Today was a tough, yet constructive, day as a homeowner.

I awoke at 8am to a 50-degree house since our furnace had pooped out overnight (again). For a bonus surprise, a pipe in the basement had frozen and was lightly leaking. I quickly filled up some jugs with water, and then turned off the water supply and called the gas company and a plumber.

The furnace technician didn’t arrive until early afternoon, but the fix was very quick. We had air in the line again, and that caused the furnace to lock out. She showed me how to bleed the line so that I could handle it myself next time. The $150 feels expensive for the 15 minutes it took her, but the knowledge is invaluable.

The plumber had a fully booked day (another one never called me back), but shifted some less urgent jobs around to fit me in. He arrived at 6pm and, thankfully, the fix wasn’t too arduous either. We just bypassed the outdoor spigot line with a new section of pipe and will reconnect that in the spring.

The plumber was likewise generous with his knowledge, and I peppered him with questions during the hour it took him to complete the job. I learned helpful bits about our piping system, he helped me label a couple of things in my breaker box, and he shared some advice on dishwasher installation (an upcoming project) and on replacing our wood-burning stove with a propane one. His $400 charge stung more, but again, his expertise made it well worth the cost.

With the timing, I missed out on the Thursday night ice climbing get-together that I typically host for some locals. But the weather was particularly cold and I’m still getting over my sickness… so maybe that was for the best.

While waiting around for the repairs today, I…

• Put up extra coat hooks for my wide variety of outerwear
• Added hooks in the bathroom so my wife’s hair curler and straightener have better spots to live while they cool down than the toilet seat lid
• Installed a ski rack on the wall so our skis and poles won’t fall over in the corner of the entryway
• Took pictures of my Sonos Beam and One SL units to sell, and then got them out of my living room (I’m committing to the HomePod Home Theater setup)
• Cleaned out the kitchen drawers and cabinets (found some real treasures in there 😅)
• And I booked a few upcoming ice climbing trips with clients, which will help pay for the service calls today! 🙌

The day was stressful, but not overwhelmingly so. And I got a lot done — even if they weren’t the projects I had put on my to-do list last night.

The last things to get done tonight will be to go out and grab some dinner for when my wife gets home at 10pm, and then pack up my gear for another big client winter mountaineering excursion tomorrow. This will be our third attempt on this mountain range consisting of four peaks. We’ve gotten three done so far, and tomorrow (🤞) we’ll complete the fourth. That 3:30am wakeup call is going to come mighty quick, though.

I’d better log off and hop to it!

Journal

MacPaw’s newly-previewed Eney gives me strong Siri vibes. Here’s Michael Burkhardt at 9to5Mac on its capabilities:

In simple terms, Eney feels like magic. You’ll be able to talk to Eney, ask it to do a task for you, and it’ll just do it. MacPaw is in a unique position to develop this tool, since they’ve already established great relationships with many Mac app developers through Setapp.

Eney will have many capabilities, but some of the top ones include:

• Sending emails for you
• Converting a file format
• Uninstalling apps
• Writing notes
• Cleaning your Mac for you
• Quickly trimming videos
• Downloading videos for you
• Helping you sort through unread emails
• Extracting audio from a video
• And more!

With third-party integrations and background processes, it sounds really good. But it’ll be coming to market in the tailwind of an Apple Intelligence-enhanced Siri with personal context and that can take action for the user enabled by the App Intents framework (think Shortcuts actions).

I’m sure MacPaw is all too aware of Apple’s first-party advantage looming over them, and yet they’re undeterred. Maybe the stilted launch of Apple Intelligence and its lukewarm reception have given them confidence that there will be plenty of space for another on-device agent to tackle computery tasks.

I think competition from Eney will be good for Siri, even if Siri never thinks of Eney at all.

Linked

[TL;DR: Enable the menu bar icon, and it’ll start working again. And yes, I timed it.]

If you, like me, were wondering why the ChatGPT app on macOS had its global keyboard shortcut mysteriously stop working, you’ve found the right place. I love the shortcut — mine is set to ⌥Space — to quickly bring up a temporary mini chat window (they call it the Chat Bar) no mattery where I am in the system. No need to open the full ChatGPT app.¹

Anyway, a couple of months ago, I noticed the shortcut would work unless I had the full app’s window open. Keeping the app running in the background with the window closed, hidden, or even minimized wouldn’t work; it had to be open. Which sort of defeats the whole point of the Chat Bar. I never could figure it out, decided it must be a bug, and resigned myself to keep the window open in a separate space until the bug was fixed.

Well… several months and multiple app updates later and the issue still wasn’t resolved. Furthermore, I never remembered to keep the window open and became re-frustrated every time I punched in the shortcut and nothing happened. Today, I finally did what I should have done long ago and typed “chatgpt app keyboard shortcut stopped working” into my search engine. 1.05 seconds later and, yet again, the top result — a post vencislav.popov on the OpenAI Community forum — had the fix:

Ok, I figured it out. Earlier today I disabled the menubar icon because I never use it and it is just visual clutter. Turns out the chat bar shortcut functionality is tied to the menubar icon and it doesn’t work unless the icon is active.

— vencislav.popov

Well, I’ll be! I, too, had turned off the (supposedly) unnecessary menu bar icon to reduce visual clutter. I popped open the ChatGPT app, hit ⌘, to bring up its preferences, and added it back to the menu bar. It took all of five seconds.

I guess that setting is more important than it looks. Although, this reliance on the menu bar icon really should either be changed or made more clear in the settings panel.

Now I’m back to pulling up the Chat Bar left and right — well, just at the bottom, I guess — to check little bits and bobs like the correct punctuation for “Well, I’ll be!” and the right capitilization for “menu bar” from Apple’s style guide. And I don’t even have to see the ChatGPT icon up there thanks to Bartender. Yippee!

Thanks, vencislav.popov!

Tips

I expect I’ll have more to say about this before long, but I recently bought a secondhand 1st-gen HomePod from eBay and paired it with my original one. I’ve been using them as my home theater system instead of my old Sonos Beam + 2x Sonos One SL setup.

I wasn’t convinced at first, but now I love it. The HomePods setup has solved my latency issues, provides way more bass, and there are no surround sound hiccups when we rearrange the room for holidays and such. Best of all, the volume control on my Apple TV remote finally works as intended. The Sonos system was so squirrelly when it came to volume adjustment. The only downside is there’s not quite as much “surround” to the sound. But I don’t mind.

All TV audio gets routed through the HomePods via the Apple TV and eARC, and my wife hasn’t noticed anything awry when playing the PlayStation or Switch. So far, so good! (And 1st-gen HomePods are pretty affordable on eBay!)

I haven’t disassembled my Sonos stuff yet, but they might be headed to the For Sale page sooner rather than later.

Gear Reviews

I have a friend who sets outrageous physical challenges every year for himself to complete. One year, it was to do twenty 12-hour outdoor activity burns. Another, it was to do a bunch of “Everests”, which is to bike, hike, or ski repeated laps of some local hill enough times to reach the equivalent height of Mt. Everest (29,032 feet) in one go. Another, it was to climb 365,000 feet in the year.

I’ve always found his challenges to be inspiring, and I like catching up with him to see what activities he’s doing to reach his goals. Usually, there’s a bit of a scramble at the end of the year to catch up to the quota.

This year, I’m following his lead and setting one for myself. Well, three of them, actually. But I’ll be pretty happy if I can get one or two done.

#1: Run 365 miles. A mile a day, on average. To be honest, I sort-of had this goal last year, too. But a couple injuries kept me from running as consistently as I wanted and I only ran 193 miles. I’m working on preventative measures so that doesn’t happen again this year.

#2: Climb 182,500 feet in elevation. Or 500 feet per day in any activity, but it must be in a dedicated workout. So just everyday walking around doesn’t count. This one’s gonna be a little tougher. I did a little over 117,000 feet in 2024, so 182,500 is about a 33% increase.¹ Lots of hiking, backcountry skiing, rock and ice climbing, biking, and trail running is in my future this year!

#3: Climb 5.10 trad. I love rock climbing, and I can climb decently difficult routes within the relative safety of top roping and sport climbing. But trad climbing, where you place your own protection in the rock as you climb, is a whole other head game. I spend enough time guiding for beginner climbers that I haven’t had to push myself in the last few years, and my trajectory at working up the difficulty grades has stagnated somewhat. I got in a few 5.8 trad climbs this year. But at 5.10, the possibilities for really cool climbs opens way up. I haven’t jumped two grades in a year before, so this will take some concerted effort to feel strong and comfortable enough to do it safely.

Beyond those specific goals, I’d like to generally get stronger with more muscle definition, and place more focus on stretching and flexibility this year. If I can make it through the Fitness+ yoga workouts without tipping over or feeling wildly out of place, I’ll call that a success.

I’m building out my 2025 theme of Small Improvements. And I say small improvements to my body and outdoor adventure stats totally count.

What theme are you working toward this year? Let me know! 💌 | 💬

2024 Totals

For completeness’s sake, here are the rest of my fitness stats from 2024, as shared by — what else? — the handy Fitness Stats app.

Over 4 million steps feels pretty good. ⌘

Update: Inspired by Pratik, here are my walking stats from Pedometer++, which I think are interesting in their own way. I dunno why the counts are different from Fitness Stats! 🤷‍♂️

Journal

Two terribly delightful things happened yesterday in my personal blogosphere.

First, the internet’s own prolific Lou Plummer wrote very kindly on his Linkage blog about HeyDingus. I can’t possibly keep up with all the app reviews, link blasts, and personal blog posts that Lou writes every day — much as I try — but I’m honored to have played a small part in inspiring his journey into blogging.

Second, the ever-thoughtful Kev Quirk invited me via this blog post to participate in a brief blog questions challenge that’s going around on Bear Blog.

I’m always down for writing about writing, so here goes!

The questions are:

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Mostly because I had opinions, but no where to put them. I was on Twitter, but the character restriction and my relative dearth of followers kind of killed my motivation to put long-form thoughts there. But with a blog, I could publish and pretend the whole world was reading. So, on January 1, 2021, I launched HeyDingus with an obligatory ‘Hey There’ post. I was inspired by my favorite Apple-centered sites (Six Colors, Daring Fireball, MacRumors, 9to5Mac, MacStories, 512 Pixels, etc.), so my earliest writing centered almost exclusively around that. But as I dove further into the indie web, I found I enjoyed writing about more personal topics and other hobbies too. I was further inspired by folks such as Manton Reese, Robb Knight, Alexandra Wolfe, Kev Quirk, and Greg Morris. And I love tinkering with new styles and formats, both on the front-end and back-end. (There’s a little more on my About page.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

My main blog, this one, is hosted on Blot. I can’t for sure remember where I first heard about it — maybe in a Do By Friday challenge? But it’s an amazing service that makes a whole website out of files synced to a Dropbox folder. That simplicity — no plugins to manage, no clunky admin panel or dashboard to constantly dive in and out of — really appeals to me. It means for every blog post and page, the “source of truth” is a text file on my computer. I can use any text editor (and all my Shortcuts and other automations) to write and make changes, and within seconds of moving that file to my ‘Posts’ folder, it’s live on the web. It’s really quite something. (Blot’s great for photoblogging, too, since you can just drops images into that folder for them to be published. But I don’t really do that.)

As I noted above, I love to tinker. Thankfully Blot is fully tinkerer-compatible. You can customize every HTML template and line of CSS, if you want to.

My microblog is hosted at, well, Micro.blog. It functions as my primary social media account (@jarrod@micro.blog) and I’ve mostly treated it as a one-to-one replacement for Twitter since that really started going downhill. Micro.blog is super versatile though, and the site (jb.heydingus.net) is a full blog in its own right. I’ve toyed for years with the idea of just moving all of HeyDingus and everything into Micro.blog so that I just have one home on the web. I probably will someday.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Yeah, I got started with HeyDingus on Squarespace. It lived there for its first year or two. It was okay, but it became readily apparent that there was a lot that Squarespace wanted me to do that I wasn’t going to (sell stuff, have a paywall, etc.) and there was a lot that I wanted to do that Squarespace wouldn’t let me (customization, full editing capability on iPad, etc.). I got pretty frustrated with it in the end. I had started to explore Wordpress when I found Blot, and I’m so glad that I did. (Although, it maybe would have been better if I’d found Micro.blog first and just migrated there from the get-go. 😅)

Squarespace could be a good (though expensive) choice if you like a block WYSIWYG editor. But if you just want a box to type your blog posts into, I recommend Scribbles or Pika. If you want to tinker, take advantage of the social web, and be part of a nice community, I recommend Micro.blog. If you are happiest in a text editor and don’t want to think much about the back-end of the blog at all, I recommend Blot.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

Well now, you already know that I like to start things in a text editor, don’t you? Almost everything I write starts in Drafts. I’ve got an editing theme there that I’ve customized with the colors of my blog (light | dark), although with a monospaced font. I usually get everything hammered out there because I love its action bar that I’ve also customized with little tools for the way I write, which is in Markdown. I’ve got actions for quickly pasting text, previewing the formatted text, uploading images to the web and inserting its relevant text, making hyperlinks, adding footnotes, and more. (If you want one, just ask!)

But then posts get sent to my ‘Drafts’ folder 1Writer (on iOS) or iA Writer (on macOS), both of which are hooked up to my Dropbox account to work with Blot. I do a final edit there — they’re each a little more focused of environments — before the post is published. I don’t get to press a ‘Publish’ button, I just move it from ‘Drafts’ to ‘Posts’.

One of these days, I want to customize the preview screen in Drafts and iA Writer to be a copy of my theme on HeyDingus. To have all the right colors, fonts, and the rest of the style would be super cool when I’m checking my work.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I least expect it, to be honest. Some of what I consider my best posts have been written in the most uncomfortable positions (sitting on the toilet seat lid, laying on my side in bed, in the passenger seat of a car) on my iPhone because that’s when inspiration struck. Sometimes it’s because I just read something and I want to comment about it right away. Other times, I’ll have been sorting out an idea in my head and I just get a feeling that I need to get it out right now or else it’ll be lost forever. It’s not the healthiest habit, but I can’t help but drop everything and write it all out, start to finish, in those sessions. The hours fly by and the relief when it’s on the web is palpable.

I cannot fathom when folks say they don’t have anything to write about. In addition to those “lightning strike” writing sessions, I have ideas for posts a mile long saved to Drafts. Usually those come in the form of titles. I’ll pull out my phone, write it down in Drafts, tag it with blog so that it gets sorted with the rest of those ideas, and move on. I actually don’t get back to those ideas very often because I have so many more timely or feels-more-important ideas that take hold.

One thing I’ll add is that I used to be pretty formal in my writing style. I figured no one would take me seriously unless I wrote with correct grammar and punctuation, and followed traditional formats, and got everything just right.

That strictness made me write less.

I’ve mostly given up on perfect writing style, not ending sentences in prepositions, and avoiding contractions. Now I write like I speak — or at least how the voice in my head speaks.¹ It makes it more enjoyable to read, I think, and I like it. So there.

My three rules for blogging:²

1. Write things that you would enjoy reading.
2. Don’t take yourself too seriously — it’s just a blog, so experiement and have fun!
3. Be helpful, curious, and kind. If your blog post isn’t one of those things, you better have a damn good reason for posting it to the everlasting web.

Sneaky rule #4: Link generously.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Like most people whose response to this challenge I’ve seen, I’m a publish-as-soon-as-it’s-done sort of guy. Sometimes it takes a while as I agonize over every word, link, and caption. But when it’s done, it’s done and wants to be out in the world. Usually posts only make it over to 1Writer/iA Writer when they’re almost ready to publish. But I do have three posts that just live in my ‘Drafts’ folder there. As a treat, I’ll share their titles:

1. ‘The New iPad: A Mini Review’ (There since the 6th-gen iPad mini came out in 2021. I psych myself out about product reviews and then they never get done. I pivoted it into a post to discuss my thoughts on that iPad after two-years with it. That was a year ago. Now the 7th-gen iPad mini is out and I still can’t bring myself to finish it or delete it.)
2. ‘How I Migrated My Blog from Squarespace to Blot’ (Similarly, I started writing this right after I migrated my blog at the end of 2022. It was a complicated process and I thought folks might find it useful to follow, but it got really long and in the weeds, but I didn’t want to publish without all the details. Honestly, it’s probably good enough that I should just put it out there.)
3. ‘What is a Blog, Really?’ (I’ve felt for a long time that everything is just a blog. And by “everything” I mean everyone’s Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky accounts. Their YouTube channels and Pinterest boards. Your grandparent has a blog in their Facebook page. The reporter for your local newspaper has a blog in their weekly column. Maybe even streaming television shows could be considered a blog. They’re syndicated stories logged on the web. Web logs. Weblogs. Blogs. There. I’ve published that blog post as a parenthetical in this one. Except I still have a bunch of links and half-formed ideas saved there that will prevent me from considered that draft done.)

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

Oh boy, I don’t know if I could pick a true favorite. I liked Manu’s quippy answer in saying, “Always the next one.”

I don’t pay very close attention to the analytics on my site (powered by Tinylytics), but when I notice one is at the top of the list of page views for a while, I’ll give it a tag of “Greatest Hits”. You can see those posts here. None of them are my favorite, although there are some genuinely helpful gems there, if I do say so myself.

One recent post that I’m particularly proud of is ‘Leading By Example’, which I wrote in the aftermath of the 2024 U.S presidential election. The ideas in it had been rattling around my head for years, but in my dismay at the implications of the election, the pieces finally fell into place and I recognized the role I’ve accepted to play in life.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

Oops, maybe I should have read all of the questions before I answered the first ones. You, dear reader, already know that I have soft plans to migrate to Micro.blog. I’m actually sort of in the middle of a redesign. The individual blog posts and pages use the updated CSS which give the site a sidebar, cool sticky titles, and a few dynamic bits (taglines and favorite quotes) that change upon every reload. I really like it. But I haven’t finished tweaking the code to work with my index (homepage) or the blog’s archive page — two of my most viewed pages, alas. Maybe I can finish that up this week.

As far as new features go, my next biggish project that I want to tackle is a /timeline page in which I visually represent my life in a long-scrolling page, with milestones represented spatially. Birthdays, graduations, jobs, moves, purchases of computers and other gadgets, of course — I want to list them all down and then keep it up over the years.

I’ll only fully move over to Micro.blog when I’ve figured out a way to provide a toggle for readers to show only traditional long-form posts, only microposts, or everything. And I want their selection to be saved to their browser. Personally, I love seeing sites where everything is mixed in, but not everyone does. And I think it will be fun challenge to figure out how to make that work, so don’t tell how. 😜

Oh, and Robert’s always asking for a light mode, so maybe I’ll get around to that someday.

Who’s next?

Thank you so much, Kev, for the invitation to this challenge. I thought I’d keep my answers to a modest paragraph each, but I such had a blast writing it that I’m now over 2000 words in. (Sorry to folks who were hoping for a quick read.)

For my part in spreading the love, I’m tagging in Rach Smith, Matt Birchler, and Keenan to the challenge. I’m very curious to hear more about their blogs. (You don’t have to be as long-winded as me. 😅)

As Kev said, if you haven’t been tagged yet but want to participate, jump right in! Nothing’s stopping you and the more the merrier. When you do, please send it to me on social or email. I’d love to read it.

Blogging

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Man, these long hiking trips on Sundays is really throwing off my blog post schedule!

1️⃣ This Newji app was making Genmoji before Genmoji was a thing. And it works on devices that can’t do Apple Intelligence. [🔗 apps.apple.com]

2️⃣ Bill Lawrence of Shrinking, Ted Lasso, Bad Monkey, Scrubs and more gave a great interview to the LA Times. [🔗 latimes.com]

3️⃣ For the nerds (👋), Ricky Mondello wrote a nicely cogent piece on how and why passkeys should be considered instead of, or in addition to, “magic links” to improve user security and customer experience. [🔗 rmondello.com]

4️⃣ AnnoyingRains made possibly the simplest change ever to their web form that cut off 100% of spam messages. 🤣 [🔗 social.avali.zone] (Via Ricky Mondello)

5️⃣ Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) made a video recapping his 2024, full of lots of highs (Ultimate Frisbee championships, giving a commencement speech, shipping products), and lows (some high-profile mistakes he made with those shipped products, and stupid driving behavior). What I took away was (1) “Wow!” I don’t know anyone who had a busier 2024 than him, and (2) I appreciate how he took personal responsibility for his mistakes, seems to have actually learned from them, and apologized, sincerely, with class. Well-worth watching the video. [▶️ youtube.com]

6️⃣ This year-end media recap by Anh might be the most effort I’ve ever seen in one. Gorgeous to simply scroll through. [🔗 anhvn.com]

7️⃣ This kind of infographic is something I’d usually share as a ‘Take a Chance’ link here. But those I prefer to be entertaining or uplifting. This, which shows how man-made things now outweigh natural beings on Earth, is quite sobering. [🔗 biocubes.net]

Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

7 Things

The Verge’s inconsistency to include a link to the primary subject in their articles finally drove me to create an account so that I could leave a comment about it. Something I almost never do. I prefer to comment on things via its relevant social media post or here on my own site. But this article about the Flic Duo was the straw that broke my back. (See how easy and helpful it is to link to the primary subject?)

This little gadget looks neat, and I’m always on the lookout for unobtrusive add-on smart home buttons to place strategically around my house. But the article didn’t mention if it would be configurable in the Apple Home app — table stakes here. So I figured I’d check the manufacturer’s webpage to see the rest of the details. Alas, the only link in the entire article was this one to a Matter explainer and product roundup on theverge.com. No link to the Flic Duo button, to the pre-order page the article mentions, or even to Flic’s website so readers could be sure they’ve found the right Flic.

Instead, I put on my Internet Sleuth hat, fired up my search engine and laboriously typed out two words: “flic duo”. Voilá! The link in question was number one on the list.¹ Long-press → copied to clipboard. Then, I reluctantly put on my Internet Commenter hat, created an account on theverge.com (nice, easy sign-up flow, btw), and wrote the following:

This sounds cool! But know what’s even cooler? A link to the subject of the article: duo.flic.io 😜

(The Verge brags about not being afraid to send traffic elsewhere. I’m always confused why so many articles fail to include a primary link to the subject.)

My intent wasn’t to be rude. Merely to point out that readers like me want and expect hyperlinks — the backbone of the web — to at least the primary subject of an article. Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel often brags on The Vergecast about how much traffic out to other websites that the The Verge creates. That’s awesome. But based on how often I have to go searching for missing links to the vacuum (missing link), tv (missing link), or game (missing link) an article discusses, there seems to be neglect among their writers to create those hyperlinks to the source material.

And then I put on my Blogger hat and spent several hours writing up this post that could have been a tweet. 😆

I guess searching for and adding relevant links is a free service² I provide for The Verge now. See you in the comments! 🙃

Blogging

I’m a card-carrying Link Saver. Typically, links I want to save for the long term go into Raindrop.io. That’s been the case for years, and one of my fullest “link buckets” is my Shopping one for prospective purchases. It’s a private wish list of sorts, and just adding things there takes care of the little dopamine rush that buying it would provide — just without the hit to my bank account. But when it comes time to actually purchase something — say a new backpack, smart lock, or grill — it’s hard to gather all the links I’ve saved for that kind of categorical item.

I just had the idea to move that workflow to Apple Notes using a ‘To Buy’ folder and a separate note for each category.¹ Its share sheet extension makes it easy to add links to a specific note in that folder or create a new note if a category doesn’t have one yet. Its good-but-not-great Shortcuts actions are also appealing.

A few advantages over Raindrop that I foresee:

• I can add little notes along with the links that aren’t secluded to a notes field within the link’s entry like in Raindrop. So if I want to comment on something relevant to the category as a whole (priorities for an item, for example), it’s trivial and obvious to do so.
• Once I make a purchase, I can delete all the links or the entire note in one fell swoop. No need to pack rat irrelevant links.
• Notes are cross-linkable to the rest of my Apple Notes database, so I can reference them elsewhere.
• Notes are shareable if I want to collaborate with my wife on a purchase or provide more context and options for an item on my shared wish list — without requiring other people to download and learn a new app.
• It lets me prioritize items that I’m actively shopping for by pinning its note and pulling it out into its own windows beside my browser.

Some neutral aspects or downsides in swapping from Raindrop:

• I typically prefer in-app browsers for this sort of quick reference. I find a never ending line of tabs in my browser a little overwhelming.
• I suppose I could create a similar structure of folders within folders in Raindrop, but I don’t think it’d be as useful.
• I’ll miss out on the archived copy of the webpage that Raindrop provides. But I guess it doesn’t really matter since if the webpage is inaccessible, I wouldn’t be able to buy it anyway.
• Raindrop’s share sheet extension is world-class. I love that it scans the webpage super quickly to make suggestions for its folder and tags. It’s nearly always spot-on.
• Raindrop’s search is really good, too. I like their easy filter buttons.
• Raindrop’s folders can be made into public webpages with RSS feeds. So you can let people view and keep up with everything you save if you want. It’s so cool, and I’ve wanted to take better advantage of it. Honestly, it might make the best platform-agnostic public wish list for friends and family.
• The fact that Raindrop is first and foremost a web app is probably another advantage these days.

I’m going to do some cleanup of my Shopping folder in Raindrop and see where this goes. I’m optimistic that it’ll lead to more actionable shopping.

Got your own neat workflow for saving potential purchases? I’d love to hear about it! 💌 | 💬

Apps Tips

Although I’m usually partial to including a short blockquote from articles I want to share, lately I’ve found myself inspired by Dave Winer’s link post style (site | follow). Probably because I click through on a lot of them. 😅 He simply shares the title (or writes a short sentence about it if he can describe it better, or wants to get a different point across), adds its URL (shortened to just its domain) to the end, and shares it.

When I come across something on the web that I want to highlight, but aren’t inspired to go through the extra steps of choosing and editing a blockquote from it, this is an ideal format. Add a comment — or not — and move on.¹

For the past year or so, I’ve been sharing the vast majority of my link and quote posts on my microblog rather than here on HeyDingus. Mostly that’s because it’s way easier to do on Micro.blog using Drafts and my shortcuts, but also because I haven’t wanted to litter folks’ RSS feeds with sometimes dozens of posts in a day.² But if you follow me there, you’ll know that I’ve gone through many stylistic iterations for those link posts. I even developed a behemoth of a shortcut (that got some traction in the Micro.blog community) to facilitate and standardize those posts. But I grew tired of the weight of that shortcut, and its rigid output. And so, a new shortcut was born!

QuickLinker

QuickLinker has been my little playground of late, where I’ve given myself lots of options for how I can format a link/quote post. If I see a style I like, I can quickly replicate and iterate on it as an option to choose from in QuickLinker.

Although it, too, is growing in size, I’ve resisted adding too many “settings” in anticipation for sharing it with others, and instead have optimized it for I like to post things. For example, I made it so I compose my comments in the output app rather than within the flow of a Shortcuts prompt. I’ve lost text too many times by dismissing the shortcut by mistake or it timing out. And I’ve limited those output options to only the ones I use. (A) the share sheet as a catch-all, (B) copying to the clipboard, (C) sending to the Micro.blog app as a draft post if it’s mostly ready to go, or (D) sending it to the Drafts app for more substantial editing. And when I send it to the MB app, it still saves an archived copy to Drafts just in case.

I’ve also worked in other techniques I’ve learned from building many, many shortcuts over the years. For example:

• Using the clipboard as a secondary input variable (I first copy any blockquote I want to share) alongside the URL of the webpage (shared into the shortcut via the share sheet).
• I’ve built previews of the text directly into the menus and alerts by using variables in their labels.
• My most commonly-used menu options go at the bottom of the lists for easy reach.
• Using named variables rather than Magic Variables for more clarity and flexibility. It’s how I can treat YouTube links differently and get a whole separate-yet-compatible set of author/title/domain/url variables out of a different shortcut run as function on them.
• Trimming extra whitespace off text typed on my iPhone, since I usually get an extra blank space from the double-spacebar-to-add-a-period shortcut.
• Adding multiple variables as the default answer in an ‘Ask for Input’ action when I know only one of them will be “active”.
• Using emoji in menus for better visual distinction.

There are other intentional limitations, too. I haven’t done much to optimize it for use on the Mac yet, but I haven’t minded since I do almost all of these posts from my iPhone or iPad. The shortcut doesn’t handle posting text to the web at all either. That’s left to Drafts or the Micro.blog app — both of which are better suited for keeping the character count in check, which is important to me.

Get it, if you want

Usually, I’d wait until I was ready to share the shortcut to my library to write a big post like this about it. To be honest, I thought this post was just going to be a short one on my microblog, simply sharing how I was inspired by Dave Winer’s style. But then I wanted to share the how which led to the why and here we are. I wasn’t even going to share the shortcut yet, as I haven’t given it my usual polish, but, hey, who cares? It’ll likely get finished up and a spot in the library before long, but if you’re interested now, here you go.³ I hope you enjoy!

Written, edited, and posted all from my iPhone in Drafts.

Shortcuts Blogging