Starting now, I’m going to batch releases of my art/writing/etc., posting things only at the beginning of each month. I did this back in 2014–2015 for four or five months, and I think it’s a good fit for me again.
Arbitrary reasons for doing it (acknowledging that it would be just as easy to argue convincingly in the other direction):
To focus more. By not thinking as often about posting work (speaking mainly of art here since that’s primarily what I’ve been doing lately), I’ll hopefully be able to focus more on the work itself and less on its reception.
To slow down. Being able to release finished work immediately is a magical and wonderful part of the Internet, but I think some detachment can be helpful, giving ample time to assess and reassess the work and to polish it further before finally posting it. (I have regrets. Not many, but I do have some.)
I don’t know that batching will actually make this happen, but: to work more on somewhat larger projects that take more time. My current working theory, however, is that immediate release cycles encourage me to optimize toward projects I can finish as quickly as possible. The experiment is to see if slowing the release cycle down makes an actual difference there or not. It may not. I may just be lazy and ill-suited for large projects.
To write more blog posts that aren’t just release posts. Or, failing that, to at least make the blog feel less like a neverending train of releases and navel-gazing meta posts. (I do believe I’m yearning for the old days, when I wrote “real” posts. We’ll see if the essayist in me still lives.)
Rules I’m arbitrarily giving myself in this experiment, and other tacked-on miscellaneous thoughts that I didn’t want to start a new list for:
I’ll post each bundle on the first day of each month, or the second day if the first is a Sunday. (I’m calling these batches “release bundles,” by the way.)
A project has to have been finished for at least a week before I can release it — so anything finished during the last week of the month will go out a month later.
There’s no set end date for now. If it works well, I’ll hopefully keep doing it for a long time. If it inhibits the old creativity, I’ll stop.
I’m not sure yet whether I’ll write about in-progress projects during the month. Lately I’ve found myself harboring some misgivings about working in public, or at least some parts of it, and I need to soul search and figure out what I’m comfortable with and what makes the most sense for me and my introvert self.
Joel Hooks on blogs and digital gardens — this makes me want to finish my revamp of Slash so I can more easily add an actual digital garden to this site (and at some point I’ll write about that revamp since I don’t think I’ve gone into any detail on it)
Amy Hoy on how blogs broke the web — it’s not quite as bad as the headline sounds, but still some good food for thought (you could say this is another way of looking at stock vs. flow)
Min — minimalist web browser (and I’ll mention here that I’m veering closer and closer to spinning up my own WebKit-based keyboard-controlled extremely minimalist browser, so that I can have full control over the UI, but that also seems a little crazy)
Just wanted to say thank you to all of you for reading this blog. I realize the time you spend here is a very small sliver of your lives overall (hopefully!), but it’s still time you could have spent elsewhere. Thank you.
My subconscious seems to be on a quest to turn this blog into more of a magazine, with regular columns and all. (Watch out, before you know it I’ll be calling myself editor-in-chief of this rag.)
In that vein, I’ve been thinking about starting a recurring (if infrequent, speaking realistically) Q&A section. This’ll be another experiment, of course, like office hours, and again in the spirit of working in public.
So: if you have any questions you’d like to see me answer here in public, email me your question with “Q&A” in the subject, and also let me know whether you’re okay with your first name accompanying the question.
I recently discovered weeknotes, and I am excited. Extremely short posts (one or two lines, like a tweet) feel too anemic to me for a blog, even after making titles optional, and now here’s a lovely way to handle that: bundle several small posts into a longer, less frequent, more substantial post. Has a nice feel to it, almost like an issue of a magazine.
Some discussion on weeknotes I dug up as I scoured the web:
And here are some of the people whose weeknotes I’ve come across so far (why so many of them are in the UK I do not know, but being an anglophile I also don’t mind in the least):
These feel humanizing to me in a way that scrolling through Facebook/etc. doesn’t. It’s wonderful.
So of course I’m now planning to start writing some myself, probably on Fridays. It’s unclear at this point which types of posts will end up in weeknotes vs. on their own, but that’ll all work itself out eventually.
Lastly: if you find other weeknotes you enjoy reading (or if you start writing your own), let me know!
Taking a cue from Robin Rendle and Jonnie Hallman, I’ve added a “Reply via email” mailto link at the bottom of my posts, both in my RSS and JSON feeds and on the web pages as well (the post detail pages, that is, not the post lists).
Slash is the engine that runs this blog. It’s just a Python app running Django, but calling it an engine is too satisfying for me to stop anytime soon. The name comes from the ubiquitous forward slash in URLs.
Overview
Slash has an internal frontend with some post management pages (see below) along with a small API which is used by Blackbullet (my current website engine, separate from the blog) to pull posts into my site template. The API also publishes the RSS and JSON feeds, which Blackbullet passes right through.
The dashboard lists current drafts and, lower on the page where you can’t see it in this screenshot, recently published posts:
Disclaimer: there’s no guarantee that these particular post drafts will ever see the light of day. I often put ideas in and then decide later that they’re not worth blogging about.
Here’s the post edit page, which is very much a work in progress (last week I added the visual tag controls, since adding tags via the metadata textbox made it impossible to tell whether I’d used a tag before or not):
It’s spartan but works for me.
Payload syntax
Other than the notebook specifier, the syntax is pretty much the same as Vinci’s. Posts are written in Markdown. Metadata is specified with the initial-colon syntax.
One thing I realize I forgot to mention in the Vinci post is that in both apps I have a shortcut syntax for including images that looks like this:
I have a page for uploading images to a date-named folder — year and month — and this syntax relies on the image being in the matching folder for the post. A small bit of convention to make things simpler.
How I use Slash
On my laptop, I open Slash when needed. On my phone, I have it saved to my homescreen as a PWA.
Other than that, I use it the way you’d expect — I write blog posts (usually directly in Slash, but occasionally in Gate or Quill), I edit them, I publish them. Months later I finally notice the typos. It’s not too exciting.
The future
As of now, the plan is to replace both Blackbullet and Slash with a new, simpler, consolidated Slash, using plain text for the backend and probably moving to FastAPI. Since I’m in the middle of planning the rewrite right now (and since I’m now working in public), you’ll see posts about it soon.
Over the last several years I’ve built a number of personal productivity tools (almost all of them web apps) that I’ve never written about here. In the spirit of working in public, that’s about to change.
There are around fourteen twelve of them, though, so I’ll be spacing them out a little, with other posts interspersed here and there for the sake of our sanity. Also, while you’ll be hearing about them in a relatively short timeframe, remember that they weren’t written all at once, and that the older ones have been iterated on for a long time.
I generally won’t be releasing the source code, FYI. I still fiddle with these apps on the regular, and feeling an obligation to maintain stability for outside users would put a severe damper on that. Sorry. That said, the ideas are all free for the taking, and I’m happy to answer questions. (I feel I should lower the expectations here. These apps aren’t amazing or groundbreaking. Consider them small curiosities.)
I added an about the blog page (still somewhat of a rough draft) which also explains how to use the new tag inclusion/exclusion controls in the feeds. (If you want the RSS feed but don’t want to see any of my posts about art, for example, you can do that now.)
