Made a new favicon for the site for the first time since July 2015. Old on left, new on right:
The new icon is a more abstract “BC” using three circles. The negative space also inadvertently looks a little like Woody Woodpecker facing left, but I’m okay with that.
In the spirit of working in public, and inspired by the office hours professors keep (and maybe others, though I’m not familiar with the idea outside of an academic context), I’m now holding occasional ad hoc office hours via video chat.
For now I’m starting with fifteen-minute appointments (less daunting for both sides, I think) and asking people to email me a list of three time slots that work for them.
This thing is very much an experiment. It may bomb. I don’t know that anyone will actually want to talk via video or audio rather than just sending an email, but it’ll be available for those who do. (Luckily, since the scheduling is ad hoc, it’s not a problem at all if hardly anyone ever uses it.)
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).
I recently came across Maggie Appleton’s article on digital gardens. Oh my goodness, this is delightful. I’m sure some small part of it is just nostalgia for the old days of the web, but the idea seems good and solid nonetheless. I love digital gardens. (See Mike Caulfield’s The Garden and the Stream and Swyx’s Digital Garden Terms of Service for more in this vein.)
Exploring some of these gardens led me to the idea of learning in public (also see Gift Egwuenu’s Learning in Public talk). Very closely related to digital gardens, of course, but a different angle to look at it from. It also nicely parallels the working in public idea I posted about recently.
I’m looking forward to adopting more of these practices myself. Not sure yet exactly what form that will take, but at the moment I’m thinking it’ll probably be the notes system I mentioned. While that would be doable with the website engine I have now, it wouldn’t be very ergonomic, so I’m probably going to retool. (And by probably I mean almost certainly, because I am an inveterate toolmaker at heart. I’ve written out plans for a new version of Slash, my blog engine, that will easily support notes as well as blog posts and web pages. More on that soon.)
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.)
Came across Andy Matuschak’s note on working in public:
One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” to steal Robin Sloan’s phrase. This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it’s Screenshot Saturday; it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re pondering in the shower; it’s thinking out loud about the ways in which your project doesn’t work at all. It’s so much of Twitch. I want to see the process. I want to see you trim the artichoke. I want to see you choose the color palette.
I love this kind of communication personally, but I suspect it also creates more invested, interesting followings over the long term.
Yes! I too love it, and I’ll be doing more of it here from now on. (I think long ago I used to do it to some degree, but somewhere along the way a fit of self-consciousness took it out of me.) No luck yet finding the original Robin Sloan source, but if any of you come across it, let me know.
I’ve also enjoyed reading through the rest of Andy’s notes, by the way. Itching to do something similar here. More to come. (I’ve already been planning to rewrite the backend engine for this site — it’s old and decrepit — so this is a fortuitous time to come across this idea.)
Hark! I’ve replaced the formerly anemic home page (a barebones list of recent work) with a more text-heavy page. That’s right! Text-heavy! Turns out I like text, and reading, and words. More of that, please.
To that end, and also as an attempt at getting this site to start feeling more like a cozy personal site again (not a cozy personals site, to be clear) and way less…sterile, we’ve got a new block of text greeting everyone at the front door. It’s an overview of the site (as opposed to the about page, which is an overview of…me as a person, I guess) (there’s a difference between the two, subtle and blurred though it may be). I’ve also included recommended entry points for various parts of the site, a new idea I’m trying out.
Anyway, it’s nerdy and will probably scare some people off and I’m totally okay with that.
For what it’s worth: I’ve redesigned the art page. It’s more visual now, and I’ve also tagged the art for easier browsing.
For people who want updates via email on what I’ve been working on (art, design, writing, coding, etc.), I’ve resurrected my newsletter and dubbed the new incarnation Manmade.
How the newsletter will be different from this blog remains to be seen, but I imagine I’ll probably post more behind-the-scenes material to the newsletter.