Smarterware

My Interview on The Pipeline
April 6th, 2010, 1 comment

Almost every interview I do these days for podcasts or magazines involves the inevitable question: "What are your best productivity tricks?" That's why it was so refreshing to do an interview with Dan Benjamin on his excellent show, The Pipeline, and never have to answer that question. Instead Dan wanted to chat about my progression from a day coder and no-name night blogger back in 2001 to a "pro blogger," about what made Lifehacker a success (hint: it's not talent, it's a big platform and LOTS of posts over the course of years), about self-publishing books, and about what I think an aspiring blogger these days has to do to make blogging a full-time job. Good times. Check it out: The Pipeline 10: Gina Trapani

Flashbake Version Control for Creative Writers
April 29th, 2009

Over the last few months my programmer self has gotten sucked into a full-on love affair with source version control system Git and a Git host, GitHub. Explaining Git to non-coder humans is almost impossible, but this morning I gave it a try. Over at Lifehacker my writer self reviewed Flashbake, scripts that offer writers automated version control using Git. What I love about Flashbake is that it automatically includes ambient information about the weather, your Twitter status, and what music you've been listening to into each version's commit message, so you can reconstruct your entire creative process with full snapshots and a log of what you'd been doing and hearing at the time. Here's the full story: Flashbake Automates Version Control for (Nerdy) Writers. (Here's my writing repository at GitHub.)