This is such a lovely, lovely review from Marc!
Jeremy’s way of writing certainly helps, as a specialised or technical book on a topic like Service Workers, could certainly be one, that bores you to death with dry written explanations. But Jeremy has a friendly, fresh and entertaining way of writing books. Sometimes I caught myself with a grin on my face…
What you write might help someone understand a concept that you may think has been covered enough before. We each have our own unique perspectives and writing styles.
Yes! This!!
That voice telling you that people are just sitting somewhere watching our every step and judging us based on the popularity of our writing is a big fat pathetic attention-needing liar.
I started writing for myself. The writing was helpful for me and luckily it was helpful for other people as well. But even if you’re the only one that reads your blog it is still helpful as a way to learn.
The web can be used to find common connections with folks you find interesting, and who don’t make you feel like so much of a weirdo. It’d be nice to be able to do this in a safe space that is not being surveilled.
Owning your own content, and publishing to a space you own can break through some of these barriers. Sharing your own weird scraps on your own site makes you easier to find by like-minded folks. If you’ve got no tracking on your site (no Google Analytics etc), you are harder to profile. People can’t come to harass you on your own site if you do not offer them the means to do so
I have been to Brighton, and seen the summer here, and have concluded that Britons must never be permitted to have summer again. It was as hot and wet as God’s lungs, and there was a man playing the banjo on a beach with no sand. A seagull screamed at me with the voice of a human baby.
Hui Jing describes her motivation for creating the lovely Penang Hokkien site:
People who grew up their whole lives in a community that spoke the same mother tongue as themselves would probably find this hard to relate to, but it really was something else to hear my mother tongue streaming out of the speakers of my computer.
She ends with an impassioned call for more local language websites:
If the Internet is meant to enhance the free flow of information and ideas across the world, then creation of content on the web should not largely be limited to English-speaking communities.
A nice little tutorial from Aaron.
Before social media monoliths made us into little mechanical turks for advertising platforms, we had organic homes on the web. We had pages that were ours. And they could look however you wanted. And you could write whatever you wanted on there.
There weren’t comments if you didn’t want them. There were no photo dimensions to adhere to. No 140-character limits. No BS. Or lots of BS. Either way, the choice was yours because you owned your site and you could do whatever you wanted.
If you’re thinking of writing something that explains a weird thing you struggled with on the Internet, do it! Don’t worry about the views and likes and Internet hugs. If you’ve struggled with figuring out this thing then be sure to jot it down, even if it’s unedited and it uses too many commas and you don’t like the tone of it.
The focus of the A Book Apart series is what makes it great …and that means having to reject some proposals that don’t fit. Even though I’ve had the honour of being a twice-published A Book Apart author, I also have the honour of receiving a rejection, which Jeffrey mentions here:
In one case we even had to say no to a beautifully written, fully finished book.
That was Resilient Web Design.
So why did we turn down books we knew would sell? Because, again—they weren’t quite right for us.
It was the right decision. And this is the right advice:
If you’ve sent us a proposal that ultimately wasn’t for us, don’t be afraid to try again if you write something new—and most importantly, believe in yourself and keep writing.
Fellow web type nerds: Tim Brown brings very good tidings indeed!
My new book is called Flexible Typesetting, and it will be published by A Book Apart this summer. I absolutely cannot wait for you to read it, because we have so much to talk about.
¶, &, @, ‽, ☺, #, and ☛.
Andy Bell is documenting is journey of getting to grips with web components. I think it’s so valuable to share like this as you’re learning, instead of waiting until you’ve learned it all—the fresh perspective is so useful!
I continue to write stuff down on my little corner of the Web (does it have corners?) and I encourage you to do the same, as all these little bits of flotsam and jetsam become something a lot lot bigger.
This forthcoming documentary on Ursula K. Le Guin looks like it will be very good indeed.
I’ve been enjoying the stories over on Upsideclown so it’s great to get a peak inside Matt’s writing brain here.
I also happen to really, really like his four stories:
I wouldn’t say I’m great at writing fiction. I find it tough. It is the easiest thing in the world for me to pick holes in what I’ve written. So instead, as an exercise—and as some personal positive reinforcement—I want to remind myself what I learnt writing each one, and also what I like.
It turns out that Diana Smith isn’t just a genius with CSS—she’s a fantastic writer too. This post is somehow heartfelt and lighthearted at the same time. It’s also very humorous, but beneath the humour there’s an excellent point here about the rule of least power …and doing things the long, hard, stupid way.
Because something about those limitations just calls to me. I know I’m not alone when I say that a rigid set of restrictions is the best catalyst for creativity. Total artistic freedom can be a paralyzing concept.
That can sometimes be the case with programming. If you have the most powerful programming languages in the world at your disposal, it starts to seem natural that you should then have no difficulty solving any programming problem. With all these amazing tools offering countless solutions to solve the same problem, it’s no wonder that we sometimes freeze up with information overload.
Rachel gives a terrific explanation of CSS layout from first principles, starting with the default normal flow within writing systems, moving on to floats, then positioning—relative, absolute, fixed, and sticky—then flexbox, and finally grid (with a coda on alignment). This is a great primer to keep bookmarked; I think I’ll find myself returning to this more than once.
This is the dumbest publishing platform on the web.
Write something, hit publish, and it’s live.
This is such a nice review of Going Offline from Eric!
As anyone who has received unsolicited (or solicited) feedback from me about their book knows, I’m an extremely picky reader, and I have no significant complaints on this one. Highly recommended.