Greg Davis

I thought this article from last week on finding back to school computer deals was worth checking out for more than just computer shopping. It’s a great summary of the online tools out there that have creeped in to the modern day bargain shopping toolbox. Amazing how far we’ve come from paper coupons and crappy Groupon (sorry).

Going Back To School? Save Money On A New Computer With 7 Secret Tips.

Some of these startups are amazing I wish I had thought of some of these things… Personally I have need to step my game up and try a few of these things. Recently I have been impressed even with just checking RetailMeNot before buying something online, more often than not if a website has any coupon or discount field on the checkout page that should trigger you to take a look around.

And double plug for the Chrome extension Page Monitor, which solves a huge challenge of keeping track of pages without RSS feeds. For example, I have a niche industry news site that sells an expensive insider newsletter that flags new stories, but all I really want is to get notified of the latest news headlines that they report. So this extension notifies me and takes me to the exact new headlines highlighted on the page which I can use for searching on my own to get the details. Awesome stuff. I have added hundreds of sites and it works spot on.

I basically resent that twitter adds another layer in how I consume news/media. I get that it makes it easy to do short posts really quickly but any web publishing interface could do the same thing by just simplifying post entry and categorizing them. I just uninstalled the widget for my own feed on this site and replaced it with a simple bookmark sharing widget using Pinboard.

A certain random mix of folks I enjoy reading / value their recommendations (i.e. Andrew Coyne– his is basically my Canadian news ticker-, Jordan Breen, Sam Harris, Jason Collins, and Geoffrey Miller) for some reason have decided to use it. I don’t see any reason they can’t be writing blog content, tag or categorize short posts, and it’s the same output and I could read it with the rest of my feeds. People say it’s just fast and easy to write on the platform, but I don’t buy that it works any faster than other options that would push content through elsewhere. Retweeting is just bookmarking and there are better ways to do that. Use a simpler service like Pinboard and share a tag feed.

To really peeve people off, Twitter specifically stopped offering RSS feeds for following people, and closed off it’s API to IFTTT. Then they shut down Tweetdeck on Android so for a while I had to check facebook and twitter separately… brutal. Luckily I stumbled on the mobile app Scope to avoid that problem.

Please, more free awesome content, but not on Twitter!

Wow I wondered why Geoffrey Miller’s (otherwise solid) twitter feed went silent:

Fat-shaming professor faces censure from university | Inside Higher Ed.

Not going to get a comment on that from me..