ldstephens Notes

TechCrunch

Days after Evernote started testing a free plan with access to only one notebook and 50 notes with limited users, the company has now made this its new default free plan. The notetaking app said that this change will be applicable for all new and existing free users starting December 4.

I ditched Evernote years ago.

Robin Rendle

Here’s one way to improve the thing you’re riting: cut the intro. […] Get to the good stuff right away and if you feel the need to pad your writing out with fluff then, well, don’t! A big word count doesn’t make things more profound or academic or smart. In fact, most of the time, more words means we didn’t think about something enough. We didn’t cull, cut, and trim.

Manu Moreale interview – Jim Nielson

Manu:

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Jim:

My blogging doesn’t feel “original” or “creative” to me. I blog because I read other people’s blogs and I want to internalize what they said by restating it myself. When I read, watch, or listen to something from someone else that piques my interest, I write it down then add my proverbial two cents. Sometimes my two cents is short, so the text ends up in my notes. But sometimes I end up having a lot to say and it grows into a blog post. In short, I take notes like a college student. Then I publish them. […] The best part of blogging is what you discover and learn experientially along the way. I wouldn't want to rob myself of that.

Pranay Parab

• Fn + c: Opens the Control Center on your Mac.
• Fn + e: Launches the emoji picker. When you have a writing app or a text form selected, the emoji picker appears near the cursor. If not, it appears in a small floating window. (May be app dependent.)
• Fn + delete: This lets you perform a forward delete, which means you can delete the characters to the right of the cursor. It’s the opposite of the Delete key on your Mac’s keyboard.
• Fn + q: Fires up Apple Notes and opens a new Quick Note, or opens your last Quick Note.
• Fn + f: Toggles full-screen for the app in the foreground. If the app is already full-screen, it’ll change it to a regular window.
• Fn + Shift + A: Opens Launchpad, where you can see all apps installed on your Mac and quickly launch them.
• Fn + n: Shows or hides the notifications panel.
• Fn + h: Hides all open windows and lets you see your wallpaper and the dock. You can press it again to return all windows to their original position.
• Fn + up arrow: This is an alternative way to use the Page Up key, which works since most Macs don’t have this key. It allows you to quickly scroll up on a page.
• Fn + down arrow: It’s like pressing Page Down, which quickly scrolls down.
• Fn + left arrow: A replacement for the Home key, and scrolls to the top of the page.
• Fn + right arrow: A substitute for the End key, which scrolls to the bottom.
• Fn + a: Selects the dock. You can then use arrow keys to select apps and hit return to launch any app. It’s a way to browse the dock with the keyboard.
• Fn + d: Lets you launch dictation on your Mac.

Joel Hooks

It's not a fucking blog.

Seriously. The idea of a “blog” needs to get over itself. Everybody is treating writing as a “content marketing strategy” and using it to “build a personal brand” which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed.

Bullshit.

This idea is toxic and led me to publish less and less over time.

Instead my approach now is to publish my thoughts more freely with less premeditation. Particularly in this space, which is mine, for me, by me.

I don't lose the freedom to publish more polished work, it's just not my own personal expectation.

​[…]

A Publishing Stack I Like

This is important. I need to enjoy the workflow and publishing experience. For me, it's technical and I want to have complete control.

​[…]

For me this is a shitty optimization. Instead I'd like to optimize for being useful and interesting to both you and myself.

Being useful for me is the primary use case for this space on the internet. It's not that I don't care about you, but this is for me. It's here so I can record what I think and know and preserve it in time and space.

It's my garden, but I'm happy for you to hang around and eat tomatos with me.

​[…]

This year I started using Tiago Forte's Second Brain techniques to catalog and store all the shit I'm researching, reading, listening to, watching, and otherwise spending my days consuming.

It all gets shoved into my Second Brain for search and retrieval when I'm ready.

Tools like Notion and Roam have become extra ram that I store the things I'm interested in in.

I clip the whole text into these tools, highlight, add commments and context, cross-reference, and summarize in an incremental way.

Joel makes some good points that are worth thinking about.

Alfred Blog

Did you know that Alfred can remember queries you've recently typed

Once you've enabled this feature, you'll have access to the latest 20 queries you've typed in Alfred by pressing the up arrow. You can even have the most recently typed query automatically populated when you reshow Alfred within 5 minutes.

I just discovered this today. Good to know!

Chuck Grimmett

What is a digital garden?

A collection of thoughts, ideas, highlights, annotations, quotes, summaries, and notes that are richer than a tweet, but lack the timestamped nature of a blog post or published essay.

Matt Gemmell

If you’re considering using it as an information repository, do of course remember that it’s strictly plain text only. There’s no support for rich content like images or videos. Whether that’s a critical limitation is up to you. I looked through my entire archive of notes, info, research, and fragments in both Ulysses and Apple’s own Notes app, and I didn’t find a single image that I wanted to commit to an ongoing information repository in-place. You might feel differently — and it’s worth noting that you can always make reference to images stored in another location, if need be.

It feels to me like there’s been a recent convergence of both the app’s scripting functionality and the new cross-linking features, to suddenly open up several new modes of use for Drafts. It’s a lot more than just a place to compose and then export text.

While Ulysses very much remains my writing environment, I’ve already expanded my text-processing usage of Drafts to also include handling my notes, research, and long-term thinking. The app has become my BBEdit (and indeed Notational Velocity) for the iPad — and that’s high praise.

👏👏👏👍

Get Drafts

Kev Quirk

Writing a blog post just for the fun of it is exactly why I blog. All that ProBlogger crap – find a niche, double down, collect emails, CONVERT! Is utter bullshit.

Also, the sheer number of useless “listicles” that plague search results is beyond a joke at this point. I'm willing to bet there are millions of fantastic posts, written by people who know what they're talking about. But they're hidden in the depths of the internet because, unfortunately for them, they haven't “optimised” enough. Fuck search engines.

M.G. Siegler

In short, I write almost everything on the iPad. But I edit and publish almost everything on the Mac.