After 5 years and $3M, here’s everything we’ve learned from building Ghost

May 23, 2018

So the biggest takeaway after 5 years is that we have been moving, and will continue to move up market, toward professional users who value power and flexibility over ease of signup. This is where we can win compared to the competition. This is where Ghost comes into its own.

There’s a lot of great stuff in this post, from the challenge of user experience with free and open source software, to GitHub creating a culture of anger, rather than creation.

I don’t use Ghost, but I like that they’re creating a product designed to privilege user choice. Even at the expense of complexity.

After 5 years and $3M, here’s everything we’ve learned from building Ghost | ghost / Blog (via Steven Rosenberg)

The Linux Setup – Peter Y. Chuang, Writer

May 22, 2018

Peter is a writer who makes a great case for Linux. I’m surprised more writers don’t use it. It’s got so much flexibility, it’s easy to make it look and act just right, which I find important for writing. In fact, I kind of like toggling between different distributions, just for a new look when I work. It’s like working in a new place without leaving home.

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here and follow me on Twitter here.

  1. Who are you, and what do you do?

    I am Peter Y. Chuang. I am a writer. I write novels, short stories, and other stuff, some of which I put on my website, which is hosted on a server running Linux (of course). I also make a GNOME/GTK+ theme.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    I tried Linux for the first time nine or ten years ago out of curiosity, and I was very much impressed by its performance, its virtual desktops (coming from Windows, that was quite a revelation), and its customizability. Unfortunately, it took me a few years before I could switch to Linux full-time, as I relied on Microsoft Excel for the financial modeling work that I used to do.

    After being a full-time Linux user for about five or six years, using Linux has now become a habit, so I don’t usually think too much about why I use Linux until I have to touch a Windows machine (I am the tech support guy in my house, so touching Windows machines is inevitable). These days I find Windows very difficult to set up and use. A lot of things that Linux users find very basic require convoluted solutions on Windows. Also, Microsoft’s endless attempts to trick users into letting their computers do unwanted stuff is, quite frankly, sickening.

    To put it simply, I use Linux because Linux is better, easier to use and control, and it’s free and open-source software.

  3. What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

    Arch Linux. I use it because it is a rolling distribution, has a very good package management system, and is very easy to configure, even though it doesn’t seem like it.

  4. What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?

    GNOME. I like it for its minimalism, and I think it’s perfect for users who are familiar with keyboard shortcuts.

  5. What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?

    LibreOffice Writer. I use it to do most of my writing and editing.

  6. What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?

    I run Linux on a custom-built desktop machine and, until a few weeks ago, a late-2015 Dell XPS 13.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    Sure. This is my desktop with the theme I made, which is forked from Flat-Plat.

Interview conducted June 17, 2017

The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.

You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here, follow me on Twitter here, and subscribe to the feed here.

Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change.

May 16, 2018

It’s nice to see any technical community looking at what it’s doing well and what it can do better. I especially love this goal:

Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness. Quality matters because it means posts can help more people. But a larger, more diverse community produces better artifacts, not worse ones.

Stack Overflow is huge. It doesn’t need to do the right thing. The leadership is making an important choice.

Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change. | Stack Overflow Blog

E-waste recycler Eric Lundgren loses appeal on computer restore disks, must serve 15-month prison term

May 3, 2018

A California man who built a sizable business out of recycling electronic waste is headed to federal prison for 15 months after a federal appeals court in Miami rejected his claim that the “restore disks” he made to extend the lives of computers had no financial value, instead ruling that he had infringed Microsoft’s products to the tune of $700,000.

I don’t understand the legal issues here, so I don’t have an opinion, other than the best way to recycle electronics is to use Linux. I’ve never understood how the Windows restore disks work (and don’t work). But Linux is easy! And runs better on older hardware.

E-waste recycler Eric Lundgren loses appeal on computer restore disks, must serve 15-month prison term | The Washington Post

The Infamous GNOME Shell Memory Leak

May 1, 2018

I never noticed the leak. I just love being part of a community that lets me know this much about problems plaguing my technology, but also solutions that solve the challenges.

And Georges ends on a very interesting note:

It almost feels like there’s a wall between the community and the users of what this community produces. Which is weird. We are an open community, with open development, no barriers for new contributors – and yet, there is such a distance between the community of users and the community of developers/designers/outreachers/etc.

The Infamous GNOME Shell Memory Leak | GEORGES STAVRACASU

Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

April 18, 2018

Unlike the output of our old editor, the output of a text editor built on ProseMirror can ultimately be rendered as a DOM tree, Markdown text or any other number of other formats that can express the concepts it encodes, making it very versatile and solving many of the problems we run into with our legacy text editor.

An interesting look at the text editor The New York Times developed. There are no plans to make it all open source, which is disappointing since it’s built upon the open source ProseMirror.

I imagine a lot of news organizations would find this kind of tool useful.

Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom | Times Open