/blog

The speed climbing is insane!!!

Jamie links to an edition of Matt Ruby's newsletter extolling the virtues of life before smartphones. It includes such observations as:

"News was not breaking and I was not alerted."

"We didn't have infinite scroll. We reached the end of the page and then it was done."

There's no doubt that smartphones have changed our lives beyond measure, I'm typing this on one for starters, but it's not the phone's fault – it's ours.

We control what is installed. We control what apps are allowed to alert us. We control what things can occupy our attention and whether we keep swiping. Not the phone.

To recapture more of what life was like before smartphones we don't need to give them up (although that's always an option for some) just be mindful about how we use them.

I've merged a couple of fixes for the Journal into the (b)log-In repository: one to account for not having any entries yet when displaying the 'day streak' and one to correct a stupid mistake of hard-coding the associated table name.

One thing I hadn't brought over from the WordPress version of the Digital Garden was the ability to export .md files of pages. So, last week, I decided it was time to dig in and get it done.

When logged in, a little Markdown logo appears on each Garden page – tapping it saves a .md version of the page to a folder on the server and triggers a download.