Braindump March 2013

There seems to be a trend for free services shutting down recently – following the recent-ish announcements that Posterous (a kind of blog service with strong emphasis on posting by email) is closing down, and this month Google announced they are closing Reader. It’s not surprising that a free service would shut down – they cost money to run, and as businesses start to look at ways of cutting costs, it makes sense to sacrifice free services.

I was surprised about Google Reader though – apparently the user base isn’t as big as I presumed it was, and they decided it was too niche to bother with. I’m also surprised they didn’t just roll it into google plus – surely little effort to gain thousands of much needed G+ users? Meanwhile i’ve moved over to feedly.

Currently most of my stuff is self-hosted, with the exception of comments hosted by Disqus. I really don’t want the hassle of running my own comment system, due to spam, but i’m starting to think about moving to a self-hosted system, maybe something like a self-hosted version of Disqus, that I can easily drop into different blogs? Whatever I use, it needs to have all the usual anti-spam stuff – comment spam is the bane of any aspiring blog software developers life!

I also paid up for a years membership to app.net – same as twitter, I am @rickhurst. It hasn’t become part of my daily social/workflow yet, as not enough of my regular twitter contacts are using it, but I wanted to put my money where my mouth is when I say i’d rather pay for a service than rely on annoying advertising.

I gave a talk on Backbone Marionette at the Southville JS meetup. It was a practical code based demo, I think it went OK. Either way it was a good turnout and nice to have it hosted in a pub back room, so we could continue chatting at the bar afterwards. The code of the (fairly pointless) demo app I put together in blue peter style is online here.

I also gave an ignite talk on remote working at the Anywhere Working Bristol event. That seemed to go down well and it was nice talking about non code-related stuff for once!

I was also pleased when a colleague pointed me to Poweramp for Android – I had been complaining about how most Android music players don’t support gapless playback, which is a real party-pooper when it comes to mix albums such as my favourite mix album of all time Journeys by dj 70 minutes of madness.

I’ve now finished a full-time freelance Javascript contract at ISM Fantasy Games, but will be continuing with them on a 3 day week basis, freeing up some time for my new business venture(s). More about that when the plans are more refined!