If it behooves you, instead of thinking any more about Twitter—hit us with some PDFs, some incomprehensible sociology, a fact about your town, some poetry no one cares about, political theory that will never land, obscure social history, climate links, math things, some tech so obscure 20 people use it. We want your inner noise. Just push the gas on your own ephemeralism and launch us into the future.
Reading notes for “Why People Photograph”, by Robert Adams
In a recent post, My Antinet and Barthes’ “Camera Lucida”, I wrote about having shelves filled with books that I remember nothing about. Seems like a waste, no?
Writing notes (by hand) while reading new books has completely changed the way I read and I am finding many benefits: More deliberate consumption, better recall, and a physical residue of the things I’ve read.
As I read, I find myself looking for things to “keep”. I write brief keywords, quotes, and short phrases as references on 4×6 index cards. After completing a book, I re-read the notes and, if something triggers further interest, I re-visit the referenced pages and make longer notes on separate cards. Lots of people do something similar, but this is what I do and it’s been a great help.
(I know this is all very “Zettelkasten-ey”, but I’m trying to avoid using trendy, sound-smart words for what’s basically just a box of notes.)
I can never decide which blog post format I should use on my home page(s). Should I use full posts so that all of the content is available by simply scrolling? Should I shorten each post to just a title and a short summary, making it look more consistent and easier to scan? Or maybe I should only include a list of titles, and let people dig in based on that.
To find out what readers actually preferred, I asked the following question on Mastodon and Micro.blog:
When visiting a blog (not via RSS), which layout do you prefer?
Full posts
Titles and brief excerpt
Titles only
I received 64 replies. Here are the results:
Results of an informal web poll asking which post format is preferred
I wasn’t surprised by these results, other than the Micro.blog responses leaned quite heavily toward full posts, while Mastodon was split closely between full posts and excerpts.
This helps me with how I present posts on my blog. I will continue using full posts, but I’ll truncate longer articles with a “read more” link to reduce the amount of scrolling needed.
I remain incapable of consolidating my blogs, social media, etc.
I’m realizing that I have three types of blog posts, “macro”, “micro”, and “nano”.
Normal long-form posts are “macro” posts. Shorter posts or images with commentary are “micro” posts. Then there are the little snippets and random thoughts I can’t help blurting out for some reason. Those are “nano” posts.
I could put them all at baty.net and be done with it, but I have yet to find a way to do this using WordPress (or Hugo, for that matter). I never like the way themes render all three types.
I thought I could do macro posts at baty.net and the rest at jack.micro.blog, but for some reason, I hesitate to post my little nonsense thoughts there because it feels weird having them saved as “real” blog posts. I can’t explain it, but those little “nano” posts make more sense to me on an actual social network like Mastodon.
This morning, I spun up a new Mastodon instance as my “official” social media presence. I wanted my own domain, and baty.social is as good as any. It’s eponymous, short, and I’d already paid for it a few months ago. So now I’m posting the nano posts at @jack@baty.social.
Micro.blog can act as an account on the Fediverse, but I think I prefer using Mastodon for that.
I’m not sure that there’s a meaningful difference between micro and nano posts, so this is an experiment. If it continues to feel right, great. If not, I’ll try something else.
Am I overthinking it? Of course I’m overthinking it.
Let’s face it, I enjoy trying different ways of publishing and tinkering with the tools for doing so. Once in a while, I spread myself a little too thin and consider drastic consolidation. You know, the dream of One True Blog™.
In an effort to figure this out, I thought I’d write down the types of content I post most frequently, and where that content might belong.
Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.
If it behooves you, instead of thinking any more about Twitter—hit us with some PDFs, some incomprehensible sociology, a fact about your town, some poetry no one cares about, political theory that will never land, obscure social history, climate links, math things, some tech so obscure 20 people use it. We want your inner noise. Just push the gas on your own ephemeralism and launch us into the future.
In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs.
Ulysses is a nice app, but it’s been a while since I’ve used it regularly. We never really clicked. There’s something about the editor and its variation of Markdown that felt off, somehow. What I’ve wished for was iA Writer’s editor attached to Ulysses’ library.
I enjoy checking it new features in Ulysses when updates are released. My license is part of the SetApp subscription so there’s no cost for keeping Ulysses around.
One of the things bringing me back to Ulysses today is the new Projects features. It’s like “hoisting” in a decent outliner. Or narrowing a buffer in Emacs. I like the focus it promises.
But the reason I’m typing this in Ulysses today is that I kind of hate writing in the WordPress editor. Gutenberg has come a long way, and is very powerful, but it’s still annoying for actually writing. If I want to drop in and resize an image or include a quote with citation, Gutenberg is great. If I simply want to lay down some text, it sucks. Whatever nits I have to pick with Ulysses’ editor are meaningless compared to the annoyances I have with WordPress. So here we are.
Other than the editor, I’m still happy with my recent switch to WordPress. If I can find a pleasant way to write for WordPress, I may stick with it.
Can we all agree that giant per-post image headers look terrible on most blogs? It’s been a curse of default WP themes past few years, too. We need it to be easier to have posts without image headers and even without titles.
Many of the responses in that thread argue that posts need giant images for SEO. Possibly, but the theme could, like mine does, allow for featured images but doesn’t display them. That way the image is in the metadata for SEO, but doesn’t force me to scroll past 500KB of unnecessary, unrelated image data to read a 200-word post. Go Matt!
And building WordPress to be less dependent upon post titles would be a great thing. Let us reel in our social graphs if we want to. And just like with images, the theme could simply hide the image from the viewer, but include them in the OpenGraph data. Everyone wins!
