rss to the newsletter’s URL. For example, the URL of my newsletter is http://newsletter.paoloamoroso.com and I can get the RSS by rewriting it as http://newsletter.paoloamoroso.com?format=rss Another trick is to append ?format=text to the URL of an issue to get the ASCII text with some HTML formatting. An example is this URL of one of my issues http://newsletter.paoloamoroso.com/issues/freeing-up-storage-on-android-deleting-youtube-s-watch-history-and-more-252454 that returns the text via http://newsletter.paoloamoroso.com/issues/freeing-up-storage-on-android-deleting-youtube-s-watch-history-and-more-252454?format=text The usual way of receiving a ...

Update The FindYour.Blog was unfortunately shut down and is no longer online. FindYour.Blog is a new blog directory — remember those? — aimed at new or niche bloggers. It lets you browse, search, review, and like blogs. You can also submit your own blog. The home page of FindYour.Blog. The directory has a clean design and is easy to use. But there’s something that makes it stand out: the community . FindYourBlog seems to attract passionate bloggers who value writing, sharing, and thinking. There are almost no marketers and the blogs in the directory don’t smell of SEO or have pushy selling, modal pop-ups, or heavy ads. Their posts focus instead on content and ideas with not much thought to ranking in search or selling yet another course. The writing has readers in mind, not search engines. Submitting blogs requires approval, and the editors are doing an excellent curation job. FindYour.Blog is a labor of love that brings back the roots and essence blogging had i...

One feature that made Medium popular is the minimalist design of its blogs. They emphasize text and images and have no blogrolls, widgets, tag clouds, or other distracting elements. It was a unique feature in the days of the desktop web when Medium came out. A post of my blog in Chrome on my Pixel 2 XL phone. Now the web is mobile-first and all responsive websites have a similar minimalist design on the smartphone and tablet screens the majority of readers use. They hide most of the design complexity behind a hamburger menu with links to other pages. If you open a post, the text and images dominate the page area. Just like Medium. For example, my Blogger blog has a responsive template that works the same way. Visit it on your phone. There are a few links at the top of the page and a handful of post recommendations at the bottom. These minor elements are hardly distracting. WordPress blogs and most other responsive websites do the same. The mobile revolution ...