Terry Godier
I build Current, a calm RSS reader, and create visual essays about our relationship with technology.
Jokingly calling it Finder++. Here are a couple of videos from the past few days of playing around. You can use cmd+shift+. to summon the shelf from the bottom of the screen at any time. It’s a pure canvas with a visual representation of the files. Move …
Read moreListen, friends. I love Linux, but I can’t, in good faith, deliver software with the level of information density you seem to require. But I love you anyway <3
What I want to build are things that work the old fashioned way, on protocols that give users sovereignty and agency, but with modern thinking applied to the UI and UX.
That’s it. That’s my whole shtick. Thanks!
All I want in life is a modern version of Yojimbo that re-imagines Finder as a surface to drag and drop and save and recall and organize various things.
Text snippets, memes, contacts, dmgs, webpage archives, bookmarks, json files, whatever.
Persistent, visual, spatial, wonderful. Too much?
After 9 days (yes!) in review… You can now save articles on macOS via the plus button on the saved view, or by pasting a url into the command palette (cmd+k) You can now right click any source or current in sidebar on macOS and release all, or release …
Read moreExceptional thinking, once again courtesy of Gruber.
Hell yeah. Same.
📢 New Essay: The Boring Internet
The internet you grew up on isn’t dying.
A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
With Current, Sourcefeed, and Byline all in the world now, the thesis is probably close to being clear. I fundamentally believe that people want to make things and people want to engage with things made by other people. We’ve got robots now that are close to, …
Read moreTags are now a thing on Sourcefeed. When you write a post, you can pick one (optional). The post still goes to your subscribers the way it always has. It also shows up in a shared feed with everyone else who tagged the same thing. The tags: walk: a note from a …
Read moreReally interesting to see how sourcefeed is working in several ways. It’s a quasi social network for some, responding to each other and coordinating topics, a niche stream of links, daily journals, and software changelogs. Inspiring!
Private subscribers You can now create private feed urls for readers. Perhaps you have a membership program that offers full-text posts, or you want to kick off a feed to share just with a few personal friends. Easy peasy. Everyone gets their own distinct feed …
Read moreSeveral people write posts on Sourcefeed saying “I have no idea if anyone reads this” - which I consider to be a feature not a bug.
I can happily report though, that every public feed has at least 75 subscribers. So, for now, yes, someone is probably reading that :)
If they launched full-time goblin mode, I’d use it
AI bots are now blocked on Sourcefeed. Being RSS-only there’s not really much to scrape, so the surface area is small, but now they’re explicitly blocked from the feeds. If they ignore robots.txt there’s still a proxy/middleware that will blackhole them.
I spent last night subscribing to all of the public feeds on Sourcefeed. A few folks even sent me their private feeds (thank you!) I got emotional reading those posts. There’s a lot of earnest writing in there, a lot of living happening in those words. …
Read moreOk, this has been unbelievably fun to see what everyone is writing about (publicly) and the crazy, zany ideas you have for the api!
🙏🙏🙏
Why? Some writing wants to be a website. Some wants to be a newsletter. Some wants to be a feed. Sourcefeed is for the third kind. RSS-only. No website, no inbox, no algorithm. Subscribers read it where they choose, in whatever reader they already trust. The …
Read moreThis is a really thoughtful response by Max Obermeier to my “the last quiet thing” essay:
Somehow just catching this, but Stuart Breckenridge recently launched Gobbler, a no-nonsense rss aggregator. Looks extremely solid to me, and look at that: it works with Current (through the google reader compatible api).
Nicely done, Stuart!
#rss
Apple actually runs two app stores for each platform: a paid one and a free one. Here’s a story that’s closer to reality than it should be: You and a friend are building apps. You’ve got the same concept, but disagree on pricing. You want to do an upfront paid …
Read moreA favor: please send me all of your favorite internet radio stations. Especially those run by one person. Send me any ambient streams of the real world you know of: coffee shops, street corners, gardens, whatever. Thank you!
Reviews on the App Store have bothered me for a long time. Review systems in general, really. People leave reviews to give feedback to developers, and to help other users know what to expect. Sometimes they’re used punitively, as an outlet for frustration, or …
Read moreSo this ad is just downright trickery right?
The CTA directly beneath the show I looked up says watch now. It’s styled like a button, even animated, and yet it’s no button. How can this possibly convert meaningful enough to be worth it?
This release includes some really nice quality of life features to help your river become even more calm. You can now set a custom velocity / age out date for a source! You can now configure the app to use the “since it first appeared in the river” date as …
Read more