If someone’s been driven to Google something you’ve written, they’re stuck. Being stuck is, to one degree or another, upsetting and annoying. So try not to make them feel worse by telling them how straightforward they should be finding it. It gets in the way of them learning what you want them to learn.
Good writing advice from Matt.
This piece by Giles is a spot-on description of what I do in my role as content buddy at Clearleft. Especially this bit:
Your editor will explain why things need changing
As a writer, it’s really helpful to understand the why of each edit. It’s easier to re-write if you know precisely what the problem is. And often, it’s less bruising to the ego. It’s not that you’re a bad writer, but just that one particular thing could be expressed more simply, or more clearly, than your first effort.
I enjoyed this documentary on legendary sound designer and editor Walter Murch. Kinda makes me want to rewatch The Conversation and The Godfather.
I found myself needing to open some old Photoshop files recently, but I haven’t had Photoshop installed on my computer for years (not since Adobe moved to the Mafia pricing model). It turns out there’s an online recreation of Photoshop!
I remember when this was literally the example people would give for the limitations of the web: “Well, you can’t build something like Photoshop in the browser…”
Editing is hard because you realize how bad you are. But editing is easy because we’re all better at criticizing than we are at creating.
Relatable:
My essay was garbage. But it was my garbage.
This essay is most definitely not garbage. I like it very much.
This is quite nifty: a fully-featured photo editing tool right in the browser, with no log-in or registration required.
Prompted by our time at CERN, Remy ponders why web browsers (quite quickly) diverged from the original vision of being read/write software.
Well, this looks like it could come in handy—no more tedious time in Photoshop trying to select turn a person into a separate layer by hand; this does it for you.
If you must add a rich text editor to an interface, this open source offering from Basecamp looks good.
This is an interesting tool: mess around with styles on any site inside Chrome’s dev tools, and then hit a button to have the updated styles saved to a URL (a Gist on Github).
A plug-in that lets multiple people collaborate on the same document in Atom. Could be useful for hackdays and workshops.
This is quite impressive—you edit the audio file by editing the transcript!
A really interesting new project from Lea that aims to put dynamic sites within the reach of everyone. The emphasis is on declarative languages—HTML and CSS—no JavaScript knowledge required.
Lea has also written an introductory article on Smashing Mag.
Joe’s site is very clever …but is it as clever as Jon’s?
Jon’s site is very clever …but is it as clever as Joe’s?
Thinking of writing a book? Here’s some excellent advice and insights from Yaili, who only went and wrote another one.
Let me say this first: writing a book is hard work. It eats up all of your free time and mental space. It makes you feel like you are forever procrastinating and producing very little. It makes you not enjoy any free time. It’s like having a dark cloud hanging over your head at all times. At. All. Times.
This is nifty—Nicholas is also going for the 100 words exercise that I’ve been doing.
A truly wonderful piece by Mandy detailing why and how she writes, edits, and publishes on her own website:
No one owns this domain but me, and no one but me can take it down. I will not wake up one morning to discover that my service has been “sunsetted” and I have some days or weeks to export my data (if I have that at all). These URLs will never break.
From the lovely people behind Editorially comes STET:
A Writers’ Journal on Culture & Technology