Welcome to Pirate School! A new podcast hosted by me and Talia Carbis, about the chaotic, messy, wild world of home education.

This podcast is basically just a chat about how we homeschool. We’re both trained as teachers, so we do know a lot of those foundational education principles. And, of course, we have opinions.

We just released episode 9, which you can find on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’ve appended a short sample of the show to the end of the audio version of this post.

Quick sidebar on how we record:

We’ve tried a few different approaches, including separate lapel mics, and speaking together into a condenser mic (with a splitter cable for headphone foldback). What we settled on was simply sitting on the couch and speaking directly into our iPhones! We open Voice Memos, clap (to sync the two separate recordings in post), and begin.

The audio quality is nothing short of terrible. So to compensate, I simply combine and sync the audio files in Garageband, then upload the result to Auphonic. I’m no audiophile, but I don’t think you can tell much of a difference between episodes we recorded with a fancy condenser mic in a baffled recording booth, and the iPhone microphone in the lounge room.

Say something profound
Say something profound
Say something profound
Say something profound
Pull it down from the heavens
Pull it up from the ground
Say something,
Say something profound

Say something oblique
Say something oblique
Some obscure reference
Something antique
The less that they get it
The better it sounds
Say something obscure and profound

Say something brand new
Say something unique
An utterance that I’ll decode in a week
Say something brand new
And say something blue
With tongue firmly planted in cheek

Just say something

Say something
For G-d’s sake
Say something!
Somebody,
I wish that you would
If they don’t enjoy it
You’re misunderstood
Say something,
Say anything good

Say something frightful!
Surprising, delightful!
Make me squirm,
Make it gross
Make me smile,
Be morose

Speak a truth
Swear an oath
Make it real
Never lie
Make me hurt
Make me think
Make me feel
Make me cry

Say something immortal

Cast a spell that will open a portal
And take me away
Send me on vacation
To find inspiration
Because I have nothing to say

Pebble is back!¹ I wrote about it, Eric Migicovsky wrote about it, even John Gruber wrote about it, and it’s now available for pre-order.

But…

iPhone users like myself have been warned. The experience will be hamstrung, due to Apple’s lack of interoperability between iOS and third-party devices.

Some features will appear first on our Android app, and then eventually we’ll add them to the iOS app. This is because the majority of our development team uses Android phones, and generally we’re building things for ourselves, so naturally Android comes first.

I don’t want to see any tweets or blog posts or complaints or whatever later on about this. I’m publishing this now so you can make an informed decision about whether to buy a new watch or not. If you’re worried about this, the easiest solution is to buy an Android phone.

This is such a non-starter. I’d happily switch from an Apple Watch to a PebbleOS watch. But there’s no way in hell you’ll convince me to switch from iOS to Android.

Essentially, this announcement sucked all the joy out of spending $225 on a new watch. I was pretty close to clicking that “Apple Pay” button for a Core Time 2, but I can’t bring myself to be excited about a second-rate experience.

It’s weird though. Many of the experiences that Eric lists as impossible on iPhone are unimportant to me.

• There’s no way for a smartwatch to send text messages or iMessages.
• You can’t reply to notifications or take ‘actions’ like marking something as done.
• It’s very difficult to enable other iOS apps to work with Pebble.

I don’t care about these features. I’m happy for my watch to live on my wrist and just give me notifications. I can pull out my phone to action them if needed. And I don’t need complex integrations with other apps (and I’m sure reasonable workaround exist for this anyway). Part of my problem with Apple Watch is that it tries to do too much! Keep it simple: Time, Notifications, Health, and Calendar.

Then, Eric lists another set of problems.

• You can’t easily side load apps onto an iPhone. That means we have to publish the app on the iPhone appstore.
• Getting a Javascript engine to run in PebbleOS forced us to go through many hoops due to iOS.
• You can’t reply to notifications or take ‘actions’ like marking something as done.

Sorry Eric, these are features not bugs. I wouldn’t want to sideload the Rebble app (or whatever app that launches for PebbleOS), I would much rather get it from the official App Store. Apple’s Javascript restrictions are for performance and privacy and security reasons, I don’t want you working around those. And I don’t want anyone having wholesale access to all my notifications. That leads to a privacy nightmare. Don’t tell me you should at least make it an option – if PebbleOS gains the ability to read notifications, everyone will, and if everyone does then we’ll see Big Social dark pattern their way into everyone’s private life.

Then, Eric mentions another problem, which definitely gave me pause. Here we have something Apple should being paying a little closer attention to.

• If you (accidentally) close our iOS app, then your watch can’t talk to app or internet.

There should be an API for enabling third-party devices to speak with iOS. You don’t need to give away any privacy measures for this. Just direct device to device communication, with an on-device data enclave which the app can then access as needed. In fact, it should be possible to pair a PebbleOS watch to your iPhone without the app installed. Enforce a limited content scope, enforce a limited update interval, enforce everything you learned about preserving battery life from making the Apple Watch. But at least make it possible for PebbleOS to sync Time, Calendar, Health, and also speak to the internet. It might be nice to have access to alarms, too (but even Apple Watch can’t manage that one!).

Apple should have done this long ago, but because they didn’t they’re now being subjected to egregiously overreaching regulation.

Today, the European Commission adopted two decisions under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) specifying the measures that Apple has to take to comply with certain aspects of its interoperability obligation…

The first set of measures concerns nine iOS connectivity features, predominantly used for connected devices such as smartwatches, headphones or TVs…

To be clear, these regulations go against everything I believe about government’s role in regulating private enterprise. It’s draconian. It’s heavy-handed. It’s more like a geopolitical swing at America’s tech dominance than thoughtful policy. And also, Apple has been asking for it. The lesson is: If you can’t self-regulate, you’ll get kicked in the ass by Europe.

That said, the measures, while unnecessarily punitive in most regards, do include some of the requests I mentioned earlier: direct to device pairing, and peer-to-peer Wi-Fi. If Apple was willing, they could have done a much better job at device to iOS integration, working with manufacturers like Garmin or Bose who already have products in the space. But they didn’t, and now the Eurocrats are telling Apple how to make software.

John Gruber also commented on Eric’s announcement post.

My advice would have been to return with just one watch. Make a decision: color or monochrome. I’d sort of lean toward black-and-white, to differentiate it from Apple Watch and other high-end smartwatches. They’re never going to out-color Apple on display quality, so why not go the other way and lean in on black-and-white utility and contrast?

Na. The colour e-ink is awesome. I’m not after a bright, saturated, colour display. Just a little interest and style to my watchfaces. Also, PebbleOS leans heavily into pastels, which will work great on this display.

Instead of arguing that “Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones”, lean into the ways that Pebble can be awesome because it isn’t an Apple Watch. 30-day battery life is awesome. I don’t think Apple Watch will ever offer that. Being able to run whatever apps — including watch faces — that you want on your own Pebble watch is awesome, and I know Apple Watch will never offer that. Lean into what Pebble watches can do that Apple Watches can’t. If the experience as a Pebble owner can be a lot better paired with an Android phone than an iPhone, lean into that. Show how much better it is on Android than iOS. Compete.

Complaining about Apple’s lack of interoperability definitely paused my Pebble purchase. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect it would be quite difficult to demonstrate the better experience on Android. Maybe replying to notifications, but like I said earlier, I’m more than happy to forgo this on my watch (in fact, I kind of wish that the colour version didn’t have a touch screen – the button only interface is so damn charming).

What this whole thing has taught me is that there’s a fundamental cultural gap separating iOS and Android users. Maybe Eric thinks that we’re upset about being in some sort of unescapable prison of an ecosystem, but we’re here happy and safe in our walled garden.

I’ve been interacting with quite a lot of Americans, Europeans, and Brits the last few days. I’ve learned two new things about the USA, and for once, neither comes from my typical sarcastic, antagonistic disposition toward “the land of the free”.

First, Americans share a common cultural temperament with Aussies, which is that they’re not afraid to call bullshit. They’re inclined to stand up for what’s right. Of course, this can cause problems, especially when the definition of “right” is disputed. But on the whole, it’s better than turning a blind eye to suffering and injustice under the auspices of manners and “mind your business”.

Second, American cities are very unsafe places right now. Houselessness has reached unprecedented heights, drug addiction afflicts a large proportion of the population, crime is up, and law enforcement is often either overwhelmed or restrained by policy.

This is all anecdotal, of course. I’ve gone from a place of gently teasing my boastful and confident American friends (call it Tall Poppy Syndrome), to genuinely feeling sorry, even worried, for them.

It could be good for G-d’s own “city on a hill” to be knocked down a peg or two, but I hope they can sort their shit out soon!

Beautiful national parks, though.

It’s pretty rare to find people who live an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle where there’s no Orthodox Jewish community. But I do.

Because I’m recognisably Jewish (I wear a kippah), I often encounter people who have questions and pre-conceptions about Judaism, which I’m more than happy to oblige.

There is one particular misconception about Judaism that I encounter time, and time again. For some reason, people seem to think Jews don’t drink alcohol.

Oh, but we do.

It’s customary to drink wine after Shabbat services, and many congregations have a custom to drink during services, too!

No holiday exemplifies this more than Purim. The Talmud in Megila 7b instructs us, seemingly, to drink until we are very drunk.

Rava said: A person is obligated to become intoxicated with wine on Purim until he is so intoxicated that he does not know how to distinguish between cursed is Haman and blessed is Mordecai.

Woah! Haman is the bad guy of the story, and Mordecai is the good guy. It’s like saying “drink until you can’t tell the difference between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader”. That’s a lotta grog.

The (let’s call it) dynamic relationship between Judaism and alcohol is problematic, especially given modern social problems related to alcoholism (a problem which Jews are by no means immune to).

Thankfully, this question was asked of Rabbi Chaim Ingram this week, and I wanted to share his response for two reasons.

1. Most of the readers to this blog are not Jewish, and I think this answer provides a great insight into the Jewish mind and culture.
2. There’s a lesson here beyond any questions of “how much to drink” that we can all learn from.

Rabbi Ingram directs us to the specific words used in the verse: “cursed is Haman”, and “blessed is Mordecai”. In Hebrew, they are: “אָרוּר הָמָן” (arur Haman) and “בָרוּךְ מָרְדֳּכַי” (barukh Mordechai).

Let’s take a quick detour to a seeming contradiction, just a dozen chapters apart, in Proverbs.

In Proverbs (11:10) it is stated:

When the righteous prosper the city exults;
When the wicked perish there are shouts of joy.

But in Proverbs (24:17) this is contradicted:

If your enemy falls, do not exult;
If he trips, let your heart not rejoice.

The contradiction resolves when you understand the difference between “the wicked”, and “your enemy”. Your enemy might be people with their own misconceptions, traumas, goals, and beliefs, which clash up against yours and cause friction.

But “the wicked” refers to something else. There’s a pure, unadulterated evil that exists in the world. When this evil is extinguished, we should celebrate! The removal of evil is the same as the triumph of good!

On Purim, we have drunk enough when we realise that arur Haman is the same as barukh Mordechai. When Haman (representing pure evil) is cursed, Mordechai (representing good) is blessed.

In an age where all moralities are often treated as equally valid, this lesson is more important than ever. Evil does exist, and removing it makes the world a better place.

Chag Purim Sameach!

My previous post was a little dense and academic. Sorry about that.

We’re not all educators, but we are all learners. Even though Ecological Dynamics was a little hard to parse, there’s some really helpful learning advice contained there. I’m going to sum it up here in a more casual tone.

And before you read this point I want you to pause. Think about something that you are trying to learn right now. As you continue through the concepts below, take the time to think about how you could apply them to your own learning journey.

---

The word “Constructivism” refers to a simple idea: Knowledge cannot be shared. It isn’t given, or taken, or picked up, or pulled down. Knowledge is Constructed.

We take ideas and influences and observations and reflections and experiences and questions (and sometimes even a little inspiration) and we bundle them all up into a sort of mental clay, and we use that to build our own Understanding. That’s how we learn.

That’s what I mean by Constructivism.

With that in mind, here are some practical tips for when you’re approaching a new skill or idea that you want to wrap your brain and body around.

1. Shake it Up

When you’re trying to acquire a new skill, one shortcut is to practice under a variety of conditions. Let’s say you want to get better at playing piano. You should do it in the morning, in the evening, on an electric keyboard, when you’re feeling blue, when you’ve got too much energy to sit still, and when you’ve had one too many glasses of wine. If you can, play on multiple instruments, in public and in private.

Or maybe you’re learning Spanish. You might mess with the medium (reading, speaking, writing), or the method (a group class, 1:1 zoom call, a book, duolingo, a tv show).

Regularly place your learning in new and unique contexts.

2. Keep it Real

Preference authentic learning modes. Everyone knows that the best way of learning a language is to go live in a country which speaks it. Because it’s real. It’s meaningful. The outcome of getting a duolingo question wrong is a red box and a sad sound. But in a real-life social interaction, the outcome is embarrassment! What could be worse!?

You won’t learn to surf in your backyard. You won’t learn guitar studying chord charts. You won’t learn to throw pottery by watching YouTube shorts. You won’t learn survival skills while camping in your backyard.

Regularly place your learning in authentic contexts.

3. Reflect → Retry Cycle

This one is simple to understand (I think we all know it intuitively) but hard to implement, at least for me. But oh boy, does it supercharge your build process.

Reflect!

Take the time to both record your practice, and then look back on it. It’s almost impossible to have an accurate concept of your practice in the moment. Observing your past work allows you to recognise the parts that are wrong, but also the parts that are almost, but not quite, right.

Learning to code? Revisit your project a month or two after it’s done, and review the code. Learning improvisational comedy? Record yourself speaking, then listen back to it. Learning to cook? Practice those chopping skills in front of a camera. Learning the periodic table? Try writing it out from memory, then check to see what you might have missed.

Then, once you’ve reflected, try again. Adjust your approach using whatever you gleaned during your self-observation.

Regularly give yourself opportunities to reflect on your learning, and integrate that into your practice.

4. Stretch

You could start at the very beginning. It’s a very good place to start. When you read you begin with ABC, when you sing you begin with Do-Re-Mi.

Or, you could throw away those old-school linear learning concepts, and jump right into the deep end!

It’s best to have a balance of both. Find a difficulty that feels easy, find a difficulty that stretches you a little, and also find one that’s way out of reach. Practice them all.

Shoot your baskets from the free-throw line. Shoot a three-pointer. Then shoot from half-court.

Play the bass line to Seven Nation Army, then play Another One Bits the Dust, and then, even though you can’t quite wrap your fingers around the notes yet, give Good Times Bad Times a shot.

Regularly modulate the difficulty of your learning.

---

If you look at any of the most successful education institutions (successful in terms of learning outcomes), you’ll see that these Constructivist ideas are at the core of their approach to learning.

So whatever you’re learning next, shake things up, keep it real, reflect, retry, and stretch yourself. And approach it with Curiosity (maybe my next post should be about Habits of Mind?). The more you practice this way, the more mental clay you’ll have to play with while you construct your mental model.

I was recently introduced the sports psychology methodology called Ecological Dynamics. It’s an approach to skill acquisition for physical activities which is becoming widely adopted by contemporary coaching practices. Elite coaches across the globe are leveraging these strategies to achieve remarkable success in top-tier sports.

I believe Ecological Dynamics can apply broadly to skill acquisition in fields beyond sports. In fact, I’d argue that it’s a direct reframing of Constructivism, a pedagogical movement which began way back in the 1920s (with every Education undergraduate’s favourite reference: Jean Piaget).

Let’s start by breaking it down.

Ecological: The study of living systems and the way they interact with their environment.

Dynamics: How patterns emerge and adapt over time.

Ecological Dynamics: The patterns that emerge when living systems interact with their environments.

In sports, this creates a framework for analysing the movements and behaviours of athletes across a broad range of conditions. Rather than focusing on a very specific skill and repeating it in isolation, players are put into new environments (often by surprise) that challenge their movement, adaptability, and decision-making. Then, they study the influence of behavioural and movement patterns on the successful completion of a goal.

This approach is founded on four main principles, which define Ecological Dynamics.

1. Functional variability: Intentional variations in the learning environment that encourage adaptability and exploration.
2. Representative learning: Authentic and contextually relevant experiences.
3. Attunement to affordances: Skill calibration through varied invitations to action
4. Nonlinear progression: Skill acquisition that is collected from a variety of sources, not from linear progression or memorisation.

---

---

We can apply these principles to skill acquisition outside of sports. As you’ll see, each Ecological Dynamics principle aligns with a Constructivist idea.

I’m not trying to say that modern coaching is uninspired or plagiarising, but to remind us as educators that these ideas really do work, yet often go ignored.

Functional variability

Rote memorisation may be common practice in traditional learning environments, but its long-term effectiveness has been long disproven. Expertise is achieved not by “perfect practice makes perfect”, but through functional variability, allowing adaptation to different conditions.

Students should be exposed to multiple problem-solving approaches, rather than a single rigid method. Play it fast, play it slow, play softy, loudly, staccato, legato, upside down and back to front.

Of course, this is already well established pedagogical practice. I came across constructivist styles of pedagogy through David H. Jonassen’s mindtools. I’ll quote him extensively here, as he’s the easiest Constructivist writer to read!

Constructivism proposes that learning environments should support multiple perspectives or interpretations of reality, knowledge construction, context-rich, experience-based activities.

Representative learning

Yet another case where the best practices and routinely skipped over. We know that the more contextually relevant the learning environment, the better the learning outcomes! So, why do we line children up in classroom rows and hand them workbooks!?

In Ecological Dynamics, realistic environments are essential for effectively observing and developing skills. To practice a skill in a complex environment the simulation should be directly analogous to the game-time conditions. This allows cognition, perception, and action from the practice context to successfully transfer to the heat of competition.

In Constructivism, we see an emphasis on authentic tasks, which immerse learners in meaningful, real-world challenges rather than abstract drills, fostering deeper understanding and transferable skills.

Authentic tasks are those that have real-world relevance and utility, that integrate those tasks across the curriculum, that provide appropriate levels of complexity, and that allow students to select appropriate levels of difficulty or involvement.

Attunement to affordances

Affordances refer to the possibilities for action that an environment offers. In both Ecological Dynamics and Constructivism, learners develop skills by recognising and responding to these opportunities. Rather than following a prescriptive set of steps, they calibrate their responses through repeated interactions with a dynamic environment, refining their intuition and judgment over time (attunement).

In sports, this means athletes learn to perceive and exploit opportunities within a game—finding gaps in a defensive line, adjusting their positioning based on an opponent’s movement, or intuitively reading a teammate’s next move. The key is not rigid instruction but an adaptive, exploratory process that is refined with practice.

In Constructivist education, attunement to affordances means that students refine their understanding by actively engaging with their learning environment and adjusting their approach in response to real challenges. Instead of absorbing abstract knowledge in isolation, they develop intuition through hands-on exploration, experimentation, and feedback.

A young writer refines their craft not by rote grammar exercises but by reading their work, and iterating on it, recognising what makes their writing effective.

Monitoring involves checking on performance during execution to make sure that the processes are implemented correctly. Evaluation is an iterative process of constantly examining whether the pieces fit together, and if activities are going in the direction of reaching the goal…

Looking ahead means learning the structure of a sequence of operations, identifying areas where errors are likely, choosing a strategy that will reduce the possibility of error… Looking back means detecting errors previously made, keeping a history of what has been done and what should come next, and assessing the reasonableness of the immediate outcome.

Nonlinear pedagogy

Traditional education often assumes that learning follows a straight, predictable path. First, master foundational skills in isolation, then gradually build towards complex applications. This model treats knowledge as something to be stacked neatly, one block at a time. But real learning doesn’t work that way. Skills develop through cycles of trial and error, feedback, and adaptation, not through rigid, linear progression.

In Ecological Dynamics, athletes refine their abilities by engaging with ever-changing constraints rather than following a fixed training sequence. A basketball player doesn’t first perfect a jump shot in controlled conditions before facing a defender. They learn to shoot while adjusting for pressure, movement, and game dynamics. The complexity isn’t stripped away; it’s part of the learning process from the beginning.

The same applies to Constructivist education. A student learning a new language through conversation isn’t drilling vocabulary in isolation but responding dynamically to real linguistic interactions.

Determinism and predictability will not help us to become effective learners in the real world. Instructional design theories need to treat learning and instruction as open systems that receive input from many sources, such as individual differences, maturation, emotional states, and social-economic, cultural, and demographic factors, etc.

---

Ecological Dynamics and Constructivist education share a simple truth: learning happens best through real experiences, not rigid drills. In both sports and academics, skills develop through adaptability, exploration, and interaction with a dynamic environment. The best learning isn’t linear; it’s a process of finding meaning, seeking feedback, and adaptation.

The dragon is closing in. The cleric is out of spell slots. The rogue is unconscious. The barbarian is bleeding out, and the wizard has one last chance to pull off something, anything, that might turn this around.

The dice clatter across the table.

Don’t we all live for moments like this? We’re drawn to the thrill, the drama, the high-stakes decisions. But Dungeons & Dragons isn’t just about rolling dice and fighting monsters. It’s about problem solving, making hard decisions, and figuring out who you are when the odds are stacked against you. We could all use a little practice with that, but none of us more so than teenagers.

One of the biggest things D&D does for teenagers is it gives them space to practice being different versions of themselves. For one girl in our group, that meant learning to speak up. She’s naturally a bit quiet, bookish. She might come across as shy the first time you meet her. But through her D&D character, who she decided was bolder and more opinionated, she found a way to try that out. Slowly, that practiced confidence began making its way into real life. It turns out, when you spend enough time standing up to merchant princes and red wizards, standing up to your friends doesn’t feel so intimidating.

For another player, the game became a way to break free from overthinking. He’s a super-considerate kid, sometimes to his detriment. He’ll weigh every possible move, afraid to make the wrong choice. But in D&D, indecision can get you killed (or at least leave you standing there while the giant flying crocodile eats your friends). So he had to learn to make a call and roll with the consequences. It’s still a work in progress, but practicing taking action really helps.

Peter Gray, in his book Free to Learn, argues that play isn’t just something kids do for fun, it’s how they’re wired to learn. Through play, children develop problem-solving skills, social awareness, and resilience. When kids immerse themselves in imaginative worlds, they aren’t just pretending; they’re experimenting, testing boundaries, and learning how to navigate complex situations. Role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons tap into that instinct, providing a structured yet open-ended space where teenagers can explore ideas, practice decision-making, and build confidence.

And just like in life, there’s no guaranteed success. One session, the party found themselves in an unwinnable Kobayashi Maru of a fight. But instead of giving up, one player took the lead and negotiated. The enemy still won the day, but the party managed a minor concession that softened the blow. It wasn’t a win, but it was something. Learning to extract small successes from failure is a skill that’ll serve them well far beyond the game table.

Psychologist Lev Vygotsky talked about the “zone of proximal development”—the sweet spot where learning happens just beyond what a person can do alone, but within reach with the right support. D&D lives in that space. It challenges players just enough, giving them a place to stretch their social, strategic, and problem-solving muscles in a way that feels safe and fun.

And the best part? They’re just playing a game, arguing over battle plans, and making terrible puns about their Tabaxian jungle guide. Along the way they’re building confidence, adaptability, teamwork, resilience, that they’ll take with them long after the final boss has been vanquished.

Because, in the end, the real magic of Dungeons & Dragons isn’t in the dice or the dungeon master. It’s in the way it changes the player.

Soundtrack for this post.

What Satie is teaching me.

1. Fast and quiet

It’s very natural to play allegro forte, fast and loud. It’s much harder to play allegro piano, fast and quiet. Just because my days are busy, quickly moving from one task to another, that doesn’t necessitate stress. It’s possible to play quickly and quietly. So I endeavour to move through my day with calm alacrity.

2. Crossover is inevitable

That top note of a right-hand chord is occasionally played on the left. Sometimes the right hand must trespass into the left-hand range. No two areas of life are ever completely separate. Often, contexts will cross into each other. Friends from work become friends out of work, and vice-versa. The goal is a harmonious balance, not separation. Systems that confine life into discrete taxonomies are flawed.

3. Big leaps take practice

Jumping over an octave into a complex chord takes a bit of practice. It’s easy to transition when one task is closely related to the next. Large changes in context are much harder. At first, context switching is draining. But with dedicated practice, it’s possible to improve (though I’m still not very good at it).

In order to, maybe, reach a wider audience, I’ve decided to change my position on social media.

I recently ran into an X profile which declared itself “write only”. My plan is to create social profiles that do the same, auto-posting words and clips from this blog.

l-w-------

I’ve chosen four networks: X, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. These are all primarily text-based platforms, which suits my blogging style.

I’ve chosen to avoid Instagram and Facebook. Instagram because my goal is to drive traffic to this site, and Insta doesn’t contain any clickable links. Facebook because organic reach is extremely weak, unless you’re on there actively engaging with the communities (which you couldn’t pay me to do).

I tried out a few “Audiogram” products, and even an open-source project, for sharing a more visually engaging post. Ultimately, though, it was more trouble than its worth.

I’ve been experimenting with workflow.

After looking into Buffer, Later, Crowdfire, Dlvr.it, Social Champ, and a whole heap more, I decided to roll my own. I don’t want any monthly fees, thank you very much.

First, I created a new Safari profile called Social, which I keep logged into the four services I’m posting to (I’ll stay signed out on my default profile).

Then, I created an Applescript which opens a new Safari window using the Social profile. It continues by opening four new tabs with the URLs for the “compose” screen on each network. The text is pre-filled, using the title, URL, and description from my RSS feed.

The only manual step is to simply click through each tab, make any slight adjustments to the wording on each platform, and press “Post”.

I figure that this is a way to have my cake and eat it, too. I’m unlikely to gain traction on these networks, but who knows? At the very least, if one of these networks are part of your regular check-in, following me there is an easy way to stay up-to-date on my latest posts.

There are now five ways to stay up to date with Digging for Fire: RSS, Podcast, Email, Social Media, or a plain old browser bookmark.