I’ve always said that I’m the most productive when I let myself work on what I feel like at the moment. Since leaving my day job, I’ve felt like working on everything. I’ve actually been a little scattered, but I’m getting into a groove.
personal
Ok, so here’s the official announcement. I left my job at AOL Tech to go off on my own (for now). Feel free to skip to the end to find out how you can support my move.
personal, work
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bookmarks, ifttt, macos
The Markdown Service Tools have been updated to 2.10. I learned some new Ruby/UTF-8 tricks in the process, and they should all be capable of handling extended character sets now. Please download and test out the new versions. Let me know if you still have any trouble with Umlats, Kanji, Cyrillic, etc.
markdown, markdownservices, mindmapping, service
Mindmeister, my favorite online mind mapping tool, saw a major update today. With a flat UI and updated color palette, it’s looking great, and new tools and tool layout make it more powerful than ever.
mindmapping, mindmeister, tools
SearchLink 2.0 is up now. I had enough changes to make after the last version — which I already thought was a pretty big step forward — that I decided it was time for a major version bump. If you’re not familliar with SearchLink as a tool for speedier blogging and online writing, see the project page for more info.
markdown, search, searchlink
I haven’t been posting about every episode of Systematic for a while now. I’ve had some amazing guests lately, and if you’re behind on the show you should definitely catch up! This week’s guest, Jeff Severns Guntzel, is a journalist out of Minneapolis, MN, and the conversation was so much fun I had to add a pointer to it. I think you’ll enjoy it.
podcast, systematic
I’ve added a quick new PopClip extension called “Twitterify” to the collection. It will convert any @names and #tags in the selected text to Markdown or HTML links pointing to the user’s page on Twitter or a Twitter search for the hashtag. It’s something I find myself doing pretty often when writing blog posts that mention users. I rarely link hashtags, but it seemed like a pretty standard addition.
popclip, twitter
I’ve updated SearchLink to v1.8 with a couple of improvements. SearchLink is a System Service for quickly turning selected text into Markdown links based on various search engines. See the SearchLink project page for more details.
markdown, markdownservices, search, searchlink, service
I had a couple of friends recently lose their beloved pets. It’s a tough thing to watch, and an even tougher thing to go through, but it’s guaranteed to happen eventually1. I learned some things from my wife, who’s lost more pets than I’ve owned, and I think there’s good advice here for everyone.
personal
A cool new app was released today called Shoots & Leaves. It lets you snap a picture and immediately turn it into a plain text link in your clipboard for sending to an array of services and other apps. Get it? Shoots and leaves… I find it funny, anyway.
appreview, apps, ios, iphone, photography
This year I Launched the new brettterpstra.com on a Jekyll platform (I’ve written about a few of my Jekyll adventures). Since then I’ve had a couple of projects ship, so I thought I’d take time to do my yearly review.
jekyll, macos, news, nvalt, personal, service, tools
