Adactio: Links—Tagged with writing

Episode 226 – Create Your Own Website Write about What You Discover and Be Dependable with Jeremy Keith – IT Career Energizer

This was a really fun podcast chat—nice and snappy at just 20 minutes.

Good Enough | Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer

I know the anxiety of sharing something with the world. I know there is a pressure to match the quality we see elsewhere on the web. But maybe we should stop trying to live up to somebody else’s standards and focus on just getting stuff out there instead. Maybe our “imperfect” things are already helpful to someone. Maybe this shouldn’t be so hard.

Frank Chimero Redesign Blog: The Popeye Moment

Frank is redesigning in the open. Watch this space:

By writing about it, it may help both of us. I can further develop my methods by navigating the friction of explaining them. I’ve been looking for a way to clarify and share my thoughts about typography and layout on screens, and this seems like a good chance to do so. And you? Well, perhaps the site can offer a clearly explained way of working that’s worth considering. That seems to be a rare thing on the web these days.

The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising - The Correspondent

The benchmarks that advertising companies use — intended to measure the number of clicks, sales and downloads that occur after an ad is viewed — are fundamentally misleading. None of these benchmarks distinguish between the selection effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that are happening anyway) and the advertising effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that would not have happened without ads).

It gets worse: the brightest minds of this generation are creating algorithms which only increase the effects of selection.

A terrificly well-written piece on the emperor’s new clothes worn by online advertising. Equal parts economic rigour and Gladwellian anecdata, it’s a joy to read! Kudos to Alana Gillespie for the great translation work (the original article was written in Dutch).

We currently assume that advertising companies always benefit from more data. … But the majority of advertising companies feed their complex algorithms silos full of data even though the practice never delivers the desired result. In the worst case, all that invasion of privacy can even lead to targeting the wrong group of people.

This insight is conspicuously absent from the debate about online privacy. At the moment, we don’t even know whether all this privacy violation works as advertised.

The interaction design of this article is great too—annotations, charts, and more!

Don’t quit your day job: the benefits of being a ‘bifurcator’ | Aeon Essays

Here, then, is my speculation. Work is something we struggle to get and strive to keep. We love-hate it (usually not in equal measure). Sometimes it seems meaningless. I’m told this is the case even for surgeons, teachers and disaster-relief workers: those with jobs whose worth seems indisputable. For the mere facilitators, the obscure cogs in the machinery of the modern economy whose precise function and value it takes some effort to ascertain, the meaning in what we do often seems particularly elusive (I should know). I contend, however, that while our lives need to be meaningful, our work does not; it only has to be honest and useful. And if someone is voluntarily paying you to do something, it’s probably useful at least to them.

Jotter

Here’s a super simple little note-taking app from Andy that works offline. Add to your home screen and away you go:

Jotter is a helpful little notepad that’ll save your notes offline, automatically for you as you type.

inessential: You Choose: Follow-Up

It came to my attention after writing my blog post about how we choose the web we want that the pessimism is about not being able to make a living from blogging.

Brent gives an in-depth response to this concern about not making a living from blogging. It’s well worth a read. I could try to summarise it, but I think it’s better if you read the whole thing for yourself.

inessential: You Choose

You can entertain, you can have fun, you can push the boundaries of the form, if you want to. Or you can just write about cats as you develop your voice. Whatever you want!

I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment:

You choose the web you want. But you have to do the work.

A lot of people are doing the work. You could keep telling them, discouragingly, that what they’re doing is dead. Or you could join in the fun.

Nicole Fenton | Words as Material

If we want design to communicate, we need to communicate in the design process.

I might get that framed.

Tune Out USUCK FM and Free Yourself to Write – Chip on Your Shoulder

Freewriting—beating your inner critic by lowering your standards:

The trick is to type so fast that the clacking of the keys drowns out that voice.

100 words in a 100 days – Monique Dubbelman

I was chatting with Monique after her Paris Web talk on doing 100 days of code. I told her about my 100 days project and now she’s doing it too!

Consume less, create more

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.

Writing comes naturally to me when I’m expressing myself on my own site, with no outside assignment and no deadline except my own sense of urgency about an idea. It’s easy when I’m crafting a brief text message or tweet. Or a letter to a friend.

But give me a writing assignment and a deadline, and I’m stuck. Paralysis, avoidance, a dissatisfaction with myself and the assignment—all the usual hobgoblins spring immediately to life.

Curating A Design System Newsletter

Some time ago I was going through the backlog of around 90 unread articles on Design Systems. About 80 of those were Medium articles and about 40 of those took me to either their user-hostile “you ready a lot and we like that” pop-up or their money-grabbing “you’ve read lots this month, pay us to read some more.”, it turns out that Medium only likes you reading things when you give money to do so.

Therefore I’ve started to add a little warning notice to each article that’s on Medium.

Why your design system should include content | Clearleft

Rachel makes the case for integrating content design patterns into component libraries:

Instead of content design systems and visual design systems existing in isolation, the ideal is one design system that accommodates everything, marrying the content and design together in the way it will actually be used and experienced.

The Problem With “Content” – On my Om

My website has my words, my interviews, my photos, and my identity — what it doesn’t have, as far as I’m concerned, is “content.” Looking at it from the other side, for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, everything is “content” regardless of its provenance. Each creation is merely an object, only valuable for its ability to increase our time spent on their platforms, allowing them to sell more advertising.

German Naming Convention

Don’t write fopen when you can write openFile. Write throwValidationError and not throwVE. Call that name function and not fct. That’s German naming convention. Do this and your readers will appreciate it.

Language and the Invention of Writing | Talking Points Memo

Language is not an invention. As best we can tell it is an evolved feature of the human brain. There have been almost countless languages humans have spoken. But they all follow certain rules that grow out of the wiring of the human brain and human cognition. Critically, it is something that is hardwired into us. Writing is an altogether different and artificial thing.

Link tags: writing

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