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Get copyright for web content

Guide to make sure you have the proper rights to use content on the web. When do you need rights and what sort of copyrights are there.

Review The Founders

Review of the book The Founders by Jimmy Soni. On the origins of PayPal and it's founding team.

Kobo Clara crashes and freezes

My Kobo Clara crashes and freezes. How can this be solved and prevented?

Playing in the interactive sandbox

The intuitive digital experience of an interactive sandbox.

Four professional writer roles for the web

Taking a wider view on writer roles for the web. This article guides you to understand writing roles, or, if you are a leader, to find the right writer for your team.

Content creation is an art, marketing technology is a craft.

Today I had a great insight into the contents of my blog and actually about my professional life. Content creation is an art, marketing technology is a craft. And together they are hard to beat.

Why choose Wix to manage your valuable content?

Hosting and managing your valuable content is a far-reaching choice. When is Wix an option?

What a silk map learned me about content

I create content for the web, but what is content? I tell a story about a silk map to explain the word and concept of content.

Three ways to enrich your website with top photos

Where can I find suitable images for a website, blog, landing page or social media campaign?

Plagiarism or copyright infringement

When is copying text plagiarism, and when is it an infringement on copyright? I made a rookie mistake and corrected it.

Review The Cryptopians

In clear, non-technical language, Laura Shin takes you in her book The Cryptopians through the history of the legendary Ethereum blockchain.

Lead Magnets and privacy law

What are the rules for Lead Magnets within the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?

The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby

If you are interested in the world of Venture Capital, Start-Ups and Silicon Valley, you simply must read this book. A well-written book with a very thorough foundation.

Clear writing for your webpage

How do I write for a web page? Collect notes and create keywords. The next step is to come up with a working title and find my full recipe in this article.

Writing recipe for your website

Start writing for a website? I use a little trick to get going and get things clear. I brief myself as a copywriter.

English editor correcting the American translator

When automated translation is part of your writing workflow, make sure to align the tools to be consistent in terms of language and spelling variants.

Borrow or buy? Your own Linktree

When you create or produce content, make your own Micro Landing Page instead of using Linktree.

The outside of a web page

Unseen is unloved. This certainly applies to the outside of a web page. But does a web page have an outside? A short introduction to Open Graph.

Portrait AND landscape

Tips for producing your own images for a webpage with social media campaign. In short: shoot landscape and portrait.

Pixels per Inch. Per inch?

The physical properties of a screen, that is the number of pixels are not measured on a surface but as a line. Pixels per Inch (PPI)

Stay safe online with VPN

VPN is vital for your digital resilience. A tunnel to free information. Find the basics in this article.

Writing for Landing Pages

My experiences writing and creating landing pages for your new customers

From Kobo to Twitter in 18 seconds

Quick iPhone workflow for quoting text on your e-reader and share to Twitter.

Blog writing with Ulysses

A easy to use and fun workflow for writing, translating and publishing blog articles. On Mac and iPhone. I will use paper, Ulysses, LanguageTool, Deepl and Ghost.

Size a stack of images to the same dimensions

A stack of images with a random height and width that all need to go to the same dimensions. And you cannot use CSS cover option. Get out the digital scissors and maginifying glass.

Double security (2FA) within Apple ecosystem

I found out that Apple has finally embraced One Time Passwords and integrated them into MacOS and iOS. I show how 2FA works and how it looks.

The One Time Password (2FA)

I don't use security I can't understand myself. At the same time we need to be resilient on Cyber Security and so I took a principal look at Two Factor Authentication and the One Time Password in particular.

HEIC, a blood type for images

What is .HEIC and why did Apple make it the most difficult file format? Great question and here you find answers and proper workflows to go to more common file types like JPG.

No code automations

Personal experiences with no code automations, API's and webhooks. How to string together modular application to create a complete and dynamic website.

Building an audience for my blog

Personal journey in building an audience for my blog. SEO, republishing and social media. My latest experiment: Revue.

The Attraction of a Lead Magnet

Attracting online leads for your business or project with a lead magnet.

Electronic paper and digital ink explained

Why are electronic paper and digital ink so gentle to the eyes and why is it that these screen consume so little energy.

Website revamp

I revamped the design of my Ghost Blog and I explain the choices. Also I have gone from self-hosted to Ghost Pro.

Digging into Web3

Web3 is not so much a fact yet but more of a vision and perhaps best explained by looking at what Web1 and Web2 entailed.

Portrait and landscape images on social media

How do I avoid images being grossly mutilated when posting portrait or landscape images on social media?

Graymail, what is it?

Graymail is (not/almost) spam. Let me explain it briefly, it can help you optimize your marketing reach.

Mint your first Non-Fungible Token (NFT)

NFT’s are pretty overwhelming if you are outside to the crypto crowd. I wrote a practical step by step record of how I minted my first NFT.

Make Instagram posts from your computer

Instagram posts from the browser: Small step for many, giant leap for photographers with an archive.

Google’s AMP is dead

No one likes to eat at the same table with someone who is known for stealing from your plate. And that was exactly what was happening with Google AMP. A short obituary. Google AMP Google AMP is an abbreviation for Accelerated Mobile Pages. The aim of this technology is to

From Typewriter to the Matrix

Follow the white rabbit down the hole. From Stephen King's memoir of the craft to computer coding and the Matrix film. A short article on single-spaced-fonts.

Site Search explained

Working with search for a website is fun. It is a bit like collecting mushrooms from the wild. Same three steps: collect, improve, serve. Let me explain with examples.

Web analytics made simple

How I try to ditch Google Analytics for Plausible. Cookie free, simple to use and speedy. And find out why this is harder than you expect.

Three principles of storytelling marketing

Find your theme, create story arc and bring stakes into play.

iOS 15 Visual Look Up: The needle and the haystack

The new iOS15 Visual Lookup finds words in the tiniest of corners. A story on how I searched for SOUL and found it in a little Amsterdam bookstore.

Free spirits publish with Ghost

If you want to stay independent as a digital producer claiming your online spot is crucial. With Ghost you are in a good position to build, grow and nurture this spot.

Micro content. Small text, big impact.

How small bits of text called micro content explain and support your marketing message.

A Story Tellers tale

How StoryBrand inspired me to professionally use Story Telling. I guess when you put my DNA under the microscope you would read a story. From the side of my mother I come from a family of story tellers. For long I associated telling a story with entertainment and the realms

Writing my first StoryBrand

Locked myself up in the Swiss mountains to focus on writing a StoryBrand for a client. StoryBrand is such a simple and powerful method. Dry facts come to life with shaping a story. The audience and the message become clear and vivid. I am in the flow and will make

Semantic web and the knowledge graph

The semantic web is not to be confused with web3 (as I did). The semantic web is about describing the web of connections between ideas and objects.

Read Medium articles on Kobo

A quick how-to for reading Medium articles on the Kobo Clara ereader. Easier for the eyes and a less noisy device.

Does my business need a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

DXP is short for Digital Experience Platform. A short introduction into this recent class of software that I describe as a single-vendor Martech stack.

The function and importance of metadata

When you scale any digital solution you probably will need to work with metadata. Meta means something like higher and beyond and is a rather invisible abstraction. It is information, in the form of data, about other information.

Live video streaming, a primer

One of the big changes, transformations, of the COVID pandemic is the rise of digital video. Not only the consumption of these video’s through On Demand platforms like YouTube and Netflix but also the actual personal production. Once I had the basics right, the proper software and tools I

Aspect ratio and orientation of digital images

Learn the principle of aspect ratio's, it will serve you later when you put the images to use. And the same for orientation. Will it be a portrait or a landscape image?

Resolutions for screens and images

The exact meaning of resolution in a digital context is fuzzy. I will list the different uses of the word and resolve confusion. This article will help you find the sweet spot to sharp looking images and proper file size.

The miracle of your screen

How the three colors of light in your screen can be made visible and how we are able see a large part of our world through this little wonder.

Record and edit a professional screencast

My personal aim was to have a Screencast set up where I can share actions on my screen, comment the actions, both with spoken instructions and visual pointers and distribute it on a modest scale. The secondary requirements were to have clean and pleasant audio and video with a technical

High Dynamic Range (HDR) video

What is High Dynamic Range and how can I put this technology to use for better images and videos.

Record and stream HDR video

I explained how you can view the colourful HDR video's [https://www.hoeijmakers.net/high-dynamic-range-hdr/] on your own screens. But how can you produce an HDR video yourself and make it available to an audience? Record HDR What made me dig into producing HDR  video was a casual remark by

Audio compression and codecs

a primer on Digital Audio for streaming music to a device such as a mobile phone or wireless headphone. It is intended for the digital producer and the interested consumer.

Audio ecosystem examples

Examples of audio ecosystems. The interconnected parts and the type of hardware and compression in the flow from digital stream to ear.

Digital audio explained with stacks of paper

Different aspects of Digital Audio explained and demo’ed.

Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI)

How do I know the email you send me is from you? There is a lot of fraud and spoofing when it comes to email. There is no clear, visual sign that the sender is doing everything to protect the integrity of their emails. A new initiative called Brand Indicators

Measure Page Speeds with Core Web Vitals

How speedy a page loads looks like a simple question. You clock the time it takes in controlled situation and there you go. The reality is a bit more complex. You want to track and analyse the experience of real users. There are loads of different browsers, network speeds, devices,

Your Ghost blog self-hosted on Digital Ocean

I have done some exploring on static sites. I was looking for an optimal set up to post articles and create pages. Here is a summary of how I arrived at the technology set up for this site: Ghost, Digital Ocean and Cloudflare. Ghost on Digital Ocean and fronted by

Using Squarespace for a year

A relationship of a year is a great time to evaluate. Puppy love is over, is there real love?

Optimize Squarespace for Search Engines

Making your Squarespace site optimal for Search Engines like Google offers you a number of benefits. It will result in better ranking and so probably more qualified visits. There is a big overlap between an optimized site and being accessible and usable. So better rendering and display on a larger

Create a website within 60 minutes

What are the options if you need a website very quickly? Just say within an hour or so.

For images on the web stick with JPG and PNG. For now.

Want to keep it safe? Just go with the flow and choose JPG or PNG.

Bias in Twitter’s automated cropping

Somewhere in Twitter an algorithm decides what is deemed striking or important in your oddly sized images. Saliency makes the automated cropping function choose. But can saliency be biased? I was working on a story on cropping today and then this tweet [https://twitter.com/bascule/status/1307440596668182528?s=21]

WebP and AVIF, the challengers of JPG

WebP is more or less fully support, AVIF not. I build a quick support check for your own browser. Find out where to transform from AVIF to JPG.

Four ways to build your website or blog

This post helps you choose the best path to sustainable online succes. Showing up online is one thing, staying on top another. For you to make the right choice I lay out four different paths.

An explanation and demo of App Clips

App Clips have the potential to shake up the digital and real world. Here is a quick primer on how it works. And you can run it yourself.

Share Kobo e-books with your partner

A step-by-step guide on how to share your Kobo e-books with your partner and other family members.

Load free ebooks on a Kobo using the iPhone

Download free ebooks on your iPhone and put them on your Kobo without the need for a computer. A life saver on the road.