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In the introduction to the latest issue of McSweeny’s Quarterly, the editors write, “More widespread and democratic access to education here and around the world means that there are more literate people…and more people reading than at any time in human history. So that’s good news.”
The bad news is that the ability to read a well-written sentence does not translate into the ability to write one. With more of our interaction taking place through emails, text messages, status updates, tweets, blog posts — heck, with more of us having to become writers — there are also more people in need of writing help than any time in human history.
Thankfully, Grammarly can give us that help. For a price.
I’m always looking for simple ways to keep a log certain activities- my workouts, my side project progress, my lesson plans, or whatever else I may want to reference later. So far the most trustworthy has been my handy-dandy notebook (cue Doug- “Dear Journal…”), but I don’t always have that with me and well, my notebook is really, “a bunch of notebooks.” What I really want is an easily accessible, singular place to keep journal entries. Since reading the Quick Look we published here a while back, I’ve though 280daily might be just that.
If you’re like the vast majority of web developers, you’ve used Google Analytics to stay on top of your site’s traffic info and never gave it a second thought. Google Analytics is free, pain-free to setup, and gives you more detailed data about your traffic than you could know what to do with. What more could you ask?
Actually, there’s a lot more you could ask for. For starters, Google Analytics may be free, but all of your data is on Google’s servers. Some may prefer to keep their traffic data private, while others would just like more control over the data and reporting. Then, Google Analytics can be slow at times, and doesn’t display up-to-the-minute stats. Additionally, the charts are Flash-powered, so if you’re using an iOS device or have simply banished flash from your browser, you’ll only have the raw data.
Mint is a refreshing alternative that wins at every point Google Analytics comes short. It’s a self-hosted webapp so you can own and manage all of your own site’s data. It’s lightweight and expendable so you can make it work just like you want, uses native web charts so you won’t have to use flash, and shows visits as soon as they happen. Let’s see how to setup Mint on your site and take a tour of the features so you can see if it’s finally time for you to switch to a fresher analytics solution.
Awhile ago we took a look at Digital Journaling with Penzu and since then the Penzu team has been hard at work making their app even more outstanding and feature rich. The biggest changes, however, have been the addition of mobile support using the power of HTML5—including offline support.
With well rounded support for all the major mobile platforms, Penzu is certainly a web app showing others how its done. We’ll take a quick look at a few of the new features in the desktop app then check out what they’re offering for mobile devices.
Penzu has also offered to give 1 Year Free Pro accounts to a few lucky readers! Read on for more info.
In a world where even adults have the attention span of a three year old, conventional blogs with thousand word posts will not cut it. Blogs are very effective for professional bloggers and blogging networks like Envato, Techcrunch, etc. However, when it comes to personal weblogs, blogs are going fast out of fashion.
At the same time, 140 characters of Twitter isn’t always enough to express ourselves precisely. That is where, microblogging services like Tumblr come into picture. Tumblr falls in the twilight zone—between full featured blogs and 140 character services—capable of doing both tasks fabulously.
Let’s take a peek under the hood of Tumblr and its features.
Remember when people used to keep journals and diaries? Okay, maybe some of you still do—but mass sharing has taken over in recent years with platforms like WordPress, Tumblr and Twitter. Every day millions of people share their immediate thoughts and moments of life—to millions of strangers; what happened to privacy?
Penzu brings the classic diary and journal into the internet age, providing a platform for private (sharing optional) blogging with a digital paper-like interface. In this review I’ll take a look at Penzu and the quality web app they’ve created to make something old, new again.
There’s certainly no shortage of ways to publish your own weblog — both hosted solutions and self-hosted. WordPress.com and Blogger are established, with large communities of users. So on first blush, it was easy for me to question why Squarespace would want to compete with them.
Squarespace handles everything for users — hosting, template design, and everything else necessary for a weblog — for a monthly fee that range from $8 to $50 a month.
