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After nearly nine years, I’m no longer at Red Hat. Feels weird to type that, but it’s true. I joined in August 2013 to work in the Open Source and Standards office (now OSPO) when the company was fewer than 6,000 people, Jim Whitehurst was CEO and everybody thought OpenStack was going to be the Next Big Thing™ up against public cloud. Nobody asked me “where do you see yourself in five years?” when I interviewed for Red Hat — which is a good thing, because I would no doubt have gotten it very, very wrong. From OSAS I went to portfolio marketing, to the comms team running the Red Hat Blog, and then to managing the editorial team over several properties. ...

At least once a week when I’m reading, or editing, copy related to work I’ll skim over something and realize that what I just read makes no sense. Sure, the words are used properly. The paragraph is composed of sentences that seem grammatically correct. But if you stop to think about what the copy is saying, it’s just three sentences in a trench coat pretending to be a coherent thought. ...

Infrastructure and code aren’t the only things in your organization that incur technical debt. Content marketing on blogs is a major offender. Here’s just three things to cut down on technical debt in your content marketing on blogs. Content marketing practice to avoid: Bare URLs/URIs in content Be kind to your readers and to yourself: Stop putting bare URIs / URLs in your content. Bare URLs - that is, something like www.example.com/document should never be in prose on the web. No, you’re not doing your content marketing any favors with cutesy shortened URLs or campaign vanity URLs. It’s not 2003, nobody is going around memorizing URLs anymore. ...

The reMarkable 2 is a nifty piece of engineering. It’s about the size of a thin college (U.S.) notebook, responsive and feels as close to writing on paper as a tablet is likely to get. The tools, on the other hand, leave a lot to be desired. reMarkable 2 and cloud services The reMarkable 2 is not the device to invest in if you’re avoiding cloud services. The reMarkable offers a desktop app and mobile app. You might think that you install the desktop app and connect the reMarkable to the computer to manage the device, grab files, and so forth. But that’s not the way the software works. ...

I’ve been putting the reMarkable 2 through its paces since I got it a few days ago. In this post I’m going to jot down some thoughts about its overall usability whether it might replace my trusty paper notebooks. Spoiler alert: quite possibly! Making marks on the reMarkable 2 First consideration: How’s the writing experience? The tablet could have all the whiz-bang features ever, but if the tactile experience of writing on it doesn’t live up to writing on paper, then what’s the point? ...

Is the reMarkable 2 a suitable replacement for pen and paper? Does it work well with Linux? I hope to find out! I’ll be writing about my experiences with the tablet over the next week and beyond. If you’ve been on the fence, feel free to follow along. (Assuming I don’t absolutely hate it and decide to send it back…) Linux, reMarkable and the elusive paper-free future I’ve been hoping to get to a point where tablets would match the experience and ease of writing on paper since the first iPad came out. The iPad with an Apple Pencil is good. The tactile experience still leaves something to be desired, however. It feels like writing on glass. ...

The unintentional theme of today’s Link-o-Rama is, apparently, tech nostalgia and why old tools are the best tools. The File Transfer Protocol is now 50 years old. 50. FTP has outlasted quite a few protocols in that time, evolved a great deal, and been used to transfer Heaven only knows how many files. I hope that Abhay Bhushan is basking a bit in the knowledge that his creation is still widely used half a century later. ...

There’s a running gag in the show Silicon Valley about a character obsessed with being in the “three comma” club. Being a billionaire, in other words. When he loses enough money to drop from $1.2 billion to “merely” $900 million, he’s “financially ruined” and despondent. Judging by the way some folks write sentences, they’re just as afraid to lose a comma. ...

A few of the posts I found interesting this week. 17 (ever so slightly) weird facts about the most popular dictionary format: " the dictionary format of Hunspell has a lot of peculiarities. Depending on your mindset, you might find the facts below curious, fascinating, ridiculous, or just plain boring. " ( zverok with ruby) Q&A with John Kozubik: Long-form Q&A with the CEO of rsync.net on console.dev. Interesting for his discussion of personal technology / tools. I loved using rsync.net but it was just too pricey for the storage allotted for personal use. Glad they continue to have a successful business. Daniel Stenberg has a nice post about the 23rd anniversary of the first official release of curl. “That was the day the first ever tarball was made available that could build a tool named curl. I put it together and I called it curl 4.0 since I kept the version numbering from the previous names I had used for the tool. Or rather, I bumped it up from 3.12 which was the last version I used under the previous name: urlget.” A worthwhile response to the flatkill.org site that tries to spread FUD about Flatpaks. “A lot of flatkill.org’s statements are made to incite fear in the Linux community. Given that all Flatpak packages are available and able to be edited by anyone, the appropriate response is to educate on why this is a problem, and then fix it. The way that flatkill.org approached this issue says a lot.”

In case this helps anybody else, wanted to share how I created the Top 100 Albums page here on Dissociated Press. I wanted to be able to automagically create a page from all posts tagged with the “100 albums” tag, rather than manually laying things out. The final result is using the Display Posts plugin that lets you utilize a WordPress shortcode (" display-posts") with some parameters to specify how the posts should be displayed and how many of them should be displayed.