Building a knowledge base An Article by Will Darwin www.willdarwin.com What is a commonplace?Curiosity spurred onInformation remixHow to be a genius commonplaceknowledge
Blogging with Version Control An Article by Will Darwin willdarwin.com I’ve been musing for a while now on the way blog posts are typically presented—in reverse chronological order. This format has never truly made sense and does not reflect the way good writing and thinking happens. ...The main issue with the ‘pile’ system is that this post is eventually buried beneath more recent pieces of writing; there is no incentive for revisiting or updating the work. Even worse, if an author does decide to unearth the piece and make some major changes, those who read the original piece are not made aware of these alterations. The sorting order is static. bloggingwritinginformation
How to Think About Notes An Article by Will Darwin www.willdarwin.com Thinking in terms of outputs Maggie Appleton's Digital Garden notetakingwritinginformation
Essential vs. nice to have Customers have trouble distinguishing between essential features and those that are just "nice to have." Examples of the latter class: those arbitrarily overlapping windows suggested by the uncritically but widely adopted desktop metaphor; and fancy icons decorating the screen display, such as antique mailboxes and garbage cans that are further enhanced by the visible movement of selected items toward their ultimate destination. These details are cute but not essential, and they have a hidden cost. / Increased complexity results in large part from our recent penchant for friendly user interaction. I've already mentioned windows and icons; color, gray-scales, shadows, pop-ups, pictures, and all kinds of gadgets can easily be added. Niklaus Wirth, A Plea for Lean Software Menus, Metaphors and Materials: Milestones of User Interface Designlittlebigdetails interfacesux