Back in elementary school I started my first rock band. Myself and a few friends would lug our gear down to our drummer’s basement and hack away at our favourite songs by Green Day, Metallica, Silverchair, The Offspring. For the first year our only fan was our drummer’s mom, though her favourite part was when we were finished and her ears could rest.

Once we had pulled together a fairly lengthy repertoire of songs, my girlfriend at the time asked us to perform at her birthday/Hallowe’en party. About 30 of our friends crammed into an old Anglican church in town, and we played music for a couple hours. Everyone was dancing, having a great time. Even the adult chaperones were enjoying the performance from the kitchen where the walls could deafen the decibel level to a tolerable level.

This was my first real live performance, and from then on, I was addicted.

Throughout high school and into college, I continued to perform live at parties, county fairs, bars, churches, living rooms and even a grocery store parking lot. I grew to love the feeling of moving a crowd through multiple emotions in a set. After a show, I enjoyed connecting with old friends that had come out and meeting new people who had heard me for the first time.

A few years into performing, a shift began to take place. The faces of those who came out to shows became less familiar, to the point where I was playing shows in front of crowds of total strangers. Travelling through the US and around Ontario, the audience was no longer made up of people I sat next to in class and hung out with at recess. These people weren’t the people I could call up on a Wednesday night to hang out or watch TV. I was no longer playing for friends.

This shift was a hard one for me, not because I had any problem playing in front of strangers, but rather because I started to treat my friends differently. When I would have a bit of news I would tease my fans about through my website, I would do the same thing in person with my friends. When a friend asked what was new in my life, the first thing I would share would be where I was playing next, or I would drop a name of someone I had just opened for. Instead of sharing my life with my friends, I was selling them my music.

This all came to a head when I was in college. A good friend that I cared about a lot told me they couldn’t stand being around me. Not because she didn’t like my music, or because I was a bad person. It was because rather than treating her like a friend, I was treating her like a fan. My words and actions all had the goal of selling myself as the rock star I thought I was (but most definitely wasn’t).

This conversation left me with a bit of an identity crisis. I had built up this persona for several years, and had lived it out both on stage and off. Whether the persona was based in reality or not, I lived as though it was exactly who I was.

I still struggle to this day with the reality that while I am a performer, I am also a human being. I have not even come close to reaching any real level of fame, aside from a little recognition through music as well as this blog. I have to fight the urge to sell my persona to my friends. If I have something big to announce, I try to share it with as many friends as possible first, so that they know they are invited to be part of my life, not my performance.

It sucks when you think that you are someone’s friend, only to find out that to them, you’re simply just another fan.

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Please note: this post contains some commentary that reflects an emotional response to feeling let down by the London Ontario Police Department, as well as the Tucker and Taz show on FM96. These emotions are raw at the moment, but I wanted to make sure I got these feelings out in the open.

Dear Tucker and Taz,

This morning on the Tucker and Taz show on FM96, hosts Scott Tucker and Chris George (Taz) welcomed London, Ontario Police Chief Murray Faulkner on their show. Chief Faulkner was invited on to discuss issues of law enforcement in our city, as well as answer questions from callers. I had a question I wanted to ask the Chief, and so I called in to the show.

To give some background on the call, I need to go back a couple of years to when I was assaulted in downtown London. In 2007 I was visiting London while living in Barrie for Canada Day. I had spent a great day at the beach, at a movie and out for a drink at a London pub. At around 1:00am, I was walking along Talbot Street towards King Street where I had parked my car. On King Street, west of Talbot, a group of disorderly young adults were kicking garbage cans and yelling at people in the area, causing a disturbance.

As I approached King Street, one of the people in the group approached me, yelling obscenities and calling me derogatory names. I sped up to avoid confrontation. As I was crossing King Street, the person approaching me sucker punched me in the face, knocking me out and causing me to fall in the middle of the street. According to the woman I was walking with at the time, the assailant then kicked me in the face several times before leaving me, bloody and out cold, in the middle of the street.

Once the ambulance had come and taken me to the hospital, Officer Brown and Officer Campbell interviewed the woman I was with, who had witnessed the entire scene, as well as myself. I told the officers that I could not clearly remember what the attacker looked like, however they still pushed to get at least some descriptive information to help with the investigation.

The injuries sustained in the attack included a fractured orbital bone and a broken bone to the right of my right eye. My head felt like it was on fire, and I had to wait at least a couple of hours before receiving medication from the hospital as they ran X-rays and other tests.

I returned to Barrie after spending a day in the hospital and several days at home with my parents recuperating. About a week or so after the assault, I was told by the London Police that they had made an arrest, and had charged the suspect with Assault Causing Bodily Harm.

A few months later, I came back to London to give testimony at the trial. When I got to the courthouse, I was informed for the first time that there had been video evidence of the attack. However, apparently the defendant’s attorney had not received a copy of the evidence for review before the trial, so the trial was pushed back another month or so.

When I came back, I was asked to take the stand to give my recollection of the events. I was not introduced to the crown attorney, and believe from conversations with the investigating officers that they cared more about justifying their case than seeking justice for myself.

Both myself and the woman who witnessed the attacks gave our testimonies that morning. After the second testimony, the case was thrown out as the defendant did not match the description of the person we had described. As it turns out, the defendant had admitted to being present at the time of the attack, but was not the person who had assaulted me. In fact, the person who had assaulted me was, according to the defendant after the case, apparently at the house the police had arrested the defendant at the time of the arrest.

Since the trial, I have not received any correspondence from police, and have felt no closure to this episode in my life.

This brings me to this morning’s phone call. I did not call to discuss specifics of the case, but rather to simply gain an understanding of whether a case like mine would still be considered an open investigation. London Police have touted themselves in the media as protectors of the innocent, solving assault cases even years after the attacks. I was curious to know whether, even though a wrongful arrest had been made, if my case could still find some closure.

After describing in brief detail my situation, I was laughed at on live radio by Tucker, Taz, and Chief Murray Faulkner. When asked if I could give a description of the person who had attacked me, rather than listening to my response they made a joke that I had in fact been intoxicated at the time. When I tried to defend myself, I was cut off the air.

I was incredibly hurt and disgusted by how Tucker and Taz handled my phone call, and even more so by the way our London Chief of Police responded to me. I have been a loyal listener for the past year and a half I have been in London since my move back from Barrie, and yet I can say now that I will never again be supportive of your show, or any show on the Corus Radio network.

Sincerely,

Patrick Dryburgh

Update: I have just received responses from both Tucker and Taz. Neither outright apologized, but did indicate that they didn’t understand the full situation.

Also, I must admit that the radio may not have been the best venue for this type of inquiry. All I really wanted to find out was whether a case that results in a wrongful arrest is still considered open, and whether it is something that could be followed up on.

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Joshua Blankenship on Taking a Break

Workaholics will eventually kill long term team productivity. Lone wolf heroes on the permanent all-nighter schedule are toxic. Find your threshold. Go somewhere sunny. Or just go home for the day. Don’t pull your team down because you refuse to take a break.

I completely agree with Joshua, and believe that this very principle played a part in my leaving Connexus in 2008.

However, this principle doesn’t only play itself out over the long term; people need to step away from what they are doing part way through the day as well.

I used to eat my lunch at my desk, in front of my computer. I normally would read RSS feeds at this time, but if there was work that was urgent I would work on it while eating. I also was available to be called away from my desk, sometimes leaving my food behind for up to an hour while I attend to things that really weren’t that urgent.

That changed when I read Jorge’s advice back in April:

“Never take your break where you work”

So simple, but it dramatically improved both my lunch time as well as my day as a whole. Suddenly I had more energy coming out of my lunch than I did before, and all because I simply took a break.

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A couple of years ago I purchased a Blackberry Pearl. At the time I had just transitioned from working in an office to working remotely from home and a variety of coffee shops. While I had my Macbook, having a device that was connected indefinitely was going to be imperative to performing my role in the organization.

As far as I was concerned, the Blackberry was the perfect instrument for my needs. Using the Blackberry Gmail app, I was able to be available at a moment’s notice to field questions, solve problems and keep projects moving. A short few months later I was no longer with that organization, and found myself with functionality I no longer needed. I called up Rogers and removed the data plan from my account, and used my Blackberry as a souped-up cell phone.

About a year later, I bought an iPod touch. While the iPod touch can only connect via WIFI, it has become a fairly handy mobile device. I can email, tweet, keep to-do lists and much more. However, even though both the iPod touch and iPhone have some productivity features, I really don’t feel very productive using them.

Productivity and Me

On my Macbook Pro, I have a fairly structured system to stay productive. Here’s the basic setup:

Email

My email is handled through Apple Mail.app. While I have gone back and forth between Mail.app and the Gmail.com interface, I am brought back to Mail.app because of its simplicity and integration with the rest of my desktop.

All of my email addresses are forwarded to my Gmail account so they can all be managed through one inbox. Emails from my work account are filtered through a rule to change the text colour so I can visually separate them.

Using the principles of GTD each email is dealt with in one way or another until my inbox is empty. Emails that can be addressed in 5 minutes or less are dealt with immediately. This include emails that require a reply, a web update or simply need to be archived for reference. Emails that require action that will take longer than 5 minutes are input into my Things.app inbox (more on this in a minute).

Once I have dealt with all of the emails in my inbox, an AppleScript provided by John Gruber and initiated by a FastScripts keystroke sweeps through my inbox and archives all emails that are not flagged or unread.

Things

Things.app has been the most revolutionary piece of my personal productivity system. Even before starting to read Getting Things Done, using Things helped me to capture the things I needed to do and helped keep them in focus throughout the day. Once I began reading GTD, I really started to harness the power of capturing any open loops. I do this through the Things for Mac Quick Entry HUD and the Things touch app as well. By synching these two pieces of software I am able to keep tabs on everything I need to be doing as well as capturing anything that pops into my head at almost any given time.

Things + Mail.app

Using a tip from Shawn Blanc back in January, emails that require further attention are added to Things.app using the Quick Entry HUD. Once I have typed in the action, I click and drag the email from Mail.app into the “notes” section of the to-do item.

As Gruber wrote a couple of years ago, this function is possible due to Leopard’s “message” URL handler. This URL handler allows email messages to be linked in other applications, which when clicked opens the message in Mail.app. Rather than trying to write out notes to remind myself of what needs to be addressed for each action, this message URL handler allows me to simply go back directly to the message the to-do item references.

The Problem

This is where the system begins to fall apart when the iPod touch or iPhone are introduced. While Leopard’s Mail.app utilizes the message URL handlers, Mail.app for iPhone does not. This means that if I am checking my email on my iPod touch and I read one that requires further attention, I need to close Mail, open Things, write down an action that explains in enough detail what the email was referencing, then go back to Mail to continue checking my emails. The other option is less taxing, which is to simply ignore the email on my iPod and address it later when I am on my Mac. However, to me, having to address a dozen or so emails more than once feels very unproductive, and defeats the entire purpose of keeping a clean inbox.

If I am in a situation where I have time to address some of my to-do items and I am on my iPod touch, I have a list of all of my to-dos in Things. If I open a to-do to view its notes and the notes contain a link to an email, however, the link does not work. I need to open Mail and find the email through search in order to figure out what the to-do item is referencing.

All of this may seem trivial, but it is the only issue that keeps me feeling from feeling productive on my iPod touch. In my mind the solution is for Apple to simply include the message URL handlers in the iPhone OS. It would be even better if there were a way to click and drag bits of information such as an email from one app to another (possibly by dragging it to the bottom of the screen and holding for 3 seconds).

Multiple Accounts

One other issue with using my iPod touch for productivity is Mail’s inability to use multiple “from” accounts. Because I use one inbox for both personal and work email, I have all of my emails set up in Gmail with the ability to send from the appropriate email address. In Mail.app on the Mac, the same functionality is allowed by writing out the different email addresses in the Account setup. However, on the iPod touch you cannot differentiate which email you’d like to send from. This means that, once again, I am unable to properly address my email from my mobile device. The obvious solution is for Apple to allow multiple “from” email addresses on the mobile Mail app, but until then there’s not much I can do.

Patience

When I first started using email, I had an account with Mail.com, with a 50 MB mailbox and a horrible web interface. Even though I currently have a laundry-list of complaints, I also realize that the iPhone and iPod touch have definitely opened up the possibilities for what mobile productivity could look like in the very near future. As Apple continues to develop its platform and developers continue to push the boundaries of what is possible on a mobile device, we will begin to see incredible advancements in how we interact with technology, our friends and the world around us.

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I grew up in a small town of just a couple thousand people. We had small schools, small stores, small parks, and one small, weekly paper. The Signpost came out on Wednesdays and covered not just my town, but several surrounding towns as well. It was not an uncommon occurrence to see your name or picture somewhere in the paper. I remember the first time my first time on the front page, I was around 3 and collecting Easter Eggs in our community park.

The Signpost came out once a week because that was all our little town needed. Had it been a daily, it likely would have been one sheet folded in four, with extra space for personal notes. When I was learning to read I would read the Signpost. It was all the news I needed to hear.

As I got a little older I began to pick up the London Free Press, the local paper for the city nearby. A full daily paper with news, sports, entertainment, comments, business and more found its way to our family’s doorstep every morning. When I began reading the Free Press, my world was opened wide. Suddenly there was an influx of news, more than I could possibly dream of reading.

Fast forward a few years with the introduction of blogs, news websites, social bookmarking sites, Digg and later, Twitter, and with it all a need to better manage the news I consumed. That’s when I was introduced to feed readers, a personal inbox where the world’s news could be digitally delivered right to me. Google Feed Reader and later NetNewsWire would become my gateway to the world’s news. From personal blogs to tech news sites, design websites to music news sites and everything in between, my reader replaced the traditional newspaper. It was instant, it was personal and it was free.

Until it became too much.

Overload

When I read a newspaper, I rarely read most of the articles. I glance at some of the major headlines, blow past the minor ones, and linger in the comments and business sections for a bit before heading off to work. Out of hundreds of articles I maybe read 3-5.

On the other hand, when I open my feed reader I am bombarded by 40-50 articles, all of varying length and quality, from several hundred different sources. There’s no indication aside from looking at where the article came from to decide the priority any given article should have. In most cases, I blow through it all and only read what a few friends have written. I know I’m missing a lot of great stuff, because I don’t subscribe to feeds I’m not interested in. The contrast to this are the times when I’ve let my feeds simmer a little too long, only to have several hundred articles waiting to be addressed. On occasion this is a welcome escape. More often than not, however, a click of the “Mark All as Read” button frees me from the daunting task ahead. Only, who knows what I’ve missed…

More of What I Want, When I Want

A few months ago a friend shared a great tip to help counter the issue I was having with my feed reader. His suggestion was to put my feeds into three separate folders, called “1st,” “2nd,” and “Sparks.” The idea was to put only the must-reads into the 1st folder. The 2nd folder was for blogs I enjoy, but if I missed something wouldn’t be the end of the world. The last folder was for new blogs, that with time would either find themselves either in the 1st or 2nd folder, or out of my feed reader altogether. For a few months, this really worked well, and I found myself having a better grasp on what I really wanted to read. Thought, even with this system I had to be careful not to subscribe to too many blogs, or the system would become useless.

98.6°

The problem with RSS feed readers today is that no priority is placed on different types of posts. Going back to the newspaper analogy, stories are given priority by the type size of the headlines, the position in the paper and on each individual page, the presence of an image and length of an article. In a feed reader, however, all articles are given the exact same priority: unread. There is nothing to differentiate between a beautifully written article from one of your favourite writers and a post full of lolcats. The user is left to fend for himself, or to hopefully build a system that hopefully separates the wheat from the chaff.

98.6° and Climbing

Enter Shaun Inman’s latest creation, Fever. Fever is a combination of a normal RSS feed reader and a personal recommendation service, à la Digg or Reddit. Unlike Digg or Reddit, news is filtered not through a community voting system, but rather through links tracked through your own personal feed subscriptions.

To do this, Fever introduces what it calls the “Hot List.” To create this Hot List, Fever asks you to distinguish between your essential feeds, called Kindling, and your supplemental feeds, called Sparks. Taking the links that are tracked in your Sparks, the Hot List feeds you recommended stories and links that you won’t want to miss. The more feeds that link to a particular story or link, the hotter that item becomes and the higher it sits in your Hot List. Your Hot List can track items back over a period of a day, a few days, a few weeks and up to a month. You’ll never miss the most important news because you were too busy being Rickrolled again.

Like Inman’s previous product, Mint, Fever is a self-hosted app built to run on your own hosting server using PHP and a MySQL database to operate. While this may deter casual users who are not comfortable with self-installed web apps, that has never really been Shaun’s market. Fever, like Mint, is targeted at a tech-savvy market that values quality design and unique functionality.

Like a Real App, in the Browser!

One of the identifying qualities of an Inman creation is the high level of attention to detail, both in the aesthetics of the product as well as how the product functions. With Fever, Inman does not disappoint on either level.

When Fever first loads, users are presented with a two column layout that displays links to the user’s groups, Kindling and Sparks, and Saved items on the left, and the Hot List on the right. Kindling are the feeds that generally have a great deal of unique content, and that you enjoy reading on a regular basis. Sparks, on the other hand, can be feeds that display primarily links to other sites, or feeds that are high-volume but may not have must-read content with each post.

Hot List items are displayed with the item’s temperature in big, beautiful Helvetica Neue and a thermometer graphic indicating hot hot each item is. A link to the item is displayed in bold, with each feed that links to that item listed below so you can read not only the hot item, but also the commentary of others.

The Hot List is a great solution to a number of problems. First, it is the best solution so far to the problem of news and information importance. Again, in most feed readers each news item is given the same visual priority. In Fever, the most talked about items are brought right to the forefront. This is perfect for those times when you only have a few minutes to spare and would rather spend it reading the most interesting stories rather than sifting through countless top 10 lists.

Second, the Hot List not only highlights the hot items, but the supplementary running commentaries as well. This is handy when you want to get a varied perspective on a particular piece of news. For instance, last week Google announced the release of their first operating system, Chrome OS. While it was interesting to read the news, the running commentary behind the news was staggering. Jason Kottke and John Gruber both had incredibly interesting things to say about the Google news release, and I was able to access both commentaries directly from Fever’s Hot List items. On a larger scale, this system could potentially replace the need for reading blog comments as commentary posted on the item’s page, allowing the focus to be on well written, thoughtful commentary that doesn’t dilute the conversation.

Stay in Bed with a Fever?

Of course, no feed reader is complete without a mobile counterpart. Fever comes with a Mobile Safari-optimized version, complete with the appropriate iPhone icon. The mobile version of Fever looks beautiful, and the Hot List is the perfect companion for those quick fixes while on the go.

Meltdown

With all that is positive about Fever, there are a few minor things I hope will be addressed in future releases¹

First, I wish there was a bit more documentation as to how the whole system works. Shaun did release a demo video to explain many of the features, however I was still lost on some things. The main one was how Fever refreshes the feeds. At 248 feeds, Fever takes a few minutes to refresh them all. Initially I had Fever set to refresh when I went to the site, which meant I had to wait almost 5 minutes to start reading anything. It also meant that I had to load my feeds in my desktop browser before loading Fever on my iPod touch, otherwise the feeds wouldn’t refresh.

This was very frustrating, until I dug a little deeper and found out about refreshing using cron. Even now I’m not entirely sure what cron is, other than knowing that it replays a certain code every 15 minutes to refresh my feeds. The code can be found under “Extras” in the main Fever menu.

Second, the iPhone app, while aesthetically beautiful, lags quite a bit in how it transitions from one section of the app to the other. While it looks like a native iPhone app, it doesn’t function like one, and that is unfortunate. I don’t know if there’s a way for Shaun to create a native Fever app for the iPhone, but if there is, I’m sure there’s a market for it.

Thirty Bones

Finally, the only major downside to Fever: the price. I am absolutely in favour of paying for quality products. I also have a passion for supporting the independent developer community. Where the issue arrises here, however, is that there are so many incredible feed readers available for free, it’s hard to justify the $30 price tag for Fever. When NetNewsWire and NewsFire, two incredibly beautiful and functional desktop apps, and Google Reader, a fully functional web-based reader are all free, $30 seems quite steep. The Hot List is a very unique feature in the feed reader world, but I’m not entirely sure it justifies the price.

I am hoping that Shaun uses future versions of Fever to push the envelope of what a feed reader can be. I would love if there were some social aspect to it, where my Hot List is affected in some way by my friends’ Host Lists. I suspect that future releases will also include some of the extensibility of the current version of Mint, including different themes and plugins. Perhaps Inman would be able to produce a hosted version, so that those not as technologically savvy could themselves catch a bit of the Fever.

Contagious

With Fever, Inman has at the very least produced a very unique feed reader, while at the same time has laid down the foundations for what is potentially the most promising solution to the problem of information overload.

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Yesterday I purchased and installed Fever, the self-hosted feed reader/personal recommendation service from Shaun Inman. I’m still learning the ropes, but so far I’m really impressed by both the functionality and the design of the user interface. Shaun has once again done a great job.

Since its launch, Fever has become the preferred feed reader of a number of people. Thanks in large part to Shawn Blanc, a number of new Fever users have recently subscribed to my blog. Prior to Fever, this was the level of connection I had with my readers:

Graphs and charts outlining my readers’ choice of RSS reader, browser, operating system, etc. were the only indicators (outside of personal contact) of who was reading my blog.

While for the majority of my readers this hasn’t and will not change, for the growing percentage of readers using Fever, suddenly anonymity is no longer guaranteed. In my Mint stats, as people access my site via their Fever installation, their domain name is also tracked. Every time someone visits my site from their Fever app, I am able to see exactly who subscribes to me, and with that information I am able to visit their site.

There are some very cool benefits to this circumstance. I now have the opportunity to return the favour to my readers and subscribe to their blogs. I am able to make contact through email or their comments section. I am able to get a much clearer sense of the types of people who are reading what I have to say.

At the same time, however, this poses some unique questions about how to approach this new level of openness. Is it appropriate to email someone who subscribes to me, thanking them for taking the time to read what I have to say even if they’ve never made direct contact with me? Are there other security/privacy issues that arise when I am made aware of who is reading my blog? How will knowing who is reading affect how I write?

I’m interested to see how the Fever user community grows and begins to interact with one another in a very new way. I hope that Fever will continue to integrate social connections between its users, beyond the side-effects of having a self-hosted app. It could really open up a whole new way of sharing news, finding information, and beginning dialogues around what we are collectively reading.

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My parents, from the time I was born, have been incredibly supportive of me and what I want to do in life. They have been active participants in most of the major decisions I’ve made in my life, providing encouragement and advice, challenging my assumptions and taking a genuine interest in my life and success.

I’ve had some audacious dreams in the past. From going to Bible College to be a youth pastor, to touring around the US chasing my rockstar dreams, to working at a church hours from home. Not every decision has been easy, and not every decision has been the right one. However, never once have my parents ever said “we don’t believe you can do that.” Not once.

As we get closer to the launch of the project Adam and I have been working on for the past 6+ months, I am starting to feel some apprehension about it all. Are we really ready for this? Is the product we’ve been working on going to reach our target market? Have we chosen appropriate pricing for it? Will anyone else even care?

My greatest fear is that the whole thing will end up to be a failure. This is my first online business, and while it’s been relatively easy to get where we are, this is just the beginning. There’s a lot of road left to travel.

It’s on the brink of a big launch that I need to hear my parents words clearly in my mind and my heart. “We love you, Patrick. We believe in you.” I’m so, so happy and grateful that I’ve been blessed to have this type of encouragement throughout my life. My goal is to not waste it away with fears of failure. If they believe in me, what is there to fear?

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I’m not one for big software reviews, but I’ve been thinking about sharing some of the software I’ve been really into lately. To start, I thought I’d do a quick write-up of some small utilities that really make life on a Mac even more enjoyable.

• I Love Stars by Potion Factory is a simple utility that displays the current iTunes song rating in your menu bar and allows you to add/change the rating to what you’re listening to. I’ve never been very good at rating my music, but after installing I Love Stars today, I am really into it. This app is incredibly polished, shown in simple ways like the way the stars roll away when you pause a song, or how it flashes in the menu bar 3/4 through the song when the song your listening to hasn’t been rated.
• Caffeine by Lighthead is so simple, yet so incredible. Basically, Caffeine sits in your menu bar as an empty coffee cup. When you click on the icon, the cup fills with coffee, and the app keeps your Mac’s screen from dimming. This is really helpful when you’re watching long YouTube videos and you don’t want to go into System Preferences to adjust your screen settings or from having to move your mouse around to keep the screen bright. Such a simple concept and implementation, but I use it daily.
• WeatherBug is a menu item that does one thing: displays the temperature. As soon as I am done this post, I’ll be heading over to Subway, and now I know whether I need a jacket. So simple, but so helpful.
• Quicksilver really doesn’t need to be mentioned, but I’ve been really getting more into some of the hidden functionality of the app that has been awesome. Everything from emailing attachments without opening Finder, to using Quicksilver as my iTunes remote control has done nothing but reaffirm my love for this app.

Anyway, those are just some fun, free apps I’ve been using for the past while that have really made owning a Mac an even better experience. If you’ve got more to share, send them my way!

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My web development app of choice, Coda by Panic, works so well in so many ways. I am constantly learning more about how it works and find more and more helpful features as I continue to use it.

While there is so much positive to write about it, there is one detail that I can’t stand: the “Sites” section. I love the icons and the overall look of it, but to me the whole layout seems very unstructured.

(Matt Brett)

I do web development both at work and in my own personal time. The sites I work on in each situation are not the same, and yet in Coda they are all grouped together. It would be so much nicer if Panic added a way to separate sites into groups for easy scanning and organizing. Below is a quick mock-up of how it could be done.

I have a few other ideas that may work as well, such as using some sort of tagging system à la Things.

However it’s done, there needs to be a way to better organize sites in Coda. If Transmit can have organized sites, why can’t Coda?

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As some of you may know, for a few weeks in March and April I took some time off from checking my web stats. As I wrote two weeks into it, it made me realize that for too long I have been deriving my identity and self worth on numbers that I just can’t control.

As I neared the end of my fast from looking at my stats, I felt this new feeling of creative freedom. Some of my best writing came out during that period. A lot of this had to do with my perspective when writing. Rather than asking myself “how can I write something that will boost my traffic?” I asked “what can I write that my friends would enjoy reading?” I tried to think of what other writers I respect would like to read. I focused on faces much more than on a set of graphs and pie charts.

More importantly though, this freedom helped me realize that this is my blog. This is not your blog. This is not the next google searcher’s blog. This isn’t my RSS reader’s blog. I began to ask “Why do I spend so much time focusing on making them like my blog?”

It was during this time that I changed the header of my blog. As those who visit the site can see, it now reads “This is Pat Dryburgh.” This is who I am; this is what I love, what I hate, what inspires me, what challenges me, the questions I am asking myself and the answers I’m discovering. I could go and scour the internet again to fill another “Top 10 Best Websites with a Green Background and Sans Serif Type” post, but that’s not me.

As strange as it sounds, this isn’t my brand. I don’t have a strategy here. I will save that process for more important things. This is just me, plain and simple. Sometimes raw, sometimes dry, sometimes ugly. I don’t write this to scare you away. Hopefully more people can start to lower the walls a bit and realize that there is freedom in openness.

Some people have been interested in how my stats increased while I was focused solely on writing. While I was happy to tell them, I am personally more excited about the personal growth I went through as part of the process.

If you’re feeling weighed down with pressure to keep up your image, to impress your audience, to grow your stats, then put the numbers away. Maybe turn off your comments. Let it be you and your blog. Let your blog be you.

※ Permalink for “Letting the Numbers Go” published on date_to_rfc822