Matthew Lang

Every day is a school day. I love that phrase.

As a programmer and daily resident of the Internet, it really does apply to me. Not a day goes by where I don’t learn something new. It might be a new method in the Ruby language, or a new trick in Rails. It might even be just learning that your favourite App.net client for the iPhone does allow you to save drafts. Really, I just discovered this last week.

The thing is though, I’m usually working at such a pace where I learn something, use it and then forget about it. No more.

You only learn from the things you write down. If you don’t, trying to remember it with the million other thoughts that go through your head that day just makes it impossible. So with that in mind I am aiming to log a today I learned (or TIL) a day.

Mostly this will be programming stuff, but it should feed the my blog for potential development and programming posts. I might even post a summary of the week here if it becomes more than just programming stuff.

I’ll be keeping a log in Journalong for this. I’ll let it you all know how it goes after a month.

If you’re reading this post through an RSS reader, then you probably won’t be aware of the fact that my site went under a little makeover at the weekend. Tired of the very familiar Octopress layout I wanted something simple and easy to read.

I’ve long admired sites like Patrick Rhone’s blog, the Medium post layout, and others like this. They’re simple sites that focus on the content of each post.

In the past I’ve also favoured having a sidebar where I could display related posts and other information from other services I use but over time I’ve grown to dislike the sidebar. It’s too much information that draws the reader’s eyes away from your blog post.

So what I wanted was a simple one column layout that makes my posts easy to read.

In the past I have kept a beady on the Octopress wiki. Being a lazy developer I wanted to use an existing theme rather than build my own from scratch. The look and feel of my blog isn’t on my list of highly important projects so using an existing theme was the way to go. The problem was that I couldn’t find anything that I liked that I could just install. In the past week, I’ve been hacking on existing themes to get try and get it to fit my requirements with varied results.

Before starting work on another existing theme, I did a check of the Octopress wiki for any recent changes and I was thrilled to see a new theme added to the wiki that fitted my requirements nicely. Leanpress (code).

As you can see it’s a minimal single column theme that has been designed to adapt to other devices like tablets and smartphones. The only change that I need to do was add icons for App.net, Github, Linked and the RSS feed for my blog.

It’s the first time in a while that I’ve really enjoyed the simplicity of a single column theme for my blog. I can see me sticking with this for a long time to come.

I originally read about Leo Babauta’s text playlist at the start of the year. The idea is that you keep a list of articles that you read on a regular basis and keep them in easy reach. I was sold.

I wanted to create my own text playlist but the problem I had was that I had hundreds of articles to pick from. My Pinboard account gets links saved to it daily and at the last count I was at just over 1300 saved links. Where do I begin to build my list? Searching through my Pinboard links was going to take time.

I let the idea of a text playlist slide for a while until I came across an article that I wanted to add to my playlist and over the last few months I’ve browsed through a few tags on Pinboard looking for articles that I’ve frequently read in the past.

At the start of the week I had a breakthrough. Stef Lewandowski’s article on creativity was my first article on the playlist and today I recalled a few other articles of the same high quality that I wanted to add. I love this idea of a highly valued list of articles that you can refer back to on a frequent basis. I like to think of it as my “Best of” from my saved links in Pinboard.

So without further ado, I give you my text playlist.

… every day.

A must read.

… for all that’s part of you with Nicholas Bate.

Nitin Khanna has been enjoying Journalong:

So you like to note down your thoughts but don’t want the complexity of a proper journaling software like Day One? Journalong is now free, so just hook it up to your Dropbox and start using it to write down your thoughts in txt or markdown, maybe even several times a day.

You can too.

I might not approve of Curtis McHale’s choice of journaling tool (just kidding), but I do approve of his reason for journaling.

I’d like to think that they will want a better picture of what I was in my 30′s as my family was starting. I’d like to think that I’m interesting enough to leave a legacy for them that they’ll be interested in.

via Pedal Consumption

I have a new hobby, sort of. Last weekend I bought myself a new set of golf clubs and last night I took my oldest son to the driving range for a boys night. He got to fine tune his swing and I got the chance to become familiar with the first set of golf clubs I’ve had in 20 years. It’s sure been a long time since I played a round of golf, so I wasn’t sure what to expect with a new set of golf clubs. The surprising thing was that I could actually hit the ball reasonably well.

This new hobby isn’t about me though, it’s more about my son. Being a great little golfer means I want to get him on the course as often as possible, but access to golf courses for kids isn’t easy, especially when you thrown in the unpredictable Scottish weather. Also he’s a bit young to be out playing a round on his own.

So I decided to arm myself with some clubs and get into this golf thing with my son. Hopefully over the summer and autumn I can get him onto some public courses near us, but more importantly he can teach Dad how to play golf!

It’s come to my attention that I have neglected Journalong in the last few months. I had big plans for Journalong but in the last few weeks I’ve simply neglected working on it. I should be able to work on Journalong on my own time, but finding that time has been difficult over the past few months. That’s no excuse though, but that’s really another story.

I only realized how much I had neglected it when an email from the on-line writing service, Draft, arrived with a bundle of new features for users. Reading through the features I realized that I had let Journalong slide for too long.

No matter what size of product or service you run, letting it fall to the wayside for even a few weeks is bad. If you want it to be a success then you need to be gradually improving your product just one bit at a time.

Even if it’s only a couple of hours a week, it better to make improvements and ship them rather than waiting for a day where you can do a whole ton of work in one go. That day might not come for a few weeks or months. What if it does come and you end up doing something else? Don’t neglect your product.