Posting Links is Lame

The last couple of posts I made went to Facebook as links back to my site. That is not how I meant things to go. I’m not trying to drive traffic to my site. I don’t even have any traffic analytics installed. I just want this to show up in the timeline.

Hopefully, the full text of this post will appear on Facebook. You can read it in its entirety in your timeline, and never visit my site. That it he goal.

Improve Your Writing with Flesch‑Kinkaid

I came across this little bit of wisdom via Hacker News:

There’s one trick that everybody who writes sales knows and nobody else seems to know. This trick is so effective that Microsoft Word has it even built in so you can test while you write.

The F-K score.

The Flesch-Kincaid score determines what grade level you are writing. If your score is 10, you are writing at a 10th grade reading level. If your score is 12, you are writing at a 12th grade level. And so on.

As it turns out, I wrote an app for that. The thing it has over Microsoft Word is that it caculates the F-K score continuously in the background. It also has a couple of tools that suggests how you can improve your score.

I had a very specific use case for that app: a project my wife had in her publishing job. It also does vocabulary tracking, which she needed. Now that her project is over, I find it hard to get motivated to update it. It makes virtually no money. Maybe I should add a Post to Web feature and reposition it as Write Sales Copy That Coverts kind of tool.

Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere

I’ve been reading about IndieWeb and the goal of publishing on my own site and syndicating the content out, or POSSE. I’ve had a personal blog for years, but never really posted to it much. Never as much as Facebook. In part, this is an attempt to break out of those networks. Or at least de-emphasize them.

My current attempt is the SNAP plugin on WordPress. It’s going ok. I like that it doesn’t brand itself when posting. It’s my Facebook app that has permission to post. It has pretty good customization of the post format.

I’d like the ability to customize the post format based on the WordPress post type. The template for a Photo post should be different from a Link, which should be different from a long text article. I’d also like is a way to pull in links to article I’ve liked, or retweeted. It looks like I’ll have to use another tool for that.

It’s a Living

This is one of my favorite SXSW photos. On the stage is a John Langord band that’s going bananas, but these guys are just working the sound board, so you can go nuts in the audience.

Soundboard Engineers
Soundboard at Yard Dog