Blogging Platforms

Twitter and Facebook seem strangely complementary; Facebook offers private sharing of text and photographs with friends and family, while Twitter offers public sharing of similar data with strangers holding similar interests. Since these services took off, "traditional" blogging, by which I mean the self-publishing of newspaper-style text and photographs, seems to have slipped from the public eye. Where once the mainstream media would have reported on the "Blogosphere" (horrible term), now the talk is all of Social Media, led by Twitter and Facebook.

That doesn't mean that the bloggers have gone away, of course. They're still around, crafting long-form articles (to varying degrees of success, quality and obscurity) and pushing the subjects that interest them but their media profile has definitely slipped. In part, this is a natural response to the sudden availability of new, faster, more convenient forms of communication, predominantly Twitter, that have enabled a new style of rapid engagement between individuals, governments, companies and other organisations.

This is great. I am a big fan of Twitter and I use it almost daily (not least to publicise my blog posts, which never fail to get at least 1-2 views per week) but what if you want to write pieces longer than 140 characters? For you there are several tools available and I'm going to look briefly at two of them.

First up is Posterous, a relatively new blogging platform, acquired in 2012 by Twitter. Posterous's unique feature is its ability to re-post your blogs to a variety of other social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Tumblr and a huge number of others. You can, with very little effort, distribute your blogs across all the major social media sites, maintaining a distributed presence with little or no effort.

Is this useful? Well, sort of. Posting a link to your blog to Facebook or Twitter is reasonably likely to increase your audience and the integration is mature and successful. Pushing updates to other sites, for example Blogger, works but the end result is less than entirely pleasing because of the way that the updates are formatted, which means your Blogger site fills up with slightly dodgy Posterous updates. Not great.

My preferred option (and I have spent a long time thinking about this) is Blogger, which I have used for about six years. By far the more powerful tool, the only thing it can't do is auto-post to other social media sites. This is a bit of a pain after the convenience of Posterous but salvation arrives in the form of IFTTT, a configurable tool for doing things with your stuff on the Internet. Configuring IFTTT to, for example, post blog links to Twitter or Facebook, is quick and easy, rendering Posterous's most compelling feature redundant and addressing the one hole in Blogger's formidable feature arsenal.

My recommendation, therefore, if you are looking for a blogging platform, is to use Blogger with a side-order of IFTTT; simple, quick, elegant, robust and fun.

Newspapers; What are they good for?

As a general rule, newspapers really aren't worth the effort. They offer a small selection of yesterday's news written largely by people more interested in meeting their deadlines than in producing insightful, informative articles. The news they present is, in most cases, unsupported by references to the source material and thus largely unverifiable by interested readers.

These failings are particularly prevalent in articles covering science, technology or economics, where specialist input or familiarity with the subject matter is often seen as unhelpful or downright dangerous. It seems that some papers deliberately produce misleading but exciting headlines and poorly written articles powered by glorious ignorance simply to increase their circulation.

This is, of course, entirely understandable from a commercial perspective. Nobody wants to read a boring newspaper and I suspect that people also chose papers that already reflect their own beliefs; nobody wants to be too challenged in their world views by their morning paper. Tailoring your news to satisfy your audience is therefore likely to be financially advantageous but might there not be a middle ground? Could we not find some happy compromise that allows papers to print simplistic, audience-pleasing stories that are both accurate and informative? Might it not, if we set our sights a little higher, actually be possible to shift the perspective of readers by gently nudging them towards a more liberal, caring future and away from whatever prejudices they might have been lumbered with in childhood?

Here is my (amateur) manifesto for improvement in the media:

All quoted sources should be referenced (unless they are confidential, of course) so that interested readers can dig more deeply into a subject.

• Articles, editorials, photographs, graphics and any other published item should be attributed.
• Articles should be fact-checked before they are published and background information should be linked.
• Re-printing of commercial press releases as news should be discouraged, or at least accompanied by some sort of opinion, explanation or editorial. Many press releases would, with only a modest amount of extra effort, surely provide a good starting point for stories like "Corporation pushes unproven/unnecessary product on unwary public".
• Papers should avoid articles that reinforce negative stereotypes or prejudices and should instead strive to produce texts that embody the best, rather than the worst, attitudes.
• Education is not a dirty word; giving readers information or outlooks that they might not previously have had can be a good thing.

There is evidence that these ideas (or, more likely, more sophisticated, considered versions) are already in place at some organisations. BBC News Online and the Economist both adopt these practices to some extent but other papers, like the mainstream dailies (and their online equivalents), seem to go out of their way to avoid anything that might be mistaken for sensible, responsible journalism.

If I had the money (and, frankly, if I knew anything about publishing) I might start a paper of some sort to put these ideas into practice; anyone want to start a new business with me?

PlainText and Innovation

I have written before about the app PlainText (Hog Bay Software), my text editor of choice, because it has a lightweight, intuitive, clutter-free, easy-to-use user interface and it syncs with Dropbox. I have written also about the features I would like to see added to iOS, particularly for text editing. Today, somewhat to my surprise, I find that PlainText already has one of the features that I had requested but with an unexpected and delightful implementation that would transfer nicely to other editors (I'm thinking of Pages and Diet Coda, specifically).

So what is this feature? How will it transform your life? Actually, in answer to the second question, I have to say that it probably isn't going to have much impact on your wider life. It would be nice if it did but text editing features can do only so much; you have to be realistic about these things.

One of the things I wanted to see in iOS 6 was an extended keyboard that included left and right cursor keys, as seen in Diet Coda. My reasoning was that cursor positioning in iOS, even on the iPads larger screen, is a bit tricky. Dedicated buttons for small adjustments seemed like a good idea in terms of increasing usability and productivity. How often, after all, do you use the cursor keys on a physical keyboard?

Hog Bay Software's solution is to make the left and right borders of the app, which are merely white space (clutter-free UI), into giant (but invisible) cursor keys. Tap the right margin to move right, the left margin to move left. Simple, elegant, easy to use and executed without need to have extra buttons on the keyboard.

The only real problem is that the feature is literally invisible. Looking back through the app's release notes I see that the feature was added in version 1.4 and that the app is now on version 1.61. In fact, things get even better, now that I've read the release notes, because they include this little gem about one and two finger taps:

New: (iPad only) In full screen mode, tap the page margins to move cursor left or right by 1 letter (1 finger tap) or 1 word (2 finger tap)

A two finger tap turns out to be a bit tricky to do (both fingers have to hit the screen at pretty much the same time - easier to write than to do) but it still works rather well and should give me another little productivity boost.

From here, it would be nice to see these features propagate out to the rest of the iOS development community, where they could do good service in many apps with text editing features. My hope is that, like Pull to Refresh in Tweetie 2, margin tapping could become a standard feature in apps or mobile websites where text entry is required. It would certainly make my life easier, which is never a bad thing.

Mastering London

London is one of the world's great cities but with its confusing layout and complicated social and transport systems it can be a tricky place to navigate, even for long-term residents. If you're visiting for the first time, here are a few tips that might help.

Public Transport - getting around the city is easy using the Underground (Tube) or buses. You can cut your costs and blend in with the locals by buying an Oyster card, which you can order online before you arrive or buy at most convenience stores. Charge the card online or in a store, then tap it on the yellow readers to pay for your trip. You tap at each end of your Tube journey (on and off) but only once on the buses (fixed rate, irrespective of distance traveled).

Clothing - London's weather is changeable and unpredictable. Expect to carry a waterproof coat on all but the warmest of days. In winter you'll want stout shoes and warm clothes to cope with rain and wind.

Apologising - the biggest sin in London is appearing impolite and unless you want to stand out as a tourist you'll need to master the art of apologising. The general rule is that if you touch or obstruct anyone at all, say "sorry", even if they're clearly at fault or the incident is so trivial you've barely noticed it. If in doubt, apologise anyway.

Asking for directions - most of the people you see on the streets in the popular tourist areas will themselves be tourists. If you need directions look for someone without a camera - most residents will be happy to help. Alternatively, the centre of the city is strewn with maps showing roads and points of interest within 15 minutes' walk; these are a great way to orient yourself.

Shopping - all prices include sales tax (where applicable - VAT, 20%) so the price on the ticket is the price you pay. Many shops will open late into the evening Monday to Saturday but the larger shops can only open for 6 hours on a Sunday.

Taxis - unlike almost anywhere else in the world, London's black cab drivers are required to know the roads of their city. This means, theoretically, that they can take you anywhere you want to go without consulting maps or using a GPS system. Charges are fixed and strictly speaking they should take you wherever you want to go (although sometimes they refuse if you destination is out of favour). Don't use unlicensed minicabs; either pre-book your minicabs or use a black taxi.

Escalators - strangely, there is etiquette even for escalators; stand on the right, walk on the left. If you can't climb all the way to the top (and some of the escalators on the deep tunnels of the underground are very long indeed) you should stand on the right to allow others to walk or run past.

There's more, much more, but master these seven things and you're well on your way to fitting in.