Welcome to Fresh van Root newsletter #61. My favorite piece of content in this issue is the story about an NFT crypto conferene in NYT. And Glide Pages is taking a fresh approach to building your personal dashboard based on your datasheet.
For all new subscribers, here’s what this newsletter is about: I am exploring content and apps at the intersection of marketing, productivity, content creation, and social media. My bi-weekly newsletter is a curated and concise summary of that exploration. Stay fresh. Rolf
🧠 Hand-Picked Content
Mainstreaming NFTs (Article, 10min)
5000 people gathered in NYC for a conference about Nonfungible Token. And this whole article hilariously describes the scene of early adopters, speculators, crypto nerds. While I am interested in the underlying technologies, the hype about NFTs is just abnormal at the moment. Maybe this conference – that had a 3000 people waitlist – is the ultimate sign for the peak of the bubble. We will see. More
Posting Just For Follower Growth (Blog, 5min)
Find your niche, and purely focus on one topic, and the followers will come. But that approach takes the fun out of social media, and follower count is just a vanity metric. This blog post perfectly sums up the current trend on Twitter. But the same applies to LinkedIn too, in my opinion. More
What Does It Take To Find Likeminded People Online? (Blog, 5min)
A recipe based on real-world experience for finding friends online. Where should you hang out, does scheduling social media posts help? A view from someone building in public for two years now. I can very much relate to the experience shared in this post. More
Rethinking Webdesign for Mobile (Blog 10min)
The design process for websites most often starts with the desktop experience, and at the end of a project, we devote little time to testing it. The result is just a stacked version of the desktop experience, ignoring the user experience. This blog post gives illustrative examples of how to approach different layout problems when bringing a desktop experience for mobile. More
To Much Junk in Space (Article, 7min)
Space is getting crowded, and collisions will create more debris in space, which will, in turn, lead to more collisions, and so on. This is called the “Kessler Syndrome”. More
🛠️ Tools & Apps & Services
Turn Your Data Sheet Into An App
With Glide Pages, you can create your own dashboard or directory in minutes. The concept isn’t new, but it’s really easy to do it without prior experience using this no-code app builder. One Minute Screencast | More
Notion Clone Announced by Microsoft
When it comes to developing innovative web apps, Microsoft does not come to mind. Their Office web apps are emulated versions of the desktop client apps. Now Microsoft noticed that Notion is quite successful with their workspace app. At a conference, Microsoft now announced a very similar product to Notion. More
Record Podcasts In High Quality Remotely
Squadcast is a web app specializing in recording high-quality audio for podcasts. It comes with specific features that make it possible to improve the audio quality compared to doing the same via Zoom. Demo Video | More
Virtual Content Assistant
This tool claims to help you generate marketing copy from just a headline. I am repeating myself on this, but I think these types of tools are cool for idea generation, but not for creating content that is ready to publish. What I like about this service called Katteb is that the pricing is “creator-friendly”. More
📣 Fresh van Root
New Freshblog out: Collect Emails On Your Twitter Profile
I have written a detailed how-to about connecting a Twitter profile to a newsletter service. My Twitter thread on the topic was quite a success. More
🔗 One More Link
Sony Walkman Commercial From 1983
Ahead of the competition back then. Also in terms of advertising. More
Pictures Of Cats
There are many of them, but this one stands out. More