Wednesday, October 02, 2019

About this blog: some updates

After nearly 20 years of weekday morning tech news scans and blogging1, I've decided it's time to change my daily routine. I've been dedicating 1 - 2 hours most weekday mornings to tech-related news foraging, and I've enjoyed sharing resources I've considered noteworthy (and/or snark-worthy)2, but I'm increasing my focus on conceptual data modeling3 and climate/political activism, and reducing my daily news-foraging time allocation4.

As a result, the frequency of posts on this blog will remain low for the foreseeable future. For now, here are some other resources (most available via email newsletters) you may find useful for daily news updates:

Tech and science

Political and general news

I'll post occasional updates as I run across other useful resources.

For now: thanks for reading over the years -- more to follow, but with fewer than 7 +/- 2 posts per weekday…

Notes:
1: My first Reality Check post was 19991027, but I changed hosting service providers a couple times before ending up on Blogspot in early 2002.

2: I may increase the post frequency again if I run across a browser extension or iOS/macOS sharing extension that significantly streamlines the posting process; Blogger has frankly been a bit of a nuisance since Google broke its BlogThis browser extension many months ago (without such an extension, every post requires several [error-prone…] copy/paste/format actions). Windows Live Writer (created by JJ Allaire and his Onfolio team) was by far the best blogging tool I've run across, but alas Microsoft acquired, eventually open-sourced, and effectively killed WLW many years ago.

3: I started a second blog on Medium several months ago -- https://medium.com/infoslob -- with a focus on everyday conceptual data models, but the response thus far has been less than encouraging (I would like to thank both of the readers who made it all the way through my Apple Podcasts post, for example; this blog has typically had 15 - 20K page views per month, but I've always assumed a lot of those were from Russian bots etc.). I'm going to resume model-related posts on Medium and will post links here as well, when I do.

4: The overall shift to social media (especially Facebook and Twitter) and apps/services such as Medium have also changed my news-foraging modus operandi over the years. I've also been mindful of the increasingly common use of paywalls, since I can't assume all readers have access to all sources (or to aggregators such as Apple News+).