As I come up on the first anniversary of my podcast, I look back in conflict. Sure, I made a podcast almost every two weeks, I learned a lot and other people seemed to enjoy them. But so few other people. Despite what some gurus advise, that you should make stuff purely for your own satisfaction, it is also rewarding to have some external validation. I feel I'm not getting enough of that. So in addition to making the podcast, I have to make more people aware of it, and that's tied up in a discussion I've been having with a crowd of clever people over on ADN.

What do podcasters need?

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24 February 2017: Almost all of this is dead and gone now. I'm still using Sleep Cycle. The others, not so much.

I am not an obsessive self-quantifier, nor am I in training, so I don't have goals to score or targets to hit. I just like to measure a few things like weight and activity each day to...

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One of the nicest things about a couple of days of break is the opportunity to get lost in a little project. Not entirely lost; after all, there are meals to be cooked and eaten, walks to be taken, relaxation to be enjoyed. Lost enough, though, to start and finish something, that something being the...

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Feeding Our Reading Habits, a long and fascinating article by Alex Kessinger, whom I know as @voidfiles on app.net, set me thinking, as it was surely intended to do. Ostensibly about RSS readers, one of the least understood and most useful tools of the internet, the article is also about how and why an RSS reader can be a good thing, and in the course of settting out a draft manifesto for a new kind of RSS reader, Alex discusses some of the things readers ought to be able to do, and some of the things you ought to be able to do with them.

I'm not going to attempt to summarise those points; if you've come this far, you owe it to yourself to go and read the article in full. Instead, here are the thoughts it provoked in me.

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I'm no expert, I admit that. I know enough to be dangerous. But I also know enough to know when I'm being taken for a ride. So my current hosting provider, Gandi, gives me all sorts of grief about what really ought to be a very simple instance of WordPress. I decided to move to Linode. But it really does assume an awful lot of knowledge. After two mornings inching forward, following instructions to the letter, except when they don't work and then I have to improvise, I've reached the stage where I think I have a working server.

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