April 2018

My podcast application of choice is Overcast by Marco Arment. He has just released Overcast 4.2, and the announcement is notable for its enlightened approach to user privacy:

Your personal data isn’t my business — it’s a liability. I want as little as possible. I don’t even log IP addresses anymore.

If I don’t need your email address, I really don’t want it.

…

And the first time you launch 4.2, people with email-based accounts will be encouraged to migrate them to anonymous accounts:

Of course it’s not possible for all applications to operate anonymously, but the principle is important: you should collect only as much personal information as you require and no more. Anything more than this is a GDPR concern and a data breach waiting to happen.

In one of the static web site projects I have been working on, the main text is composed using Markdown but a number of common constructs are used which Markdown can’t easily express. That’s not Markdown’s fault in any sense; I’m using it well outside its originally intended scope.

Here’s how I made things a bit simpler by using a Nanoc filter as a pseudo-extension for Markdown.