Oh so this is just a pdf with links embedded so you can jump around? That's pretty neat (and a very slick UI for creating and buying them!)
860 karma · joined June 23, 2010
In the meantime I've made a big update to the Airtable with links to tools, examples and further reading:
https://airtable.com/shrYY94GrqVB4HUsi/tblHPrdomiPbLpod6/viw...
Electric Tables V0.2: https://tomcritchlow.com/2022/02/07/electric-tables-v2/
Reminds me also of this amazing project that also deals in structured data and tables: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/wildcard/
* Making topic-focused lists of articles. e.g. researching a particular topic just grab a bunch of URLs and stick them in a table
* Real estate research - grabbing a bunch of locations and adding them to a table, but where price and image are auto- grabbed (and adding notes)
* Making a list of gift ideas
* Making a running list of music I want to check out
These are mostly simple bookmarking use cases.
What I *really* want to be able to do is publish these lists (either as HTML or as JSON endpoints) and collaborate on them with others! But that requires building a server and login etc that all feels a bit beyond my coding skills.....
The video I made with Tella: https://www.tella.tv/ - very neat
As for CSP - I'm not technical enough to really understand why it needs to exist or how it might be re-architected but as a hobby coder I love it when things are extensible / hackable and CSP seems to be a pain in the ass!
Googling "Making sure /usr/local/bin is in my $PATH" leads me here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19202007/making-sure-usr...
So I fire up the terminal and write echo $PATH and then go back to SO to see that it looks like it's all set up correctly. But why do I need to go to SO? Why do I need to fire up the terminal? It just feels too damn hard and too opaque.
I think defaults and documentation and onboarding matter. Not to mention a GUI :)
Plus: glitch/replit are quite slow to do any real coding inside of vs developing locally.
But maybe the future really is in the browser in this way.
Secondly - I wish I could get ScrollToTextFragment to work reliably. I've tried integrating this into Quotebacks and every time it just works so sporadically that I roll it back. Somehow Google thinks this is robust and stable enough to put into production but my experience is very hit/miss.
Some light additional context - this is part of my ongoing series "The Strategic Independent" which will eventually become a book sometime next year. All the posts in that series are catalogued here: https://www.are.na/tom-critchlow/the-strategic-independent
This post (and the whole series) is designed for independent consultants, free-agents and freelancers who have to navigate entering and exiting client environments often faster than full-time employees. Hopefully there's something useful in that context but many of these ideas could be applicable beyond that also.
Anyway - thanks for the love. If you have topic suggestions for future posts in this series would love to hear them! Thanks, Tom.
The basic premise for this series is inspired by the book and I definitely borrow more directly and heavily for chapters 3 and 4 (which aren't quite ready to publish yet!).
FWIW I posted a little UX teardown of the different annotation platforms here if you're interested: https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/12/annotations/
The biggest problem there is that they will likely want their sponsors on the stickers rather than your set of startups...
Maybe you flip the model on it's head - get the startups who are on your stickers to finance the stickers and then offer the package for free to consumers. It's basically free marketing for these startups - maybe you share the customer's email address with the startup too in return? Feels like a small investment from each of the companies but you might get more orders that way?
just some thoughts
1) seems like a perfect complement to something like mattermatrk: http://mattermark.com/ perhaps try reaching out to those guys? They offer startup tracking so pairing it with this fantasy-investment style game could work well.
2) learning from fantasy football - perhaps you get people to sign up in groups and compete against each other with new money being released into the pool each month/quarter?
3) you could bring people back into the app when the startups they have invested in get in the news? This would involve building a lightweight RSS-scraper and some logic but might not be too hard and would add a nice feedback loop for the product.
4) maybe you let people use (small amounts of) real money to invest in the startups, and let people buy and sell their investments? Kind of like a second market platform? this would make it inherently more compelling for people to stick around but it's almost certainly a lot more work to build...
Actually, a 3D fabricating shop that did custom framing is not at all a bad idea. It costs a lot of money to frame things well and if you can do custom dimensions using robots you might be on to a winner!
I find it really works for serendipity!