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!
I’m going to try batching links into groups of five from now on, since solitary links often feel a little too insubstantial for a post. Links often won’t be related.
Links #1:
Nadia Eghbal’s notes — rough, chronological, posted monthly, I’m intrigued by the format
While not all of these are actually one-liners, Una Kravets’s Ten modern layouts in one line of CSS has some neat tricks I hadn’t seen before. (I’m realizing I really need to brush up on modern CSS. It’s been a few years and lots of things have changed in that time.)
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.)
Just came across Frank Chimero’s essay Everything Easy Is Hard Again, on the rapid state of change on the web, technology-wise. It’s really good. While I don’t completely agree with everything he says, I do think there’s unnecessary complexity that could be pared down a bit.
