blogging

Collections of articles, links, and other material from around the web, relevant to software design and engineering.

Is it the notetaking system that’s helping you think more clearly? Or is it the act of writing that forces you to clarify your thoughts?

Is it the complex interlinked web of notes that helps you get new ideas? Or is it all the reading you’re doing to fill that notetaking app bucket?

Is all of this notetaking work making you smarter? Or is it just indirectly forcing you into deliberate, goalless practice?

The idea of “evergreen” content naturally contrasts with its opposite. I am going to call that non-evergreen content “deciduous” because I wasn’t bullied enough as a child.

I have appropriated from Brian Eno and others the distinction between architecture and gardening, and have described my blog as a kind of garden. But lately I’ve been revisiting the architecture/gardening distinction and I have come to think that there is something architectural about writing a blog, or can be – but not in the sense of a typical architectural project, which is designed in advanced and built to specifications. Rather, writing a blog over a period of years is something like building the Watts Towers.

Simon Rodi didn’t have a plan, didn’t even have a purpose: he just started building. His work was sustained and extended by bricolage, the acquisition and deployment of found objects – and not just any objects, but objects that the world had discarded as useless, as filth. You put something in here, then something else, you discover, fits there … over time you get something big and with a discernible shape. Not the regular shape envisioned in architectural drawings, but nevertheless something that can be pleasing or at least interesting to look at – an organic and irregular shape. A geometry of irregular forms.

A primary motivation for creating my Stream was the paralysing sense that a blog post needed appropriate length and weight. Since switching to Kirby, there’s relatively little friction to posting, but there’s definite friction in evaluating a post’s worth to the reader. I’d think to myself, “I’d like to write something about that, but I’ll have to come up with all sorts of extra stuff and dressing, and it’ll take all afternoon.”

And so, I was increasingly aware that I was letting many interesting or essential thoughts go undocumented, allowing them to drift from memory, or exist only on social media, likely to one day evaporate. I’ve become more and more interested in the human desire to document, and it’s something I’ve always valued, so I needed to find a solution that I could entirely control and own. That solution was my Stream.

I hadn't realized that Medium had made JavaScript a requirement to be able to read any Medium post - I'd had JS disabled for ages on Medium just because of all the extra cruft they added.

But now, without JS, you only get the first few lines of content, and the rest is loaded entirely with JS - which is...stupid.

Scribe fixes all that and focuses entirely on the author's content.

Why Would I Want to Use This?

• You believe in an open web
• You believe more in the author than the platform
• You don't like the reading experience that Medium provides
• You object to Medium's extortionist business tactics
• You're concerned about how Medium uses your data
• Other reasons

A rule of thumb is that the importance of a blog in your feed reader is inversely proportional to their posting cadence. Prioritise the blogs that post only once a month or every couple of weeks over those that post every day or multiple times a day...Building up a large library of sporadically updated blogs is much more useful and much easier to keep up with than trying to keep up with a handful of aggregation sites every day.

Eschew anything beyond writing the content of a post. No art direction. No social media imagery. No comments. No webmentions. No analytics...Imagine stripping away everything in the way of writing until the only thing staring you back in the face is a blinking cursor and an empty text file. That’ll force you to think about writing.

...[And] write for you, not for others. And if you can’t think of what to “write”, document something for yourself and call it writing.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the mystery of blogging, it’s that the stuff you think nobody will read ends up with way more reach than anything you write thinking it will be popular.

So write about what you want, not what you think others want, and the words will spill out.

1. Own your domain and use simple technology
2. Never change the technology
3. Write something on a schedule

I think the whostyle makes a few arguments. Among them:

• Text is more than a string of character codes. Its design matters, typography and layout alike; these things support (or subvert!) its affect, argument, and more.
• The web should be more colorful and chaotic, along nearly every dimension. The past five years have brought a flood of new capabilities, hugely expressive — let’s use them!
• Quoting is touchy, and anything you can do to cushion it with respect and hospitality is a plus.

An audacious attempt to reshape blogging, to see where it can go next!

Podcasts and video have really taken over - to the extent that it feels like reading may be falling behind. Can we enhance text and imagery on the Web? Try to give blogging new life?

Digital gardening is the Domestic Cozy version of the personal blog. It's less performative than a blog, but more intentional and thoughtful than our Twitter feed. It wants to build personal knowledge over time, rather than engage in banter and quippy conversations.

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.

A personal site offers a dedicated place to experiment across the entire tech-stack; not a deliverable for a client that is handed over and then never touched by me again. A personal site is a place to try out that new API, see what can be done with CSS, truly discover what the Web can be.

There was a time when owning digital space seemed thrilling, and our personal sites motivated us to express ourselves. There are signs of a resurgence, but too few wish to make their digital house a home.

Use feeds to subscribe to websites and get the latest content in one place.

Feeds put you in control. It’s like subscribing to a podcast, or following a company on Facebook. You don’t need to pay or hand over your email address. And you get the latest content without having to visit lots of sites, and without cluttering up your inbox. Had enough? Unsubscribe from the feed.

You just need a special app called a newsreader.

This site explains how to get started.

This webring is an attempt to inspire artists & developers to build their own website and share traffic among each other.

The inverse-chronological colly on the front page is exactly what I didn’t want to end up with. I have tried my damnedest to keep everything on this site as temporally neutral as I can make it. I even intentionally leave the dates off the documents. Temporality only matters if you’ve already read everything and you want to see what’s new or changed, like if you’ve subscribed to a feed. Which is exactly what that is on the front page.

My sense is that RSS is having a mini resurgence. People are getting wary of the social media platforms and their rapacious appetite for data. We’re getting fatigued from notifications; our inboxes are overflowing. And people are saying that maybe, just maybe, RSS can help.

Quotebacks brings structured discourse to blogs and personal websites.

Quotebacks makes it easy to reference content and create dialogue with other sites by turning snippets of text into elegant, self-contained blockquote components.

I still believe in a Kindle/Analogue-esque device that, within it, contains an operating system that is half Patreon, half Substack, half Instapaper.

I think of this as the Republic of Newsletters writ large—The OmniBlog—where writers can publish their work and folks can subscribe via RSS but with a Coil-esque payment system built in and preloaded onto a physical e-reader. Writers could blog away, connected to eachother, whilst readers could subscribe to their work and perhaps even fund larger pieces of writing...

Shit, I just described Medium huh.