Blogging about what you are working on is is really valuable for the writer because it forces you to think logically about what you are doing in order to tell a good story.
It’s also really valuable to blog about what you’ve learned, especially if you’ve made a mistake. It makes sure you’ve learned the lesson and helps others avoid making the same mistakes.
They let me write a 24 Ways article again. Will they never learn?
This one’s a whirlwind tour of using a service worker to provide a custom offline page, in the style of Going Offline.
By the way, just for the record, I initially rejected this article’s title out of concern that injecting a Cliff Richard song into people’s brains was cruel and unusual punishment. I was overruled.
I just binge-listened to the six episodes of the first season of this podcast from Stephen Fry—it’s excellent!
It covers the history of communication from the emergence of language to the modern day. At first I was worried that it was going to rehash some of the more questionable ideas in the risible Sapiens, but it turned out to be far more like James Gleick’s The Information or Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet (two of my favourite books on the history of technology).
There’s no annoying sponsorship interruptions and the whole series feels more like an audiobook than a podcast—an audiobook researched, written and read by Stephen Fry!
Fax machines, pop-up books, radioactive televisions, writing boxes, microfilm readers, nuclear bomb cores, cupholders, bidets, jet engines, index cards, wiffle balls, oil barrels, lightning rods, playing cards, air conditioning, hair dryers, wheelchair ramps, handbags, diving bells, slippers, laundry chutes, sewing machines, pockets, skee-ball, safety pins, chalkboards, tote bags, holograms, hearing aids, dollhouses, billboards, airports, flash drives, cardigans, beer cans, stethoscopes, text editors, mugs, wallpaper, towel dispensers, bumber stickers, staplers, microscopes, fingerless gloves, wire hangers, toast, and more.
I’ll be in my bunk.
When is a space not a space?
Tom talks about ogham stones and unicode.
Publishing on the web really is quite marvellous:
…an endless thrill, a sort of everlasting, punk-rock feeling and I hope it will never really go away.
When you’re struggling to write something that sounds clear and sounds human (two of the essential basics of a good blog post, I’d argue), just use the words normal people would use.
If we use jargon, we reveal our insecurity. If we use pretentious language, we expose our arrogance. But if we use language that anyone can understand, people are much more likely to value what we do.
Oh, this will be good! Adam has been working on, thinking and writing about forms for quite a while and he has distilled that down into ten patterns. You just know that progressive enhancement will be at the heart of this book.
By the end of the book, you’ll have a close-to exhaustive list of ready-to-go components, delivered as a design system that you can fork, contribute to and use immediately on your projects. But more than that, you’ll have the mindset and rationale behind when or when not to use each solution, which is just as important as the solution itself.
This is something I struggle to articulate to friends who are suffering because they feel tied to silos like Facebook and Twitter:
What self-publishing does is provide me a choice, which makes me feel good. I feel like I can step away from platforms at will and I don’t feel as shackled as I have done previously.
I really like Alice’s updates.
I think I’ll do weaknotes. Some collections of notes. Sometimes. Not very well written probably. Generally written with the urgency of someone who is waiting for a baby wake up.
I know many people love Medium’s editing interface, but I just can’t believe that so many writers and publications have turned toward a single centralized commercial entity as a proposed solution to what ails the publishing industry. There is tremendous strength in independence and decentralization.
I’m telling you this stuff is often too important and worthy to be owned by an algorithm and lost in the stream.
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.