Feb. 17, 2019, 7 p.m.
Open sourcing my drafts folder (and making a new wiki on my blog)
Tom Critchlow
Hey bloggernauts!
It's been about four months since the last email - so I suppose I owe you both an apology and a celebration. Sorry you haven't heard from me - and/but yay for not taking up space in your inbox.
Client work has been steady and busy for the last 4 months so that's mostly what I've been doing. A little book writing as well - but oh my trying to write a book is hard work. Not so much the actual writing but the weight of carrying a (metaphysical) book on your shoulders all the time. It's a psychic load, that's for sure.
Anyway - this email brings us back to blogging. Or, more accurately networked writing. I've been very curious about the ways in which "internet-writing" is new, different and useful. So there's two things I want to draw you to:
Web-annotations
I wrote a post exploring the UX of web-annotations. Except - the title is a little misleading. UX is one (albeit important) part of the puzzle but more broadly annotations are an interesting and likely *new* part of the web. There's a new proposed W3C standards thing coming that I don't claim to fully understand but it involves annotations. But this piece breaks down some of the various solutions for allowing in-line comments on your own blog.
Be sure to stick around for the updates at the bottom of the post where I post what I think is a nice clean "standard" javascript script that anyone can use to embed annotations using Hypothesis.
Secondly...
I built a personal wiki
For some time I've been playing with three "modes" of information exchange on the web:
Streams - This is the fast-twitch flow that I personally use Twitter for. Plenty saturated at the moment.
Campfires - This is the blog (and more broadly the blogosphere that I read and engage with). Room to grow here but generally I’m satisfied.
Gardens - This is where there’s the widest gap for me personally. No place to store and evolve deeper longer-term thinking. Many of my friends have gravitated to Are.na but I just can’t get it to work for me.
So I went on to build my own solution using only text files and folders and published on the web using Jekyll/Github pages. There's a full writeup here:
Building a digital garden.
But - here's the semi-secret announcement for those of you on the email list, one of the folders of my wiki is my entire blog post drafts folder:
Be gentle, of course, these are my butterflies pre-flight! Fragile and delicate and almost non-existent in some cases. But maybe there's some that catch your eye? Perhaps encouragement is all that's needed to push some of them over the edge?
--
Because all of the above is about me I thought I'd throw in a few links I've enjoyed recently too:
- Blogging to exhale by Daniel Gray (a wonderful pairing to seeking inspiration? by Derek Sivers)
- The city is my homescreen by Dan Hill
- Nike x Architecture x Disaster Capitalism (032c)
--
That's all for now from this corner of the republic of newsletters. As always - hit reply with feedback, ideas or just to chat.
Tom
It's been about four months since the last email - so I suppose I owe you both an apology and a celebration. Sorry you haven't heard from me - and/but yay for not taking up space in your inbox.
Client work has been steady and busy for the last 4 months so that's mostly what I've been doing. A little book writing as well - but oh my trying to write a book is hard work. Not so much the actual writing but the weight of carrying a (metaphysical) book on your shoulders all the time. It's a psychic load, that's for sure.
Anyway - this email brings us back to blogging. Or, more accurately networked writing. I've been very curious about the ways in which "internet-writing" is new, different and useful. So there's two things I want to draw you to:
Web-annotations
I wrote a post exploring the UX of web-annotations. Except - the title is a little misleading. UX is one (albeit important) part of the puzzle but more broadly annotations are an interesting and likely *new* part of the web. There's a new proposed W3C standards thing coming that I don't claim to fully understand but it involves annotations. But this piece breaks down some of the various solutions for allowing in-line comments on your own blog.
Be sure to stick around for the updates at the bottom of the post where I post what I think is a nice clean "standard" javascript script that anyone can use to embed annotations using Hypothesis.
Secondly...
I built a personal wiki
For some time I've been playing with three "modes" of information exchange on the web:
Streams - This is the fast-twitch flow that I personally use Twitter for. Plenty saturated at the moment.
Campfires - This is the blog (and more broadly the blogosphere that I read and engage with). Room to grow here but generally I’m satisfied.
Gardens - This is where there’s the widest gap for me personally. No place to store and evolve deeper longer-term thinking. Many of my friends have gravitated to Are.na but I just can’t get it to work for me.
So I went on to build my own solution using only text files and folders and published on the web using Jekyll/Github pages. There's a full writeup here:
Building a digital garden.
But - here's the semi-secret announcement for those of you on the email list, one of the folders of my wiki is my entire blog post drafts folder:
Be gentle, of course, these are my butterflies pre-flight! Fragile and delicate and almost non-existent in some cases. But maybe there's some that catch your eye? Perhaps encouragement is all that's needed to push some of them over the edge?
--
Because all of the above is about me I thought I'd throw in a few links I've enjoyed recently too:
- Blogging to exhale by Daniel Gray (a wonderful pairing to seeking inspiration? by Derek Sivers)
- The city is my homescreen by Dan Hill
- Nike x Architecture x Disaster Capitalism (032c)
--
That's all for now from this corner of the republic of newsletters. As always - hit reply with feedback, ideas or just to chat.
Tom