Russell Davies: Writing for snobs
They came for the writers of car brochures, but I wasn’t a writer of car brochures, so I said nothing.
Link tags: writing
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When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s passport number
This was an absolute delight to read! Usually when you read security-related write-ups, the fun comes from the cleverness of the techniques …but this involved nothing cleverer than dev tools. In this instance, the fun is in the telling of the tale.
Why Do We Interface?
A short web book on the past, present and future of interfaces, written in a snappy, chatty style.
From oral communication and storytelling 500,000 years ago to virtual reality today, the purpose of information interfaces has always been to communicate more quickly, more deeply, to foster relationships, to explore, to measure, to learn, to build knowledge, to entertain, and to create.
We interface precisely because we are human. Because we are intelligent, because we are social, because we are inquisitive and creative.
We design our interfaces and they in turn redefine what it means to be human.
15 years of blogging (and 3 reasons I keep going) - Austin Kleon
Why keep blogging? For me, there are at least 3 good reasons:
- To leave a trace.
- To figure out what I have to say.
- Because I like it.
100words — 🐙 woohooctopus
Well, this is impressive (and brave)—competing a 100 words for 100 days during lockdown …with a baby.
And remember, this isn’t writing and publishing at least 100 words every day; it’s writing and publishing exactly 100 words (that’s the hard part).
Kissa. Book. Launch. — Roden Explorers Archive
Own. Your. Nook. There’s power in owning your nook of the ‘net — your domain name, your design, your archives — and it’s easier than ever to do so, and run a crowdfunding campaign at the same time.
ongoing by Tim Bray · Meta Blog
But aren’t blogs dead? · Um, nope. For every discipline-with-depth that I care about (software/Internet, politics, energy economics, physics), if you want to find out what’s happening and you want to find out from first-person practitioners, you end up reading a blog.
Dense information from real experts, delivered fast. Why would you want any other kind?
Why Medium is Not the Home for Your Ideas – The Hulry
Some good blogging advice.
Building a blog for the long run? Avoid Medium.
Why you should have a blog (and write in it) | Leticia Portella
Having your independent blog is an excellent way to share what you think in a decentralized way, independent of any major company that may add a paywall to it (Medium, I am looking at you).
Quotebacks and hypertexts (Interconnected)
What I love about the web is that it’s a hypertext. (Though in recent years it has mostly been used as a janky app delivery platform.)
I am very much enjoying Matt’s thoughts on linking, quoting, transclusion, and associative trails.
My blog is my laboratory workbench where I go through the ideas and paragraphs I’ve picked up along my way, and I twist them and turn them and I see if they fit together. I do that by narrating my way between them. And if they do fit, I try to add another piece, and then another. Writing a post is a process of experimental construction.
And then I follow the trail, and see where it takes me.
There Has Never Been a Better Time to Read Ursula Le Guin’s “Earthsea” Books - Electric Literature
Well, this is timely! Cassie mentioned recently that she was reading—and enjoying—the Earthsea books, which I had never got around to reading. So I’m reading them now. Then Craig mentioned in one of his newsletters that he’s also reading them. Now there’s this article…
To white protestors and accomplices, who say that they want to listen but are fearful of giving up some power so that we can all heal, I suggest you read the Earthsea cycle. You will need to learn to step away from the center to build a new world, and the Black majority in this fantasy series offers a better model than any white history.
There’s a voice inside your head that prevents you from sharing ideas—punch it in the face. - Airbag Industries
When I challenge the idea of topics—especially when I suggest writing about a design topic—the “I don’t know what to write about” excuse goes to level two: Someone has already written about [design topic]. And that might be true, but by Great Gutenberg’s Ghost, if that was a hard requirement for publishing, we’d have one newspaper, a few magazines, and maybe a thousand books. Hollywood would be a ghost town because we got to the end of all of the movie tropes by 1989. We’d have seventy-five songs with lyrics, but re-recorded in every music style and everyone would still hate Yanni. The point is you can’t let the people who have come before you be the excuse to stop you from writing or, frankly, creating.
marcus.io · Making RSS more visible again with a /feeds page
Personal website owners – what do you think about collecting all of the feeds you are producing in one way or the other on a
/feedspage?
Sounds like a good idea! I’ll get on that.
The Curse of Knowledge · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer
A great explanation of the curse of knowledge …with science!
(This, by the way, is the first of 100 blog posts that Matthias is writing in 100 days.)
Reading in the dark
I keep coming back to this remarkable piece of writing by Cassie. Honest, resonant, and open, centred around a perfect analogy.
Increment: Frontend
This month’s issue of Increment is all about front-end development. There are feaures from Lea Verou, Chris Coyier, Chris Lilley, Safia Abdalla, and more.
What’s Happening? Or: How to name a disaster - Elvia Wilk - Bookforum Magazine
It went unnamed by Doris Lessing and Cormac McCarthy. William Gibson called it The Jackpot:
On the one hand, naming the crisis allows one to apprehend it, grasp it, fight back against it. On the other hand, no word can fully encompass it, and any term is necessarily a reduction—the essence of “it” or “change” is not any singular instance but rather their constancy.
Memoirs Of A Survivor, The Peripheral, Parable Of The Sower, New York 2140, The Road, Children Of Men, Station Eleven, Severance, The Rapture, Ridley Walker:
Fiction can portray ecologies, timescales, catastrophes, and forms of violence that may be otherwise invisible, or more to the point, unnameable. We will never grasp the pandemic in its entirety, just like we will never see the microbe responsible for it with the naked eye. But we can try to articulate how it has changed us—is changing us.
Responsive web design turns ten. — Ethan Marcotte
2010 was quite a year:
And exactly three weeks after Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers was first published, “Responsive Web Design” went live in A List Apart.
Nothing’s been quite the same since.
I remember being at that An Event Apart in Seattle where Ethan first unveiled the phrase and marvelling at how well everything just clicked into place, perfectly capturing the zeitgeist. I was in. 100%.
Strangest of All: Anthology of Astrobiological Science Fiction [PDF]
Eight sci-fi stories gathered together by the European Astrobiology Institute. This free book is also available as .mobi and .epub.
New PDF Preview, Better Web Publishing, Improved Editing - iA Writer: The Focused Writing App
I think this one single feature is going to get me to switch to iA Writer:
For starters, we added Micropub support. This means you can publish to Micro.blog and other IndieWeb tools.