Great support from @sparkpost. My email issue was resolved in a few hours.
Ten Years of Hanselminutes
Well done Scott Hanselman on reaching double-digits with his technology podcast, Hanselminutes.
The observant among you will have noticed another lull in my writing here. It’s been a frustrating few months trying to get back to a steady rhythm of blogging. I truly miss the days from a couple of years ago when I was writing and publishing on a daily basis. Those were good times.
There are a number of reasons why this has happened and I won’t bore you with the obvious ones like “I’m too busy” and “I’m too tired”. Instead I thought I would take a look at the not so obvious reasons.
I don’t have the thousands of avid readers that others have but there is a steadily increasing number of readers here. Page views and visitors have been going up over the last two three years. A good sign that I’m doing something right. And yet ever since I noticed the amount of traffic my blog has been receiving, I’ve noticed that the frequency with which I write to the blog has been decreasing.
Stage fright?
You might call it that. I’ve lost track of the amount of posts that I have started writing and then abandoned. It’s frustrating to start writing something and then trash it and go over the process again and again. I find that half the battle is not in writing something but writing something fit to publish.
The second reason is the choice of topics. For a long time I was writing daily about apps, web development, freelancing, productivity and a few other things. Trying to find something to write about in these areas has been a struggle lately. I’m starting to wonder if I am restricting myself in the topics that I could be writing about. Do I need to start looking further afield? Maybe. Or maybe I need to look back on what I wrote in the past and refresh it? Lots of things change and the topics that I wrote about three years ago could have changed.
Who knows.
All I know is that the mere act of reflecting on the lack of writing has prompted me to write something for the blog. And that is a start in the right direction once more.
The Morning Pages Experiment
What I’m experimenting with now, though, is adding a little more structure to my pages. Not something overbearing (the whole point of morning pages is for it to be free, stream-of-consciousness writing), but more a footnote. Once my daily pages are dumped from my brain, I’ve started adding three lists: Focus, Fears and Excitement.
— Pulling Focus by Relative Sanity
My morning pages routine has also seen a little change in its format in the last few weeks. I pick a word, form a topic or question around it and then start writing. It’s working well so far.
Doing the Twitter cull thing again. Mostly news sites.
Been trying a number of desktop apps as web alternatives, but I keep coming back to the web based apps. Hard to beat such a great platform.
Daniel’s decision to delete the majority of his social media accounts is a reminder that social media isn’t a necessity in life. You can live without it you know!
Last year, returning from one of my Blurb missions, I landed at John Wayne Airport in Orange County California. We were fortunate and actually landed eight minutes early. The only issue was we didn’t have a gate. The pilot came on and said “The good news is that we are early, but we are going to have to wait eight minutes for a place to park.” The woman next to me, based on her clothing and briefcase, was who I would label as a midlevel executive, business traveler. During our delay she turned on her phone, punched in the code and checked her Facebook page twenty-four times in eight minutes. Again, I don’t use “addiction” lightly.
— Why I Deleted My Social Media Accounts by Daniel Milnor
Update: Some links in this post pointed to pages that no longer exist and have been removed.
Do I know any people who are good with SQL Server Reporting Services?
That moment where you can’t decide which one your messaging apps you’re going to use. Twitter, Instagram, Path …
A nice reminder from NB for the weekend.
Update: Some links in this post pointed to pages that no longer exist and have been removed.