#bds design

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.

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.