More Engst

I’m a little behind on my podcast listening, so I just heard Gabe Weatherhead’s interview with Adam Engst today. It’s very good. In addition to the nominal topic of digital publishing, Adam also gets into the value of banner ads, mailing lists, and knowing your customers. I thought his comments on the success of Marco Arment’s The Magazine were especially insightful, possibly because they’re exactly what I’ve been thinking.

You’ll also hear the genesis of this post on his recent problems with Pages and BBEdit, a post I commented on earlier this week.

Speaking of BBEdit, he and Gabe do a lot of that. They persuaded me to get a copy of Glenn Fleishman’s Take Control of BBEdit, a book I didn’t think I needed because it doesn’t get into topics like codeless language modules or controlling BBEdit through AppleScript. But as I use BBEdit more, I realize that my real deficiencies are not in the advanced stuff, but in the basics. There’s an old joke that you can write Fortran in any language—I think I’ve been editing in BBEdit as if it were TextMate.