Links #121

Mike Hogan on keeping a development diary. 100%. I do this both at work — just a Markdown file that I edit in Vim on my work laptop — and on personal projects. Very much recommended. (It’s so much easier to start working on a project when I can look at the last diary entry to see where I left off and regain context.)

Sharon McMahon’s proposal to improve U.S. elections. All eight of her proposed reforms sound great. I hope we see at least some of these happen.

John Gruber on the attempted assassination. Yep.

Kristine Haglund on the beauty of holiness. “Beauty is an index to the divine not because it lifts us out of the earth, but because it lets us see the ways we are part of it and lets us hear God whispering that ‘it is very good.’”

Wm Morris on what’s possible with ebooks. Some interesting ideas here. When I make EPUBs, I try to not care about the formatting, because so much of it is in the hands of the reader app; that’s a big part of why in recent years I’ve focused more on making PDFs (Historia Calamitatum, Plutarch). I’m intrigued, though, by the idea of web pages as a possible best of both worlds — they’re reflowable, you can easily design full responsive layouts that work on any size device, you get the full power of CSS (including features like scroll snap), you can view source, etc. (Thinking about Make Something Wonderful, for example.) There are downsides, clearly, but maybe those can be worked around more than I’ve realized.