Link tags: writing

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 /feeds page?

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.

Why does writing matter in remote work? — Tim Casasola

Some good writing advice in here:

• Spell out your acronyms.
• Use active voice, not passive voice.
• Fewer commas. More periods.

The Stacks Reader | A Treasure Trove of Classic Journalism

Digital preservation of dead-tree media:

The Stacks Reader is an online collection of classic journalism and writing about the arts that would otherwise be lost to history. Motivated less by nostalgia than by preservation, The Stacks Reader is a living archive of memorable storytelling—a museum for stories.

Didn’t I Write This Story Already? When Your Fictional Pandemic Becomes Reality | Tor.com

Naomi Kritzer published a short story five years ago called So Much Cooking about a food blogger in lockdown during a pandemic. Prescient.

I left a lot of the details about the disease vague in the story, because what I wanted to talk about was not the science but the individuals struggling to get by as this crisis raged around them. There’s a common assumption that if the shit ever truly hit the fan, people would turn on one another like sharks turning on a wounded shark. In fact, the opposite usually happens: humans in disasters form tight community bonds, help their neighbors, offer what they can to the community.

Why we are living in JG Ballard’s world

I’m not the only one thinking about J.G. Ballard.

A luxury cruiseliner quarantined in San Francisco bay, its well-heeled passengers confined to their cabins for weeks on end. Holidaymakers on lockdown at a quarantined hotel in Tenerife after an Italian doctor comes down with coronavirus. A world of isolated individuals rarely leaving their homes, keeping a wary distance from one another in public, communicating with their friends and loved ones via exclusively technological means. These situations are so Ballardian as to be in the realm of copyright infringement.

Indoor Voices 🤫🤫🤫

A group blog by a whole bunch of people who are staying at home.

It’s hard to believe, but there was a time where the internet was just full of casual websites posting random stuff. And you’d go to them maybe even multiple times a day to see if they had posted any new stories. It was something we all did when we were bored at our desks, at our jobs. Now there are no more desks. But there are still blogs.