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I'm a journalist and occasional web designer. I blog about simple, useful software at http://onethingwell.org

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I came expecting examples of to-do lists, mail clients, clever messaging apps, etc. There are a handful of those.

There are hundreds of posts about those sorts of applications in the archives[0], but the focus of the site tends to drift about a lot depending on what I'm up to/interested in at a given time.

Instead, the majority of apps are described by sentences where literally every word would be unfamiliar to a typical computer user.

That's definitely a problem, and after chatting with some readers on Twitter recently I'm making more of an effort to 'translate' jargon and buzzwords in software descriptions.

[0] See, e.g., http://onethingwell.org/tagged/todo

Nice site.

Thank you!

He hasn't covered yet some well known ones, or at least I cannot find them using the search field in his site

I've posted about all the software you mention bar toxic but, as you discovered, Tumblr's built-in search doesn't work terribly well. I'll add a Duck Duck Go search box this afternoon. (It's been on my todo list for, er, just over two years now...)

GiveSimp.ly 14 years ago

This looks like it'd be useful for any group that relies on donations from members, public collections, &c. - seems odd to limit the number of potential users by pitching exclusively to churches.

"Find people around you app - Nobody wants to find people around them and meet them. Trust me"

Install Grindr on your phone and you'll find that a huge number of people are very interested indeed in finding and meeting people around them.

A 1959 Austin Healey Frogeye Sprite.

Not entirely practical in the British winter, admittedly. And the lack of seat belts tends to worry passengers. But I always have an enormous grin on my face while driving, and it's absurdly cheap to run.

I could see that data being nice to review if you were writing a private diary/journal for your own future consumption.

Other than that, the concept seems pretty flawed - git is useful when you manually commit at the end of a chunk of writing, and again after an edit/change. Wrangling with commits made at preset intervals - when you're likely in the middle of a paragraph - seems like it would be a nightmare, and next to useless if you need to revert to an earlier draft.

Without wishing to knock Kickstarter, which has provided a platform for plenty of great projects, it's fascinating that people are now willing to pay good money for an icon and a statement of intent (otherwise known as vapourware).

Life in Text Mode 16 years ago

He does use Firefox, for sites that don't work in w3m.

My setup on Linux is pretty similar, and I use w3m a fair bit, especially for reading documentation--it's fast, and for text-heavy sites suits me better than a graphical browser.

That said, doing without a 'normal' browser entirely seems a bit masochistic/text-obsessive to me too.

[dead] 16 years ago

"Mr. Jackson now teaches at a majority-white school."

Not for much longer, I suspect.

I'm not sure you can call a text editor 'ultra minimalist' when it depends (on my system at least) on 353MB of other software.

Thank you, Ubuntu 16 years ago

"it runs on every piece of hardware you throw at it"

That's what continues to impress me about Ubuntu - I've installed it on everything from PPC-era Macs to dodgy little netbooks and it invariably 'just works'.

The link's in my profile (not sure what the rules on self-linking are here!)

I get between 45 and 50k page views a month, which isn't exactly crazy traffic - I think the affiliate link in question did well because it was a) part of a very enthusiastic review of a pretty obscure product and b) the post was linked to/reblogged on Tumblr by much more popular sites.

It's certainly made me rethink my plan to put adverts on the site - hard to say without testing, but past experience with Google Ads makes me think the occasional hardware review/affiliate link would be better for me, in terms of earning some cash for all the work I put in, and better for my readers (no intrusive ads, and a good post is a good post whether it has an affiliate link in it or not).

I know how you feel - I wrote an 'anything and everything I've ever found interesting' type blog for ten years, and hardly anyone read it (despite a pagerank of 4, and certain individual posts on obscure topics getting decent traffic via Google).

This year I set up a tightly-focussed, single topic blog and committed to writing three posts every week day - it took off, I have lots of enthusiastic readers (and this month I paid the mortgage with a single Amazon affiliate link, if that matters). I did no SEO beyond writing clean, simple HTML, and actively ignored some standard SEO advice (eg. one-word titles, no repetition of keywords).

In other words: in my experience you're never going to become the next Kottke with a general interest weblog, but if you find a niche you're passionate about, you don't need to do any SEO douchebag stuff to attract readers.