3 pieces of software that I use that I am sure a lot of people haven't heard of, but should start using. If you have heard of them, do you use any ...
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Now I'm curious about the little experiment.... (Still need to read the whole other article š³)
So I wanted to see if a "crap" post (30 minutes to write, low effort...crap is probably a little strong...an average not great post) in a more popular tag can outperform a decent post, even if the "crap" post was released at a terrible time.
If views is the metric then yes (probably obviously) is the answer.
It is part of a bigger experiment to see what sort of promotion posts on accessibility will need, how "clickbaity" titles need to be etc. in order to get a decent reach. (I am about to start writing "for profit"...i.e. to promote something (subtly!) I am going to launch next year so I am trying to be a bit more methodical!)
I do have an advantage that I downloaded every single live post on DEV about 3 months back (10.6GB - and that is without images) so I can do some interesting analysis on best posting times etc. there.
inhu.co/dev_to/analyse/timeofday.php
The bottom chart on that page is reasonably accurate as I excluded the top and bottom 5% of posts that skewed things. Needs better analysis, hence why not released a post yet, but I thought I would let you have a look!
Anyway I will post properly on that but I thought you might like a rough idea of what I am up to š
It mAde it into the Facebook feed - that probably screws any analysis
It made it onto Twitter as well, but the idea was also to see if whoever runs the DEV social stuff looked at the quality of articles across the whole site or just picked things out of certain categories (or if it is random what they pick...who knows?!).
They kind of fell right into the trap as a post designed to be promoted and get views with little effort got promoted! šš¤£
My mega article with one of the highest reactions to view count ratios I have ever had - not a peep of promotion on that one!
It is interesting but more experiments are needed now as you are right, I can't do a direct comparison now š„
Wait... I thought the promoted articles thing was a bot. Is it not a bot? What have I missed? What year is it?
I have no idea. I would love to know what the criteria is for that, and how on earth you get on the "top 5 comments" list etc. Maybe it is a bot that just randomly picks stuff? Who knows!
I think the top 5 comments is by amount of likes (don't know if the likes of the responses count or not). The top 7 posts is probably a combination of both votes and a human picking, because they often are not the ones with the most votes.
Maybe it is just something I should be asking with the #meta tag - it would be interesting to know. See if I can game that system too once I know the rules! š
But number of likes has very little to do with it from what I can tell...in fact I got "sniped" twice on the a11y tag where I had top post and some random post got promoted...once when I had positions 1, 2 and 3 all at the same time!
Didn't think too much of it until just now, now I am really intrigued at how this actually works? Now I am actually a little annoyed by it now that I am thinking about it...lol!
Maybe part of the algorithm is "do not select any person that was promoted in the past x days/weeks"?
You don't think I get promoted often enough for that to be the case do you? š¤£
I am in the middle of writing a post to ask the question so it will be intriguing to see the answer!
Could do with your opinion actually - is it balanced? I am aware at the moment I am a little annoyed that my crap post got the promotion and I don't want it to look like a "boo hoo" post!
dev.to/inhuofficial/how-does-the-p...
It looks fine. I kind of hope they reply with something like "we vote for them during our weekly demo/retrospective."
š±
I hadn't heard of any of these tools before š³ but may need to try some (the time tracker seems interesting)
A tool that was really useful while using windows was screen2gif that allows to create animated gifs from screen captures. Super useful to add in bug tickets.
Got that one, for some reason never used it for bug tickets despite that being an obviously great idea š¤¦āāļø
My repeating logo GIF is in part thanks to S2G to create the perfect loop.
All my bug reports will now be awesome...the simplest tips give those āof course, thatās geniusā moments! ā¤ļø
Oh and if you have some software that you use that you fancy raving about, put it in a comment and let me know!
I use ColorZilla, the extension which allows you to pick colors (and other stuff)
Forest app to block my mobile apps and websites. (Just use gatekeeper to block apps on laptop)
I got beta access to Github Copilot so I use that too
I could go on forever...
So ColorZilla is awesome, I use that too! But the PowerToys thing is handy when you are outside the browser. Also having a keyboard shortcut is is super handy.
Never heard of forest app - will look at that, didn't realise they had a phone blocker now!
How do you use GateKeeper to temporarily block apps being launched? (perhaps I should have made that clear!) I haven't had a Mac for a couple of years now but if they added that feature that is awesome!
Let me know how you get on with CoPilot - I have been enjoying the varying pro-con arguments going around at the moment!
Edit - added a sentence to explain Cold Turkey blocks on a schedule rather than permanently!
Well, I don't set a schedule yet for GateKeeper. I just start it when I need, and end it when I need. I have enough willpower to stop me from abusing it!
If you have low willpower, you can use the terminal commands
sudo spctl --disable --label "BlockedApps"andsudo spctl --enable --label "BlockedApps"and maybe setup a cron job for these to run to make a schedule...If you have even less willpower, and wanna stop installs of apps, you could
sudo spctl --disable --label "Mac App Store"And if you have even less willpower, you could make sudo not work temporarily, by putting this in your sudoers file:
which would prevent you from using sudo.
And if you have even...I'll stop here :D.
No need to stop, they are great tips on how to do it!
Why have I heard of all these but don't use any?
Interesting tools, but it's that beautiful workstation screenshot that earned you the heart-click this time. Great work as always!
hehe thanks Jay, took a while to build up to it!
The best bit is that desk...the whole thing is sit-stand (6ft by 6ft / 2m x 2m) - watching the thing rise up still makes me smile!
Is Rescuetime the one that is a bit dubious through data use? I think I read something years ago
I haven't seen anything about that?
But if you are cautious about that it might not be the best idea to let a piece of software view every single application, document title etc. you are viewing and send it to a remote server.
I realised a long time ago that I am not interesting enough to care if someone is spying on my usage data etc. But it is a valid concern for most and perhaps something for people to look into if they are considering using Rescue Time. I would imagine they are no worse than Google etc. otherwise they wouldn't have many customers!
A great point for people to consider!
p.s. I love your profile pic!
I love Cold Turkey. It changed my life for the better. Iām going to talk about it in my RustConf talk this year š