Thord D. Hedengren

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Tag: blogging

  • Five things (April 3rd, 2018)

    Five things (April 3rd, 2018)

    Traveling is a big part of my life at the moment, mostly for work, but still. It has obviously made me reconsider some things in my setup, and also been top of mind the past few months.

    Here are five not completely travel related things for you, in no particular order as usual.

    • I travel a lot, which means that I put a lot of value in a good pair of noise-cancellation headphones. People keeping tabs on my setup know that I’ve switched to Bowers & Wilkins PX, and I couldn’t be happier. Great headphones, recommended.
    • Speaking of travel, Zürich is treating my oyster cravings well. No trips planned in April so I guess I’ll just have to find the best oysters in Stockholm then.
    • I wish there was a decent blogging app for iOS. Alas, none does it for me, so all my posts are copied as HTML and pasted into the WordPress admin interface. It works well enough on an iPad, but the UI is sorely lacking on smaller screens. (I’m tapping this on my phone in the bath, by the way.)
    • Love the Rimowa Classic Flight Cabin Multiwheel! Didn’t think I’d move from backpack to something with wheels, but this is just plain great.
    • Finally, my Peg & Awl’s Hunters Satchel was every bit as lovely as I hoped. I got it with my initials, obviously. It’s become my daily carry, and I can’t see that changing anytime soon.

    As always, I love hearing about things you use and like. Hit me up on Twitter or drop me a line. Here are some older five things lists.

  • Open Live Writer

    Microsoft has open sourced its blogging application Windows Live Writer, as Open Live Writer:

    Open Live Writer is an open source application enabling users to author, edit, and publish blog posts. It is based on a fork of the well-loved but not actively developed Windows Live Writer code. Open Live Writer is provided under a MIT license.

    This is what you do when you can’t or won’t support software anymore. Google and Dropbox have a lot to learn about doing the right thing in this regard.

  • Instagram, the blogging platform

    Kyle Chayka, making the argument for Instagram as an alternative blogging platform, in the New Yorker:

    Instagram, a minimalist, mobile-focused app for sharing photos, might seem like a strange place to keep a public diary. Facebook, which aggressively positions itself as an ongoing digital record of your life, comes across as a more natural place to share updates and idle musings. But the Rock’s not alone: People are increasingly turning toward Instagram not just as a place to post filtered photos, but to spill their lives and thoughts into the captions as well.

    The term “blogging” is as broken as even. Sure, a photo and a few words can definitely be blogging, but it might just as well be an elaborate photo caption. We used to talk about photo blogging way back, that’s a more suitable term to what’s described in the afore linked article. It matters little, what’s interesting is how we use the services available for our publishing needs.

  • Twitter to go beyond 140 characters

    Recode reports that Twitter are planning to go beyond the 140 character limit, with a longform product. Also, this, which I think it’s a no-brainer:

    In addition to the long-form product, execs have been openly discussing the idea of tweaking how Twitter measures its 140-character limit by removing things like links and user handles from the count, multiple sources say. In the past, Twitter has tinkered with the limit in other ways. Twitter Cards are still beholden to the 140-character limit but are intended to help people (and advertisers) share lots of information, and Twitter added a “retweet with comment” option in April to give people more room to comment on tweets they share. The company also lifted the 140-character rule on private messages back in June.

    This following Facebook’s revamped Notes, a snipe at Medium and other similar platforms, no doubt. Blogging isn’t dead, but it might very well be owned by social networks in the future. Let’s hope not.

    Also, hi. Sorry for the silence, it’s been a bumpy few weeks. More on that later.

  • Nick Denton's 2015 memo

    Gawker Media CEO Nick Denton has published a mammoth memo for 2015, where he announces changes in leadership and other important stuff for people working on any of the company’s properties, or with an interest in media. But as always when Denton writes, there’s more, and this stood out.

    We all understand how this works. Editorial traffic was lifted but often by viral stories that we would rather mock. We – the freest journalists on the planet – were slaves to the Facebook algorithm. The story of the year – the one story where we were truly at the epicenter – was one that caused dangerous internal dissension. We were nowhere on the Edward Snowden affair. We wrote nothing particularly memorable about NSA surveillance. Gadgets felt unexciting. Celebrity gossip was emptier than usual.

    We pushed for conversations in Kinja, but forgot that every good conversation begins with a story. Getting the stories should have come first, because without them we have nothing to talk about.

    (more…)

  • The things between tweets and essays

    We’re a lot of people who seems to enjoy, or at least miss, blogging. I’ve got my own thoughts on blogging as a term, but that’s a different post. For this one, I just wanted to quote Gina Trapani’s new blogging rules:

    If it’s a paragraph, it’s a post. Medium-sized content gets short shrift these days. Don’t go long. One or two paragraphs count. Then press publish.

    Andy Baio’s on the same track, and I found both of these post via Six Colors, where Steven Snell’s been publishing under the same conditions from the beginning. It’s refreshing to see and read.

    I obviously agree. The whole redesign of TDH.me, and the mixture of short quote and comment posts, and the essays, shows that well enough. Thing is, we’re not in this alone, there are others who’ve been blogging like this for years, of recently returned to it. Someone less pressed for time than me can probably put together a pretty exhaustive list. Maybe this also heralds the return of the Webring, or at least the Blogroll, wouldn’t that be great?

  • The Allure Of Medium And Svbtle

    The Allure Of Medium And Svbtle

    I’ve struggled with Medium and Svbtle for some time. Not with the actual services though, their interfaces and stability is excellent and I’ve just got good things to say about the execution. Both services are home to great content, I subscribe to the featured feed on Svbtle and follow several collections on Medium.

    Medium screenshot
    Medium screenshot

    What I’m having trouble wrapping my head around is what these services mean for someone like me. I really don’t need another place to post content, I’ve got this site and a Swedish one too, along with whatever side project that I’m meddling with at the time. Publishing my words were never an issue, and I’d imagine it’s not much of an issue for anyone these days, with tools like WordPress.com and Tumblr at our disposal. Blogging solved the accessible publishing platform issue a long time ago.

    Yet there’s no doubt Medium and Svbtle are alluring. When using these services the content look good, everything is really clean. There are no nasty widgets or crappy free themes to wade through. In terms of freedom to publish, less can sometimes be more. With Medium and Svbtle, you’re just writing and publishing.

    (more…)

  • On Medium And Its Likes

    Medium’s open for all, just sign in with your Twitter account and you can use Ev William’s latest publishing platform. It’s good, very good in fact, and focused on content rather than anything else. Content first, as it is and were. I want to like Medium, and I do on many levels.

    The Medium editor is, in many ways, outstanding
    The Medium editor is, in many ways, outstanding

    But Medium’s a bad idea for you. It’s a locked canister for your content, a window to the web that might just as well be gone in a year. I don’t doubt that, should Medium go south, there’ll be export options, and the open source community will make sure that you can import your content to other platforms, but all your links will be dead, even if your content isn’t.

    That’s not all. When you put your words on Medium, when you move your blog to Google+ or Facebook, then you’re effectively building their brands respectively, limiting and sidelining yourself. Tumblr, Blogger and WordPress.com have all solved this problem. You can connect your own domain to these services, and thus should you wish (or be forced) to move your content elsewhere you’ll be able to move it all.

    With Medium, not so much, not at its present state.

    Don’t ever rely solely on a service where you can’t move your content, and keep your domain and links, to another platform. In other words, putting your well-thought words of wisdom on Medium, Google+ or Facebook is a bad idea.

    Unless you don’t give a shit about what you do, and what you publish online, of course. Then by all means, go for it. And by all means use Medium, it’s the best alternative out there, of the bad ones that is.

  • Quote & Comment

    In this week’s column over at WPMU.org I’m talking about the blockquote. You should go there and read it.

    I’m also talking about a particular type of blog, which I tend to call Quote & Comment. This is a blog that is primarily built as a content flow consisting of quotes and links to other sources, along with a few lines of commentary. You might call it a link blog, but I’ve never been too fond of that term.

    (more…)

  • The iPad as a blogging tool

    A lot of us are comfortable writing on the iPad. I am in fact writing this post laying in bed, on my iPad, and while my MacBook Air certainly beats it in both writing tools as well as speed and input feedback, they represent two different things. The Air is the most portable real computer there is, but it is still something I want to put on a table or, worst case scenario, in my lap. Meanwhile, the iPad is a lot easier to just prop up and hammer out a few words on. They are two different things, which is good. I’ve yet to write a book on my iPad, something I’ve done numerous times on my Air.

    But as a blogging tool on the go, that should be the perfect use for the iPad, right? (more…)

  • The Blog Herald and why I left

    I’ve gotten a lot of questions about The Blog Herald recently, so I feel I need to clear the air on that matter. I used to be the editor of said site, but as of December 1st 2009, I’m not. This is not due to any controversy, me falling out with the owners of the site (being Splashpress Media, which I’ve always had and still have a great relationship with). Neither is it because of Paul “Scrivs” Scrivens appointment as the new publisher of the Splashpress network, I’ve only got good things to say about the guy in fact, and he knows it.

    In a time of transition, it made sense to take a few steps back. The network was changing, and The Blog Herald with it, and I felt that the plans that me and Splashpress had for the site was a bit obsolete because of this. (more…)

  • Why hello there

    I must say I’m happy to see you here. It’s been a long time after all, with me blogging and whatnot.

    Yes, this is my blog. This is where I’ll speak my mind, discuss matters of great importance with you, dear reader, and where I’ll roam free. In a yet to be published interview with the excellent BloggingPro (will link it when it’s up, of course), I try to explain why I haven’t blogged the last few years. Or rather, why I haven’t blogged in English, my Swedish blog is well read but has next to naught to do with the international blogosphere and matters concerning new media on a more global scale.

    But before I reboot myself as yet another voice in the crowded online media landscape, I’ll get this baby a bit more ready. I thought long and hard as to how I wanted the blog to look and behave, and mused over wether to have my blog and (upcoming) design portfolio at the same place. Obviously I decided not to, I’ll get to that later on. For now, I’ll put a tiny bit of effort to get tdh.me looking decent, and then it’ll be an ongoing work in progress I guess. After all, it is not just a springboard for my mind, but also a necessary playground amidst the more serious design gigs I sometimes venture upon.

    Meanwhile, I urge you to subscribe to my RSS feed and to keep an eye on the horizon. I won’t be there, but it is a pretty thing after all.

    Happy holidays.