It's been quiet of late on my blog and for a good reason. While my daily posts have ground to an almost complete stop, I do have a good reason for it.

Today I'm officially (and nervously) announcing a micro-service of mine, DailyMuse. So what is DailyMuse? Well, let me first take you back to a post that Patrick Rhone made on App.net.

Maybe something like this exists but, if not, someone should build it: I want to type a bunch of things into a place and then have that place pick a thing at random and email it to me once a day.

I made a note of this post with the intention of building something, but I never got round to it. Patrick's tweet in October was finally the nudge that I needed.

"Making cool stuff for our friends that they would like" sounds like a solid, successful, business plan to me.

— on App.net by Patrick Rhone

Now while I don't know Patrick personally, having not met him in person, he is someone who is a great influencer on how I work. His books are great source of reflection and I've long been a fan and user of his Dash/Plus system. So having established that I'm not friends with Patrick in the traditional sense, I still wanted to make this "thing" for him.

Having toyed with a few ideas before the end of last year, I started putting something more concrete together that Patrick could use. After a couple of weeks I had the basics of the service working. After a brief introduction by email, Patrick became the first user of DailyMuse.

That's the story behind the idea, but what is it? I think it can be best summed up as this:

DailyMuse is your own personal email subscription. You're the curator and audience.

Using DailyMuse you can collect quotes, phrases, lists and links in your own collection of snippets. DailyMuse then sends you one of these snippets at random, once a day.

Snippets are written in plain text or using Markdown. You can tell DailyMuse to pick a snippet at random or to pick from a queue of previously unsent snippets.

Receving the same snippet on consecutive days doesn't offer much value, so I added the ability to pick from snippets that hadn't previously been sent. There is still a lot to be done with it, but with the it's core value in place and working, it didn't make sense to hold on to it and never ship it.

So if getting the right start to the day sounds like your thing, and you don't mind curating your own collection of content to start the day with, then why not give DailyMuse a try? It's free for 30 days after which you can subscribe for $2 per month or £20 per year.