NextDraft & Dave Pell

Six months or so ago I came across an article that directed me towards NextDraft. I looked at the single page, decided against an email subscription and then downloaded the iPad app.

I have read it almost every day since. Each new issue contains ten pithy news items, filled with puns and asides but all very serious underneath. Dave Pell, the self-designated managing editor of the internet, curates them, and each page comes with a link or two to original sources.

“Who that Dave Pell?”, I wondered in Bizarro fashion. According to an answer on Quora,

Dave says he is a former school teacher, and is currently an angel investor. His father fought with the partisans in WW2, and came to the US after the war, becoming a successful real estate developer; he wrote a book about his exploits. Dave is very accessible, and responds personally to e-mail.

I also found a post in PostStatus in which Dave Pell explains why he has now decided to launch NextDraft as a wordpress.com site. Somewhere in the interview he says

I do it all from one highly customized WordPress installation developed in partnership with Andrew Norcross of Reaktiv Studios. When I press publish, my content is parsed for the web, for my iOS apps, and sent to email subscribers via the MailChimp API.

I want a workflow like that.

Time to switch my attention back to this from that.