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Posts tagged with meta.
One Thing Well now has a page on Google+.
I’m not quite sure how I’ll use it yet—possibly as a place for the ‘bonus links’ I post to Twitter, slightly off-topic stuff, &c.—but feel free to, er, encircle the page and we’ll see what happens.
I’m off on holiday to a place with no internet access, so posts to One Thing Well will slow to a trickle.
Normal service will resume next Thursday—see you all then!
Three administrative notes:
The next batch of sponsorship slots is available, for May and the beginning of June. The price is still just £99/$159. (Yes, I have left this announcement a bit late: if you want the next slot, no need to rush, we can run something midweek!)
I’ve started tweeting occasional links to One Thing Well-ish stuff that doesn’t quite merit a full post or is a wee bit off-topic. Follow @onethingwell if you’d like to see a few bonus links a week.
Some parts of the site now magically live in different places all around the world, thanks to Amazon CloudFront. If I’ve broken the site for you while setting this up, do let me know.
As you can (probably) see, I’m now running an advertisement at the top of the page.
I know it may seem that the site has become a hotbed of commercial activity lately, what with this and the sponsored posts, but adding this stuff isn’t a decision I’ve taken lightly.
I hate obtrusive, distracting advertising as much as the next person—all my browsing goes through a fairly strict set of Privoxy rules, and I’ve turned down a fair few offers from advertisers bearing not-terribly-pretty hideous banners.
The ads above come courtesy of Carbon, an invite-only ad network. I’m confident that they’ll serve up decent-looking, simple and unobtrusive micro-banners, because I see their ads every day when I’m searching on Duck Duck Go (and occasionally while checking mail in Sparrow Lite).
The ‘invite-only’ aspect of Carbon applies to advertisers as well as publishers. So hopefully you’ll only see ads that are relevant to your interests, for decent products and services. In fact, current advertisers in Carbon’s Dev/Code Circle include software I’ve linked to in the past and use myself, like Alfred and Kaleidoscope. In the unlikely event that you spot an objectionable or inappropriate ad, just drop me a line and I’ll talk to Carbon about it.
So, there we go. Boring announcement post over. Have a wee click around the site and I bet you’ll see an ad of interest!
Oh, and one final bit of housekeeping: I’ve tweaked the site’s design a bit to accomodate the ads, so you might need to force refresh the page to see the changes. If you spot any design wonkiness, do let me know.
I love writing One Thing Well, but it’s quite a bit of work. So I’ve decided to offer RSS feed sponsorships.
If you have a product you’d like to promote to the tech-savvy, software-obsessed folk that read the site the sponsorship page has all the details.
In brief: a week’s sponsorship costs £99—that’s $159, or €114—which gets you a prominent review of your product at the beginning of the week, and a shorter ‘thank you’ post at the end. Interested? Send Jack an email.
If you’re wondering why you might want to sponsor One Thing Well, here’s what happened to sales of DoublePane after I wrote a review that helped the app become the #1 Utility in the Mac App Store:
And if you are one of those lovely tech-savvy, software-obsessed readers? Don’t panic. I promise I’ll only accept sponsorship from cool companies who make great stuff, and sponsored posts will be clearly marked as such. I’ll also donate 10% of the income from sponsorships to free and open source projects1.
Thanks to Nick for the stats, and Patrick for the advice.
Credit for this idea goes to DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg’s FOSS Tithing Movement. I’ll run a poll a year from now so you lot can pick the projects that get the cash. ↩
Apologies for the unstyled appearance of the site for the last day or two—the server where I keep the CSS file went down, and doesn’t seem to want to come back up.
If you’re still seeing a mid-90s retro, HTML-only version of OTW, a hard refresh should fix it.
If you use Markdown to compose your Tumblr posts, you might be forgiven for thinking that the system uses Markdown too—the posting form links to the original syntax guide on Daring Fireball, after all.
It turns out that link is a bit of a fib. Tumblr actually uses PHP Markdown Extra, or something like it, which means you can write
This sentence needs a footnote[^1]. [^1]: This is the footnote it needs.
to get yourself a nicely-formatted footnote.1
You can also do abbreviations, definition lists, tables, and ID attributes for your headers without having to faff about with HTML2.
I have a horrible feeling that I’m the last person on Tumblr to figure this out, and I’m incandescent with rage faintly annoyed that Tumblr doesn’t make it clear which variant of Markdown it’s using.3
Unless you want to use abbr tags without a title attribute, which I tend to with well-known abbreviations—like HTML—so I can be sure screen readers will pronounce them properly. ↩
Mostly because I’m going to find it very hard to resist the temptation to edit past posts to conform to PHP Markdown Extra. ↩
For those who’ve sent in suggestions and are wondering why I haven’t posted your tip yet, see above.
Not that I’m complaining; quite the opposite—many thanks to everyone who’s been in touch with a pointer to their favourite piece of simple, useful software. Keep ‘em coming!
A few folk have been in touch asking about specific RSS feeds for Linux, OS X and Windows. Here they are:
Though if you do subscribe to one of these feeds instead of the main one, you’ll miss out on a lot of cross-platform and web-based stuff that applies to your favourite OS.
