Andy Welfle.

Last summer, I attended Blog Indiana, a big conference that includes workshops for all walks of social media. Mostly geared toward marketing professionals, there were tips for SEO, for tracking results, for tweeting effectively, and for writing.

This year, they’ve rebranded to Mixwest, and it looks like they’re including web design and technology into the mix, too.

I wanted to get back to basics — blogging. There’s a lot of markety-speak, SEO tips, and a few social media practices I outright don’t agree with in the mix, but there are some with good, practical advice. I tried to emulate that.

With that in mind, I submitted a pitch for using Markdown, a writing syntax that assumes you’re writing for the web. Here’s the description from my pitch:

Even among the most well-seasoned web writers, many compose their posts in MS Word, a print-oriented application. This system is flawed from the outset. Truth is, for the web, it doesn’t matter what font you use or what size your type displays, and fiddling with margins makes NO difference when you’re posting online to a site with preset CSS styles. Even a WYSIWYG editor can slow you down while you move your fingers off the keys to the mouse to set your styles and links.

Enter: Markdown. This simple, easy-to-use syntax lets you write and format as you go, without ever needed to take your fingers away from the keys.

Andy will demonstrate different applications (both Markdown text editors and Markdown-compatible CMSs), suggest workflows, and demonstrate how you can become faster and more efficient in your writing and posting, while never losing accuracy or creativity.

Here’s the thing, though. They’re crowdsourcing the program selection for Mixwest by letting the crowd vote for their favorites.

So, if you’re interested in what I have to say, and you’re on twitter, please go vote! I’d really appreciate it.

Here’s the link:

What’s up with Markdown: Get your blogging on by streamlining your writing workflow

I work with some really talented people. My former coworker Aaron Bushnell and current coworker Nick Johnson are two of the most talented developers I’ve ever even talked to, much less work alongside of. And when it comes to the way they work, I have learned to shut up and listen to their advice.

That’s why I’ve had it on my list to purchase and implement 1Password for some time. The application and the company that develops it, AgileBits, is revered by its constituents, almost in a religious way. The way it operates, the underlying philosophy and the peace of mind it instills in the secure way it stores your passwords is really interesting to a lot of people. Their website has a very active discussion forum, and their blog is full of interesting, cryptological goodies and case studies. These developers don’t just make an app — they love everything about what they do, and it shows.

A lot of smart people think the password system is flawed and what’s interesting is that 1Password knows and admits that. They give users the right tools to make the most of the way it works. And now, in a world with single sign-ons, OAuth and “Sign in with Twitter/Facebook/Pinterest/Etc.”, a lot of us have no idea who the heck is verifying our identities and how we’re signed in. And, a lot of us (myself included, until recently), use one or two passwords for the dozens and dozens of online accounts we have.

1Password helps you fix that. With a random password generator and a super-simple password manager app for iOS and OS X (and Windows, and Android, and various browser extensions), you only have to know your one master password (which is heavily locked down and encrypted), and it stores all your other passwords, which are (hopefully) unique from each other.

The biggest drawback to 1Password is its price: It’s expensive. The iPhone app will run you about $18, and the OS X desktop app is $50, so you definitely making an investment. That’s going to be a barrier for a lot of people.

Luckily, that’s not a problem for now. AgileBits is running a 50% off sale on their products, which was just the catalyst I need to pick it up.

One of my biggest fears in the modern world is having all the PINs, passwords, passphrases, keycodes, and identify-verifiers fall out of my head. The trade off used to be that if you keep your access information easy to remember, it’s not hard for someone with dishonorable intentions to get into it. Until nowThis is something that 1Password almost completely solves, and the peace of mind it brings

Most of my best writing is spread out among a number of other websites. My guest post at GatherContent, for one, and some favorites from Medium or Woodlcinched. I appreciate that my writing is found in a diverse number of sites, but how do I show all those articles to someone at once?

Because of this question, I’ve been looking for a good online writing portfolio for years now. Sure, I could (and maybe should) put a custom portfolio option in a subdirectory of Welfle.com, but I tend to think that if others can create one better than I, why not use theirs?

That’s why I was excited when I found Contently recently. They have free platforms for writers, for brands and for media companies. I’m concerning myself specifically for the portfolio platform for writers.

It lets me add publications for which I’ve written, and from there, I can add clips. From there, I can get into the granular details, editing the title, description, and thumbnail of each clip (if the original article doesn’t have an image? No problem: I can upload my own!). I can rearrange those clips within my portfolio. And — best yet — it dynamically shows how many shares, likes, comments, etc. that I’ve gotten on it.

There are a few things I’m not thrilled about — it calls each clip a “story” for example, like I am a journalist or a fiction-writer. And see there where it says I have “2.5k followers”? That’s including Twitter and LinkedIn followers, where in reality there is likely a big overlap. And a couple of the publications have no appropriate thumbnail, so it displays a generic icon which I don’t think looks great.

Still, though, for a managed service, and a free one at that, this is great.

Sign up here, or if you want to see mine, check it out here.

I’m trying to do more writing about content strategy, since that’s what I do professionally. I’m a big fan of the folks across the pond over at Gather Content. They make a really invaluable tool for people like me — it’s a system to collect content from a client, for later integration into their website.

They also have a pretty great blog about content strategy, and have invited me to contribute to it! I adapted a piece I wrote for the Reusser Design blog and submitted it to them!

I learned about this whole “blobs/chunks” things from my content strategy hero, Sara Wachter-Boettcher. In a nutshell, it’s about custom content types (chunks) as opposed to a general WYSIWYG editor to handle the main content of a page (blobs).

Hit the link for the full article and some screenshots.

I have some friends who are amazing poets. I mean, really, really good. My good friend Erica has a blog called Let it go and I am consistently blown away by how beautiful her poems are.

She, and other friends, really ramp it up in April, which is National Poetry Month. She’s committed to a poem a day, and while I can’t match that, I’m trying to get the creative juices flowing to that area again. I figured others might like to join me in the National Poetry Month Poems collection on Medium.com.

I used to not be too bad at writing poetry. In college, I wrote a few that I was, and still am, pretty proud of. Trouble is, after graduation, almost all of my writing took a turn for the concrete — I write almost solely to inform nowadays, and I’m painfully out of practice with fiction writing (which was my whole life at a certain time in my life), entertainment features writing and poetry.

Nowadays, I can still write a limerick or a haiku, which I don’t really consider real poetry. (At least not the way I write haikus.) But to set my mind free to make associations I don’t usually do — I don’t know if my mind is lest plastic with age, or if I’m just woefully out of practice, but it’s a serious challenge.

Hopefully, this month I can overcome that.

Have you guys heard Inside Joke yet? It’s a fortnightly podcast where my friend Dirk talks to interesting people. He’s interviewed awesome people so far like Matt Kelley, Erica Anderson and Alex Jonathan Brown. He even interviewed me several months ago.

But this most recent episode takes the cake. He has Roman Mars from the excellent, excellent podcast about design and architecture, 99% Invisible. This is a big deal for public radio geeks like me. I learned a lot about Roman Mars (Like did you know he’s responsible for Public Radio Remix?

It’s a reasonable listen at 45 minutes. You should check it out at the link, or go find it on the iTunes Podcast Store.

Something really exciting happened to me yesterday — I was invited to contribute to Medium (which I’ve mentioned before in a previous post here) This is a platform I’ve been excited about for months — it’s a content publishing platform created by Evan Williams (@ev), the founder of Blogger and Twitter. He’s a heavyweight in the social media world.

What is Medium? What problem does it solve? Ev says of the usual social media players in an interview in November on The Big Web Show:

Social media [that is talked about today] is about lowering the bar to the floor when it comes to creating content, but has a ceiling as to what can be created. Instagram is great how great how quickly you can do something that is cool, but you can [only do that one thing].

With Medium, it’s kinda the opposite. Not everyone can create (at least not yet), but there are many things you can post: short form to long form writing, photos, etc.

Yes, that does sound like a blog, doesn’t it. Well, almost. Joshua Benton from the Neiman Journalism Lab at Harvard said in a post about Medium:

What’s most radical about Medium is that it denies authorship.

Okay, maybe not denies authorship — people’s names are right next to their work, after all. But it degrades authorship, renders it secondary, knocks it off its pedestal.

… And while social networks allowed that value to be spread, algorithmically, much wider, the proposition was much the same. You were interested in your Facebook news feed because it was produced by your friends. You were interested in your Twitter stream because you’d clicked “Follow” next to every single person appearing in it.

It feel like a big, collective, hive-mind blog, and posts are organized in collections. Though I can create a private collection, which could essentially function as an in-platform blog, I would have much more success with a shared collection. So rather than assign a category to my post, I’m writing a post to that category. As Benton said, “topic triumphs over author.”

By downplaying the author a bit more (than, for example, this blog, which is solely about me and my interests and thoughts), it’s elevating the content and its message. Content is king, after all, and I can definitely respect it taking a role higher than the author.

Just today, for example, I wrote my inaugural post in a popular collection called “Writers on Writing“. My post is something which is something I’ve been meaning to write for a long time, is now part of that collection.

People can “recommend” the post which moves it to a more prominent place, and I have the chance of being moved to the front page. But I’m contributed toward a larger theme, one voice in many. This blog, for example, has many posts in various themes, but the unifying factor is that they’re my posts. Medium is mostly about the content itself.

Medium’s not bad to look at, either.

Using the gorgeous Tisa Web Pro, the compose screen and the article view is full of Typekit-y goodness. It’s a breeze to add photos between paragraphs, and adding a cover photo to your story is as easy as dragging and dropping. You have minimal editing capabilities, but I’m okay with that. I especially like how the text-formatting bar is available by selecting a word or phrase after you write it — I can spend less time worrying about my formatting when I should be concentrating on writing my content.

Don’t worry. This blog isn’t going away. I’m still not certain when and how I’ll be using Medium. But since I’ve been finding so many great articles and stories on Medium to read, I’m really excited to contribute in some way to that greater body of writing.

Everyone who works at a creative agency has an “agency crush”: another company that does something cool that you admire and — however subconsciously — want to emulate.

For me, that agency crush is One Lucky Guitar. For some of my coworkers (well, and me, too), it’s Sparkbox. And for my boss, it’s Carsonified.

Ryan Carson, the owner of Carsonified, has long extolled the virtues of the four-day work week.

There’s a big hump to get over in client perception, he says:

When we tell people that at Carsonified we only work 4 days a week (Mon-Thurs, 9am – 6pm) then the general assumption is that we don’t get as much done as other companies. That our workload has to be reduced in order to fit into our smaller work week. “You can’t do a full time job in just four days,” is the most popular reaction.

My boss has taken this to heart, and that’s why at the beginning of 2013, we started working ten-hour days, four days per week.

From my post at the Reusser Design blog:

Longer work days mean more concentration time, and that, paired with a conscious effort to minimize interruptions, means more productive days. And as a bonus, our team gets Fridays off to work on creative projects, spend more time with their family, or maybe just sleeping in!

I’ve never been much of a morning person, so getting up at 5:00 AM to be into work at 6:30 AM is really hard. But doing that only four days a week makes a big difference, especially because I can get a lot of things done on Friday — stuff that would otherwise be broken up into a few hours in the evening on the other weekdays.

tl;dr I really like working longer work hours, but four days a week. Fridays off are worth it.

The brilliant Marco Arment discusses the new App.net tiers and some recent changes. As always, he writes with clarity and foresight:

My bigger concern is the shift they’ve taken recently away from being a near-clone of Twitter. They’ve always positioned themselves as a more generic platform that could be used to support many different apps, and the Twitter clone was just one use of it. But they’ve pushed especially hard in this direction recently, especially with the heavy promotion of the new File API.

I’ve been using App.net now for about a month (Thanks, Brad Dowdy, for the invite!), and I just switched my trial account over to a paid account last week.

(Of course, all that is moot now that ADN offers a freemium plan.)

So far: I’m really enjoying it. The community is small — a little too small, maybe — but it serves a niche. With a handful of web developers, tech journalists, Minor Internet Personalities, and smart people, I’ve been really enjoying the thoughtful, intentional conversations I’ve been having there. (Which is helped, in part, by the 256 character limit on posts as opposed to Twitter’s 140.)

I say “intentional” because, in general, there was no one there who didn’t want to be there. Either a user was paying $35 a year, or had a month trial to give it a try and make a decision whether or not to stick around.

This model has changed now. In the matter of a few hours, the number of Fort Wayne residents on ADN went from two to more than ten. Now there are plenty of people who signed up for free just to stake out their claim on another social network. And more businesses and faceless brands can and will join to market at is. But is this the price of growth? I suspect so.

I don’t harbor any unrealistic expectations. App.net could very well fail like all the other ones, or just peter out, like Google+. The creators want it to replace Twitter. I can’t imagine that happening, though I wish it could. I’d be happy with my niche group of internetters. I think the community is so tight because of the moralistic ideal we all hold — a high regard for developers, for the privacy of the user and as much transparency as possible in how the platform is run. They’ve done a great job with that, and is antithetical to everything that pisses me off about Twitter.

I’ll be interested to see where it goes. Meanwhile, I may have a few invites left to a free ADN account. Or, if you’re already there, find me at @andyw.

The amazingly creative folks, and my good friends, at pye,brown (pronounced “pie comma brown”) are holding a second Bomb Shelter event. I was out of town during the first one, though I fully intend on attending this.

What is the Bomb Shelter? Says the website:

The Bomb Shelter is a post-apocalyptic haven for first-time standups to get on stage and tell jokes in front of an audience that just wants everyone to survive the night.

This is a great idea. I have no stand-up comic aspirations, but if I did, my roadblock would be a safe space to try out my jokes, my technique and audience reactions, long before I build up enough confidence to try it out in front of strangers.

Click the headline to check it out (more details, like ticket prices and locations coming soon), or click here to check out videos from the first event.