BDS

Today I was brainstorming the potential different topics I was considering talking about on this daily blog. I’ve been having difficulty figuring out how to position the blog. I want to be able to help other creatives by sharing my journey, but also be a resource for those creatives.

Which brings me to my current predicament; what do I write about? I’m into a lot of different things. I could talk about guitar for hours, but I could also do the same about web development, or new tech, or design. There definitely isn’t a shortage of stuff I could talk about, but to keep a consistent and common theme is difficult.

I think I’m going to have to bit more research the next couple of days and take a look at some other blogs to get some more ideas.

Thanks for reading. Also thanks for your patience with the daily blog. Figuring out a content schedule and having life creep up a bit lately has had me reprioritizing. Always have to adapt and pivot. The BDS website has been coming along nicely. The content is almost finished and the construction on the site has been coming together.

So after two weeks of the daily blog I'm making some changes to the format to make it a bit more sustainable. I'm keeping the daily blog going but only on weekdays. I'm working on figuring out some different themes for the each day to add more structure to writing.

A content schedule for this blog is going to make things a bit easier in terms of figuring out what content I'm going to be writing and sets the expectation for what content you (the reader) will be seeing regularly.

The growth of this blog has been great in such a short time. I'm excited to make this pivot and see how it evolves.

Thanks for reading today or any of my posts! It really means a lot.

It was my birthday this week so I'm taking today/tonight to celebrate. No blog today or tomorrow. See you Monday!

These days apps like Google Photos and iCloud Photo Library makes storing and searching for your photos whenever is so convenient, it's almost automatic at this point. It's not like flipping through an old photo album but having all of my photos whenever is the future.

But where there's a disconnect is with the old photo albums and boxes of photos from previous generations. And not just those, the home movies too. I have been looking into ways to digitize all of these old photos and videos for my whole family to access whenever.

For the photos there are a few options. The obvious solution is using a standard scanner but sometimes the photo isn't always in the best shape. Another option is if you have the negative of the photo, there are negative-to-digital scanners that you can purchase on Amazon. This is how I scan all of my film photos I take now and it's the only version I use when editing.

Last month I went to New England to visit family I have in the area. My family made the trip by car but I decided to fly down because I couldn't spend that much time cooped up in a car. I showed up a lot earlier than my family did so I spent a day exploring Boston.

It was a great opportunity to get some great content for BDS.Photo. Ryan from the team went down also (he’s engaged to my sister btw) and we had an awesome time getting photos and videos of the area.

After sifting through all of the content we got while we were down there, I've decided to separate the work into 3 different segments (that will also be highlighted as highlight stories); New Bedford 1, Boston, and New Bedford 2. They all have a distinctive mood so it felt best to separate them.

Has your email inbox gotten out of control with newsletters and subscriptions? I know for me, it was a constant pain to just go through every email and save each article or resource I thought was worth looking at.

I was looking for a way to still get all of these articles to me in one location but not flood my inbox. There are a few options out there (I outline a few options at the end of this post) but the one I use is an app called Feedly. If you have a link to any RSS feed, you can subscribe to it and view the posts on a solid UI that's available on all devices.

Since most of the newsletters and subscriptions I was subscribed to were just curated emails of posts from their blogs, getting a direct feed to them via Feedly was a no-brainer.

Often keeping a promise to yourself is the hardest thing to do. Typically if you don't follow through, the only person who's noticing and who you're hurting is yourself. Sometimes that makes it easier, sometimes harder.

One way to stay on track is to find an accountability partner; someone to keep you in line with your goal. Another way is to say you're going to do something publicly. For some goals like fitness or nutrition, having an accountability works. For others, like saying I'm doing a daily blog, stating the goal publicly makes sense. Either way these accountability techniques are there to keep you consistent.

Today wasn't about working on the business; I was focused on spending time with my girlfriend's family and taking a break from the day to day chaos. It was well spent and much needed. I'm even writing this all now at the end of the day (I did say I was gonna put out a daily blog here).

Taking this time to slow down gave me some time to reflect back on the week and to look forward to the following one.

This past week was mostly behind the scenes, getting things in order work and about social media content (especially from the posts I published). I've found that I finally have a solid workflow in place to get content out there for BDS.Photo that will give me the time to focus back on the BDS Design Co. website (which is my main focus for the upcoming week).

Getting this website done has been looming over me for too long. This week it's time to take action and get it finally finished. I have a lot of finished, just need to push through the final stretch 💪. I also have some great photos going out on the BDS.Photo Instagram that I've been waiting to share. I'm just excited to get the week started.

Thanks for reading! Tomorrow's the holiday Monday but I took my break. Back at it tomorrow.

The roof access at my building is closed. With tomorrow being Victoria Day, I wanted to get a panoramic timelapse of the fireworks around my area 😒. Ah well.

I’ve been back to using Tweetbot on my phone and I forgot how great it is. In my opinion it's the way Twitter should be used, that is if you want a more customized experience of Twitter.

Then I saw this article from The Verge and saw that Tapbots released Tweetbot 3 for Mac. Then I read that it was on sale for the release and had the App Store open before I even finished the article.

Having the Tweetbot experience across all of my devices now is awesome. Having even where I left off on my feed synced across my devices is seamless. This makes me think, why isn't this in all apps? This is definitely something that's being done with handoff on Apple devices, but what if this could be applied across web apps and devices? 🤔

Also why have chronological feeds died? I get tailoring the content you're viewing to what your activity is like on the platform, but there's something about a chronological feed that makes the experience better. And I’m not the only one feeling this way.

One negative I have experienced while using it is I found my computer freezing. I have it set to stream updates which may be an issue, or the fact I have 4 accounts set up on it. I put my computer through a lot but never to the point it completely freezes; not even the rainbow wheel pops up here, it's just frozen. (Update: I’ve turned off streaming since first writing this and it’s been working fine)

Overall, I have to say that I’ve fallen in love with Twitter again. Over the past few months it’s really come to be my favourite social network, but after using Tweetbot these past few weeks it’s changed what I thought about the social network again for me. If you’re looking for something different, or if you’re a real power user, this app will not disappoint.

Thanks for reading! I actually did a paper on the user experience of Tweetbot in my "Human-Computer Interaction" course (this is what UX used to be called) comparing it to the main Twitter app. I actually enjoyed that assignment and it had some pretty material in it (maybe something to share on the blog 🤔).

Today I spent most of the day reorganizing my office. After cleaning out my old room at my parent’s place last week, there was a bit of a bit of a build up of that stuff sitting in my office. It’s a pretty small space, so it was pretty necessary.

When I need to make a high quality piece of content fast, Adobe Spark makes it happen

When I’m working on creative content, I usually want full control over all of the creative aspects. Transitions, colour grading, audio, music; I want it all to be done from scratch. This includes my daily blogs and the content I create for it (i.e. the photos I take, the Instagram story videos I make, etc.).

However, since I'm creating this new content every day, sometimes I'm unable to come up with a full video idea to be made into an Instagram video. On those days (like today), I've been using this app I've recently come across called Adobe Spark. It creates these awesome high quality photos and videos in minutes and I've been using them for my Instagram stories. But it's capable of making content for a variety of social networks. They have a great video showing what it's capable of.

Question for the room; if you're tagging other accounts on Instagram to gain exposure, are you tagging the photo or including them in the comments (or both)?

I've been wondering about this since I started scheduling my photos to auto-post. Before I would use the scheduling app to notify me to post (that's all they were capable of doing until Instagram changed their API). I would get notified, then post the photo manually, add the caption, location and then tag accounts manually on the photo. I've had good results this way.

Now that everything is automated it's been great in terms of not worrying about missing a post going out. However, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the latest shots I’ve scheduled to auto-post really haven’t performed well compared to the shots I would post manually. The main observation is that I'm not including the tags on the photo or the location; the captions I've written have all been the same; just the caption and hashtags, no account tagging.

Last November I decided to separate my photography work from my design work and this led to starting BDS.Photo. I use this account to showcase all of the original creative projects that myself and the team have been working on.

Going out to shoot with the team and exploring different locations is always a great time. During these shoots I am constantly thinking about how everything will look like once it's shared. It all comes together when I plan the way the photos will look like on Instagram. As I mentioned last week when I talked about automating my social media workflow, I use Planoly to plan and schedule my Instagram posts, and it’s been a true life-saver for managing my content.

With the Instagram account acting as the portfolio of work for BDS.Photo, it is the pretty much the face of what we’re capable of. Having the ability to see what the photos will look like ahead of time and planning certain releases of other content to complement the feed is an invaluable tool when trying to maintain the image of an account.

Last Friday (May 11) the new, highly anticipated Arctic Monkeys album was released. I’ve been listened to it since it came out about a half-dozen times and the best way I can describe it is “okay".

It's not your typical Arctic Monkeys album that's for sure. You're not hit with the punchy guitars, instead your greeted with lot of piano. I like the direction that they've gone in for this album, but it doesn't get me excited to throw it on the stereo.

There are some good bangers on there like "Four Out Of Five” and “Batphone” but other than that, all of the other songs are pretty chill. At one point during the title track “Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino", it felt like I was listening to a Black Keys song from their “Turn Blue” album with the way the bass line was going.

Overall I must say the album is well done; they went pretty experimental with it which I can appreciate, but I don't think it's going to have a similar impact the last album had. I really like how they're experimenting more and have added in more piano. This album didn’t exactly hit me in the face and didn’t leave the same kind of first impression, but I’m excited to see them play these new songs on tour later this summer.

I’ll keep this album in the rotation and give it a chance for now. However I don’t see it being a go-to like Jack White’s latest album “Boarding House Reach”.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this music review. I’ve always enjoyed listening to new music from some of my favourite bands and discussing them. Have you heard the Arctic Monkeys new album yet?