Things I Thought Were Cool This Week – 6/18/2023 Edition

Welcome back to the second edition of Things I Thought Were Cool This Week. A weekly blog posts of things I learned this week that I thought were cool.

Spotify Blend

A friend sent an invite for me to match him on Spotify Blend. This feature has been on Spotify for 2 years now but I had no clue. What this app does it is it matches common music between you and a friend, and then fills in the playlist with songs from each other’s libraries that match the primary theme. So for example, we both listen to a lot of rock and metal. So we had a lot of matches in that section but I am a card carrying Swiftie so a couple of T-Swizzle songs were added in. Super cool app.

Built in RSS Feeds in WordPress

I received a question this week on the first edition of “Things I Thought Were Cool” on how one could subscribe to these posts. I don’t have a very specific answer but I did learn that WordPress just has baked in RSS Feeds. For real..go to andrewoconnor.tech/feed and take a look. I didn’t do anything to make that happen. It’s just there. I learned this was standard in WordPress, and probably has been for some time. So add my blog to your favorite RSS reader 🙂

Phones in Schools

I recognize I am quickly becoming Abe Simpson. Not-very-old-man-still-yells-at-cloud. Here is an example of that. Jonathan Haidt posted an article this week “The Case for Phone Free Schools” and I was absolutely floored. I wasn’t in high school that long ago but there was a fairly strict no phones in class policy. Which, many of us routinely violated but the policy was still there. As phones evolved, I suppose many of the in-school use cases may have as well BUT, I felt it was worth sharing this article on how phones in school can affect the mental health of students. I have a much longer…and unorganized…post in my head about smartphones. One of these days I’ll get it together but the summary is this, they’re not great for us.

Definitely check out the article. Even if you don’t have kids, I think you may find it fascinating.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading 🙂