blogging
Design Links & Learning
A Blog by Nick TrombleyCollections of articles, links, and other material from around the web, relevant to software design and engineering.
On online collaboration and our obligations as makers of software
An Essay by Baldur BjarnasonIs 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?
missing concepts in link culture?
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.
revisiting architectural blogging
An Article by Alan JacobsI 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.
Stream on
An Article by Simon CollisonA 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.
scribe.rip
An ApplicationI 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
What do I need to read to be great at CSS?
An Article by Baldur BjarnasonA 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.
Things Learned Blogging
An Article by Jim NielsenEschew 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.
How to blog
An Article by Tom MacWright- Own your domain and use simple technology
- Never change the technology
- Write something on a schedule
Whomst styles?
An Article by Robin SloanThis is a “whostyle”: an attempt to carry the ~timbre~ of an author’s voice, in the form of their design sensibility, through into a quotation. It’s the author who defines their whostyle; the quoting site just honors it, a frame around their words.
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.
multiverse.plus
A Website by Kicks Condor & Weiwei HsuAn 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?
A Brief History of the Digital Garden
An Article by Maggie AppletonDigital 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.
Blogging with Version Control
An Article by Will DarwinI’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.
The Value of a Personal Site
An ArticleA 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.
This used to be our playground
An Essay by Simon CollisonThere 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.
aboutfeeds.com
A Website by Matt WebbUse 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.
XXIIVV Webring
A WebsiteThis webring is an attempt to inspire artists & developers to build their own website and share traffic among each other.
Navigation by shibboleth
An Article by Dorian TaylorThe 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.
How the Blog Broke the Web
An Article by Amy HoyHow would I improve RSS?
An Article by Matt WebbMy 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
A Tool by Tom Critchlow & Toby ShorinQuotebacks 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.
Re: How would I improve RSS?
An Article by Robin RendleI 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.
Understanding Architecture
We have turned our faces towards the future
During the modern era, we have even changed our bodily position in relation to the flow of time; the Greeks understood that the future came from behind their backs and the past receded away in front of their eyes, but we have turned our faces towards the future, and the past is disappearing behind our backs.
A timeless space
Our culture reveres youth, aspires to agelessness and is frightened by signs of age, wear and decay. As a consequence of this obsession, and the qualities of our man-made materials, contemporary environments have lost their capacity to contain and communicate traces of time. Our buildings often seem to exist in a timeless space without contact with the past or confidence for the future.
Theatre Epidaurus, Greece, 330 BC
Mounting the massive cut stone stairs [of the amphitheater], we note the way in which the overhanging front edge of each seat folds down to form the first step up to the next section, the second step being the front edge of the foot space of the next set of seats. This detail is complemented by the way the undercut beneath the front edge of each seat is curved rather than sharp-edged — a detail that, being hidden in the shadows, is first revealed by our touch. An equally subtle detail is the way each stone seat is lifted slightly above the level of the foot space behind it, so that one does not set foot on the surface upon which others sit.
The secret life of sculpture
The sculptures are arranged in informal groupings, carefully placed to catch the natural light that brings them to life, so that, when we enter the room, it seems we have interrupted an ongoing conversation among them.
Church on the Water, Hokkaido, 1985–8
At the edges of the outer walls to left and right, the slate floor is held back, creating a shadowed slot into which the concrete wall slips out of sight. Because the wall does not meet and bear upon the floor, as is usual, the relationship of the wall to the ground is uncertain, and the rippling surface of the black slate floor appears to float free of the walls, merging with the rippling surface of the water.
We must go with them
"You cannot make what you want to make, but what the material permits you to make. You cannot make out of marble what you would make out of wood, or out of wood what you would make out of stone. Each material has its own life, and one cannot without punishment destroy a living material to make a dumb senseless thing. That is, we must not try to make our materials speak our language, we must go with them to the point where others will understand their language."
— Constantin Brancusi
Wood
Wood speaks of its two existences and timescales: its first life as a growing tree and the second as a human artefact made by the caring hand of a carpenter or cabinet maker.
Lightness & Heaviness
"Lightness is born of heaviness and heaviness of lightness, instantaneously and reciprocally, returning creation for creation, gaining strength proportionally as they gain in life, and as much more in life as they gain in motion. They destroy one another also at the same time, fulfilling a mutual vendetta, proof that lightness is created only in conjunction with heaviness, and heaviness only where lightness follows."
— Leonardo da Vinci
Errors & Crimes
"A builder who hides any part of the building frame, abandons the only permissible and, at the same time, the most beautiful embellishment of architecture. The one that hides a loadbearing column makes an error. The one who builds a false column commits a crime."
— Auguste Perret
Desired qualities of light
In today's architectural practice, light is regrettably often treated merely as a quantitative phenomenon; design regulations and standards specify required minimum level of illumination and window sizes, but they do not define any maximum levels of luminance, or desired qualities of light, such as its orientation, temperature, color, or reflectedness.
Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, 1959–65
If you are there at sunset, as are the scientists every day, you see the most magical of transformations: the golden glow that fills the sky to the west is first reflected in the water of the ocean and then shoots like a line of fire up through the gathering darkness of the plaza's stone floor, to reach its source in the cubic fountain. The court is breathtaking in its sublime power, opening at the edge of the continent to the Pacific Ocean and framing the light blue-on-dark-blue horizon line of the sea and sky.
Secreted
House and home are two evidently different notions: house is a material, spatial and architectural concept, whereas home is a unique setting and product of the act of dwelling itself. Home is charged with subjective meanings, symbols, memories, and images.
A home is also a set of personal rituals, habits, rhythms, and routines of everyday life. In every sense of the word, home is an extension of its inhabitant. Consequently it can not be an object of design by an architect; it is secreted, as it were, by the actual act of dwelling.
Room continuum
The Modernist aspiration for continuous, flowing space and open interconnections between spaces has a tendency to reduce the sense of room-ness by turning space into a continuum, creating a flow through units instead of projecting a spatial object.
Tree, leaf, house, city
"Tree is leaf and leaf is tree – house is city and city is house. A city is not a city unless it is also a huge house – a house is a house only if it is also a tiny city."
— Aldo van Eyck
Chapel of St. Ignatius, Seattle, 1995–7
The exterior walls of the Chapel of St. Ignatius are made of large, complexly interlocking concrete slabs, a variegated golden-brown in color, and the roofs are clad in light grey metal. At the corners where the joints between the wall panels interlock are windows of various rectangular shapes and sizes, and the egg-shaped metal anchors that were used to lift the walls in place project slightly forward, casting small shadows.
- Bells
Dwelling in ritual
Even a dwelling is a device that generates a distinct pattern of daily activities and their relationships. Some buildings are explicitly built for ritual, but the repetition of any activity, either mundane or religious, tends to ritualize them, and by facilitating this, an architectural structure can turn gradually – sometimes even unnoticeably – into an instrument of ritual.
Ise Shrines, Nagoya, 685–Present
The Ise Shrines at Naiku and Geku, near Nagoya, highly refined idealizations of ancient agricultural storehouses, have been rebuilt at least sixty-one times since first being established. The entire twenty-year building cycle is a continuous, precisely defined ritual. The result is unlike any religious structure in the world, one that is always new, and at the same time over a millenium old.
Memory & Fantasy
Memory and fantasy are related, as are recollection and imagination; one who cannot remember also cannot imagine, as memory is the very soil of imagination.
In our bodies
We tend to think of our memory as a cerebral capacity, but the act of memorizing engages our entire body. Remembering is not solely a mental even; it is also an act of embodiment and bodily projection. Memories are not only hidden in the electrochemical processes of the brain; they are also stored in our skeletons, muscles, senses, and skin.
American Folk Art Museum, New York City, 1998–2001
As we draw closer, we see that the three-faceted planes of the museum are fabricated out of rectangular panels made of white bronze that was poured directly into dammed forms on the concrete floor of the foundry, producing a surface texture similar to both metal and stone.
Take your names with you
When the Masai of Kenya were forced to relocate, they took with them the names of hills, rivers, and plains, and fitted them to the topography of their new domicile.
The same desire is reflected in the countless European place names in the United States, as the borrowed names had the power to project a sense of familiarity in a strange and unfamiliar land.