Why must a blog comment be text? Why could it not be… a drawing?1
Red and black might be more traditional ladybird colours, but sometimes all you’ve got is blue.
I started hacking about and playing with a few ideas and now, on selected posts including this one, you can draw me a comment instead of typing one.
Just don’t tell the soup company what I’ve been working on, okay?
I opened the feature, experimentally (in a post available only to RSS subscribers2) the
other week, but now you get a go! Also, I’ve open-sourced the whole thing, in case you want to pick it apart.
What are you waiting for: scroll down, and draw me a comment!
Footnotes
1 I totally know the reasons that a blog comment shouldn’t be a drawing; I’m not
completely oblivious. Firstly, it’s less-expressive: words are versatile and you can do a lot with them. Secondly, it’s higher-bandwidth: images take up more space, take longer to
transmit, and that effect compounds when – like me – you’re tracking animation data too. But the single biggest reason, and I can’t stress this enough, is… the
penises. If you invite people to draw pictures on your blog, you’re gonna see a lot of penises. Short penises, long penises, fat penises, thin penises. Penises of every shape
and size. Some erect and some flacid. Some intact and some circumcised. Some with hairy balls and some shaved. Many of them urinating or ejaculating. Maybe even a few with smiley
faces. And short of some kind of image-categorisation AI thing, you can’t realistically run an anti-spam tool to detect hand-drawn penises.
2 I’ve copied a few of my favourites of their drawings below. Don’t forget to subscribe if you want early access to any weird shit I make.
In anticipation of WWW Day on 1 August, some work colleagues and I were
sharing pictures of the first (or early) websites we worked on. I was pleased to be able to pull out a screenshot of how my blog looked back in 1999!
Tables for layout, hit counter, web-safe colour scheme, and the need to explain what a “navigation bar” is in case they’ve not come across one before. Yup, this is 90s web design at
its peak and no mistake.
Because I’m such a digital preservationist, many of those ancient posts are still available on my blog, so I also shared a photo of me browsing the same content on my
blog as it is today, side-by-side with that 25+-year-old screenshot.1
The posts are in reverse-chronological order now, rather than chronological order, but the content’s all the same (even though the design is now very different and, of course,
responsive!).
I’ve even applied img { image-rendering: crisp-edges; } to try to compensate for modern browsers’ capability for subpixel rendering when rescaling images: let them
eat pixels!5
Or if you can’t be bothered to switch to 1999 Mode, you can just look at this screenshot to get an idea of how it looks.
I’ve added 1999 Mode to my April Fools gags so, like this year, if you happen to visit my site on or around 1 April,
there’s a change you’ll see it in 1999 mode anyway. What fun!
I think there’s a possible future blog post about Web design challenges of the 1990s. Things like: what it the user agent doesn’t support images? What if it supports GIFs, but not
animated ones (some browsers would just show the first frame, so you’d want to choose your first frame appropriately)? How do I ensure that people see the right content if they skip my
frameset? Which browser-specific features can I safely use, and where do I need a fallback6? Will this
work well on all resolutions down to 640×480 (minus browser chrome)? And so on.
Any interest in that particular rabbit hole of digital history?
Footnotes
1 Some of the addresses have changed, but from Summer 2003 onwards I’ve had a solid chain
of redirects in place to try to keep content available via whatever address it was at. Because Cool URIs Don’t Change. This occasionally turns out to be useful!
2 Actually, the entire theme is just a CSS change, so no tables are added. But I’ve tried to make it look like I’m using tables for layout, because that (and spacer GIFs) were all
we had back in the day.
3 Obviously the title saying “Dan Q” is modern, because that
wasn’t even my name back then, but this is more a reimagining of how my site would have looked if I were transported back to 1999 and made to do it all again.
4 I was slightly obsessed for a couple of years in the late 90s with flaming text on black
marble backgrounds. The hit counter in my screenshot above – with numbers on fire – was one I made, not a third-party one; and because mine was the only one of my friends’
hosts that would let me run CGIs, my Perl script powered the hit counters for most of my friends’ sites too.
5 I considered, but couldn’t be bothered, implementing an SVG CSS filter: to posterize my images down to 8-bit colour, for that real
“I’m on an old graphics card” feel! If anybody’s already implemented such a thing under a license that I can use, let me know and I’ll integrate it!
Okay, we’re gonna need a whole lot of caveats on the “this is 5,000” claim:
Engage pedantry mode
First, there’s a Ship of Theseus consideration. By “this blog”, I’m referring to what I feel is a continuation (with short
breaks) of my personal diary-style writing online from the original “Avatar Diary” on castle.onza.net in the 1990s via “Dan’s Pages” on avangel.com in the 2000s through the relaunch on scatmania.org in 2003 through migrating to danq.me in 2012. If you feel that a change of domain precludes continuation, you might
disagree with me. Although you’d be a fool to do so: clearly a blog can change its domain and still be the same blog, right? Back in 2018 I celebrated the 20th anniversary of my first blog post by revisiting how my blog had looked, felt, and changed over the decades, if
you’re looking for further reading.
These posts were from the 1990s (in case the design didn’t give that away), and despite a change in domain name, I’m counting them. They’re still accessible, via this domain,
today!1Similarly, one might ask if retroactively republishing something that originally went out via a different medium “counts”2.
In late 1999 I ran “Cool Thing of the Day (to do at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth)” as a way of staying connected to my friends back in
Preston as we all went our separate ways to study. Initially sent out by email, I later maintained a web page with a log of the entries I’d sent out, but the address wasn’t
publicly-circulated. I consider this to be a continuation of the Avatar Diary before it and the predecessor to Dan’s Pages on avangel.com after it, but a pedant might argue that because
the content wasn’t born as a blog post, perhaps it’s invalid.
Pedants might also bring up the issue of contemporaneity. In 2004 a server fault resulted in the loss of a significant number of
149 blog posts, of which only 85 have been fully-recovered. Some were resurrected from
backups as late as 2012, and some didn’t recover their lost images until later still – this one had some content recovered as late as 2017! If you consider the absence of a pre-2004 post until
2012 a sequence-breaker, that’s an issue. It’s theoretically possible, of course, that other old posts might be recovered and injected, and this post might before the 5,001st, 5,002nd,
or later post, in terms of chronological post-date. Who knows!
Then there’s the posts injected retroactively. I’ve written software that, since 2018, has ensured that
my geocaching logs get syndicated via my blog when I publish them to one of the other logging sites I use, and I retroactively imported all of my
previous logs. These never appeared on my blog when they were written: should they count? What about more egregious examples of necroposting, like this post dated long before I ever touched a keyboard? I’m counting them all.
I’m also counting other kinds of less-public content too. Did you know that I sometimes make posts that don’t appear on my front page,
and you have to subscribe e.g. by RSS to get them? They have web addresses – although search
engines are discouraged from indexing them – and people find them with or without subscribing. Maybe you should subscribe if you haven’t already?
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I’ve only recently started actively keeping stats on my blogging activity, without which I probably wouldn’t even have
noticed that my “5K” milestone was coming up!
Let’s take a look at some of those previous milestone posts:
In post 1,000 I announced that I was ready for 2005’s NaNoWriMo. I had a big ol’ argument in the comments with
Statto about the value of the exercise. It’s possible that I ultimately wrote more words arguing with him than I did on my writing project that
month.
It takes a pretty special geocache for me to make a video about it (unlike my geohashing expeditions, for which videos aren’t uncommon). The only other
one I can think of was one of my own…
I absolutely count this as the 5,000th post on this blog.
Here’s to the next 5,000!
Footnotes
1 Don’t go look at them. Just don’t. I was a teenager.
Dave Winer kindly let me know about a proposed
standard for linking to OPML blogrolls. Given that I added a page
containing my blogroll last year, it was easy enough for me to add a tiny bit of code to the header to add support for automatic detection of my blogroll.
Now all we need is some tools that can do such detection!
(You’ll note I’ve added a title attribute: as I discovered the other day, some browsers including ELinks will show all
<link>s of unknown rel="..." at the top of the page and I wanted this one to make sense!)
theunderground.blog‘s content, with the exception of its homepage, is delivered entirely through an XML Atom feed. Atom feed entries do require <title>s, of course, so that’s not the strongest counterexample!
This blog is available over several media other than the Web. For example, you can read this blog post:
We’ve looked at plain text, which as a format clearly does not have to have a title. Let’s go one step further and implement it. What we’d need is:
A webserver configured to deliver plain text files by preference, e.g. by adding directives like index index.txt; (for Nginx).5
An index page listing posts by date and URL. Most browser won’t render these as “links” so users will have to copy-paste
or re-type them, so let’s keep them short,
Pages for each post at those URLs, presumably without any kind of “title” (just to prove a point), and
An RSS feed: usually I use RSS as shorthand for all feed
types, but this time I really do mean RSS and not e.g. Atom because RSS, strangely, doesn’t require that an <item> has a <title>!
Unlike other sites, I didn’t need to test textplain.blog in Lynx to
know it’d work well. But I did anyway.
In the end I decided it’d benefit from being automated as sort-of a basic flat-file CMS, so I wrote it in PHP. All requests are routed by the webserver to the program, which determines whether they’re a request for the homepage, the RSS feed, or a valid individual post, and responds accordingly.
It annoys me that feed
discovery doesn’t work nicely when using a Link: header, at least not in any reader I tried. But apart from that, it seems pretty solid, despite its limitations. Is this,
perhaps, an argument for my.well-known/feedsproposal?
Molly White writes, more-eloquently than I would’ve, almost-exactly my experience of LLMs and similar modern generative
AIs:
…
I, like many others who have experimented with or adopted these products, have found that these tools actually can be pretty useful for some tasks. Though AI
companies are prone to making overblown promises that the tools will shortly be able to replace your content writing team or generate feature-length films or develop a video game from
scratch, the reality is far more mundane: they are handy in the same way that it might occasionally be useful to delegate some tasks to an inexperienced and sometimes sloppy intern.
…
Very much this.
I’ve experimented with a handful of generative AIs, such as:
GPT-3.5 / ChatGPT, for proofreading, summarisation, experimental rephrasing when writing, and idea generation. I’ve found it to be moderately good at summarisation
and proofreading and pretty terrible at producing anything novel without sounding completely artificial and/or getting lost in a hallucination.
Bing for coalescing information. I like that it cites its sources. I dislike that it somehow still hallucinates. I might use it, I suppose, to help me
re-phase a search query where I can’t remember the word I’m looking for.
Stable Diffusion for image generation. I’ve found it most-useful in image-to-image mode, for making low-effort concept art in bulk. For example, when running online
roleplaying games for friends I’ve fed it an image of, say, a skeleton warrior and asked it to make me a few dozen more in a similar style, so as to provide a diverse selection of
distinct tokens1.
Its completely-original2 work lands squarely in
the uncanny valley, though.
Github Copilot for code assistance. I’ve not tried its “chat”-powered functionality but I quite enjoy its “autocomplete” tool. When I’m coding and I forget the syntax
of the command I’m typing, or need to stop and think for a moment about “what comes next”, it’s often there with the answer. I’ve even made us of the “write the comment describing
what the code will do, let Copilot suggest the code for you” paradigm (though I’ve been pretty disappointed with the opposite approach: it doesn’t write great comments!). I find
Copilot to be a lot like having an enthusiastic, eager-to-please, very well-read but somewhat naive junior programmer sitting beside me. If I ask them for some pairing assistance,
they’re great, but I can’t trust them to do anything that I couldn’t do for myself!
Surely others besides that I’ve since forgotten.
Most-recently, I’ve played with music-making AI Suno and… it’s not
great.. but like all these others it’s really interesting to experiment with and think about. Here: let me just ask it to write some “vocal trance europop about a woman called
Molly; Molly has a robot friend who is pretty good at doing many tasks, but the one thing she’ll never trust the robot to do is write in her blog” –
AI-generated content:
[Verse]
Molly’s got a robot that she keeps by her side
It’s pretty handy
It can do many things right
But there’s one task she won’t let it touch
It’s true
The robot can’t write in her blog
No
That won’t do
[Verse 2]
This robot can clean the house
Sweep it up real nice
It can even cook a meal
Add some spice
But when it comes to sharing her thoughts on the screen
Molly won’t trust the robot
That’s her routine
[Chorus]
Molly’s robot friend
By her side all day and night
There’s one thing it can’t do
Can’t write her blog right
She’ll keep typing away
Sharing her heart and soul
That’s something the robot can’t do
It has no control
So yes, like Molly:
I’m absolutely a believer than these kinds of AIs have some value,
I’ve been reluctant and slow to say so because they seem to be such a polarising issue that it’s hard to say that you belong to neither “camp”,
I’m not entirely convinced that for the value they provide they’ve yet proven to be worth their cost, and I’m not certain that for general-purpose generation they will be any time
soon, and
I’ve never used AI to write content for my blog, and I can’t see that ever changing.
It’s still an interesting field to follow-along with. Stuff like Sora from OpenAI and VASA-1 from Microsoft are just scary (the latter seems to have little purpose other than for
misinformation-generation3!),
but the genie’s out of the bottle now.
Footnotes
1 Visually-distinct tokens adds depth to the world and helps players communicate with one
another: “You distract the skinny cultist, and I’ll try to creep up on the ugly one!”
2 I’m going to gloss right over the question of whether or not these tools are capable of
creating anything truly original. You know what I mean.
In August, I celebrated my blog – with its homepage weighing-in at a total of just 481kb – being admitted to Kev Quirk‘s 512kb club. 512kb club celebrates websites (often personal sites) whose homepage are neither “ultra minimal”
or “link pages” but have a total size, including all assets, of under half a megabyte. It’s about making a commitment to a leaner, more-efficient Web.
My relatively-heavyweight homepage only just slipped in under the line. But, feeling inspired perhaps by some performance enhancements I’ve been planning this week at work, I
decided to try to shave a little more off:
Now, at ~234kb, danq.me just beats the excellent gomakethings.com (it’s all those heavyweight fonts, Chris!).
Here’s what I changed:
The “recent article” tiles are dynamically sized based on their number, type, and the visitor’s screen resolution. But apart from the top one they’re almost never very large. Using
thumbnail images for the non-first tile shaved off almost 160kb.
You can see the difference, but it’s still acceptable to look at, I think.
Not space-saving, but while I was in there I ensured that the first tile’s image – which almost-certainly comprises part of the Largest
Contentful Paint – is never delivered with loading="lazy".
I was providing a shortcut icon in .ico format (<link rel="shortcut icon" href="https://bcdn.danq.me/_q23t/icons/favicon-16-32-48-64-128.ico" />),
which is pretty redundant nowadays because all modern browsers (and even IE11)
support .png icons. I was already providing.png and .svg versions, but it turns out that some browsers favour the one with the
(harmful?) rel="shortcut icon" over rel="icon" if both are present, and .ico
files are – being based on Windows Bitmaps – horrendously inefficient.
By getting under the 250kb threshold, I’ve jumped up a league from Blue Team to Orange Team, so that’s nice too. I can’t see a meaningful
path from where I’m at to Green Team (under 100kb) though, so this level might have to suffice.
After a first attempt at mobile blogging, I found a process that works better for my work flow.
Throughout the day, I have ideas and need to write them down. This could be a coding process, a thought to remember, the start of a blog post, and more. I love a good notes app. I’ve
gone through quite a few and use a few for different things. Lately it’s been Simplenote.
…
As I took part in Bloganuary and began what’ll hopefully become a fifth
consecutive year of 100 Days To Offload, I started to hate my approach to mobile blogging and seek something better, too. My blog’s on WordPress, but it’s so highly-customised that
I can’t meaningfully use any of the standard apps, and I find the mobile interface too slow and clunky to use over anything less than a great Internet connection… which – living out in
the sticks – I don’t routinely have when I’m out and about. So my blogging almost-exclusively takes place at my desktop or laptop.
But your experience of using a notetaking app is reasonably inspiring. I’m almost never away from a “real” computer for more than a day, so there’s no reason I can’t simply write into
such an app, let it sync, and copy-paste into a blog post (and make any tweaks) when I’m sitting at a proper keyboard! I’m using Obsidian for
notetaking, and it Syncthing‘s to my other computers, so I should absolutely be leveraging that. I already have an Obsidian folder full of
“blog post ideas”… why shouldn’t I just write blog posts there.
I guess I’ve always been more of a sprinter/hurdles blogger than a marathon runner.
Might I meet that challenge? Maybe. But it turns out it’s easier than I thought because Kev revised the rules to require only 100 posts in a calendar year (or any other 365-day period, but I’m not
going to start thinking about the maths of that).
That’s not only much more-achievable… I’ve probably already achieved it! Let’s knock out some SQL to check how many posts I
made each year:
SELECTYEAR(wp_posts.post_date_gmt) yyyy,
COUNT(wp_posts.ID) total
FROM
wp_posts
WHERE
wp_posts.post_status='publish'AND wp_posts.post_type='post'GROUPBY yyyy
ORDERBY yyyy
My code’s actually a little more-complicated than this, because of some plot, but this covers the essentials.
A big question in some years is what counts as a post. Kev’s definition is quite liberal and includes basically-everything, but I wonder if mine shouldn’t perhaps be stricter.
For example:
Should I count checkins, even though they’re not always born as blog posts but often start as logs on geocaching websites?
(My gut says yes!)
Do reposts and bookmarks contribute, a significant minority of which are presented without any further
interpretation by me? (My gut says no!)
Does a vlog version of a blog post count separately, or is it a continuation of the same content? (My gut says the volume is too
low to matter!)
Can a retroactive achievement (i.e. from before the challenge was announced) count? Kev writes “there is no specific start date”, but it seems a little counter to
the idea of it specifically being a challenge to claim it when you weren’t attempting the challenge at the time.
Some posts are lost from 1998/1999. If they were recovered I might have made 100 posts in 1999, but probably not in 1998 as I only started blogging on 27 September 1998.
A heartfelt post about saying goodbye to Aberystwyth as I moved to Oxford on 16 June was my 100th of the year. Pedants might argue that
this year shouldn't count, but so long as you're willing to count checkins (and you should) then it would... and my qualifying post would have come only a couple of days
later, with a post about the Headington Shark, which I had just moved-in near to.
I'm not convined this low-blogging year should count: a clear majority of the posts were geocaching logs, and they weren't always even that verbose (consider this candidate for 100th post of 2013, from 1 October).
Another geocache log heavy, conventional blogpost light year that I'm not convinced should count, even if the obvious candidate for 100th post would be 18 May's cool article about
geocaching like Batman!
I maintain that checkins should count, even when they're PESOS'd from geocaching sites, so long as they don't make up a majority of the qualifying posts in a year. In
which case this year should qualify, with the 100th post being my visit to this well-hidden London pub
while on my way to a conference.
My blogging ramped up again this year, and on 24 August I shared a motivational poster with a funny twist, plus a pun at the intersection
between my sexuality and my preferred mode of transport.
Total count of all the posts.
Doesn't add up? Not all posts feature in one of the years above!
* Pedants might claim this year was not a success for the reasons described above. Make your own mind up.
In any case, I’d argue that I clearly achieved the revised version of the challenge on certainly six, probably fourteen, arguably (depending on how you count posts) as
many as nineteen different years since I started blogging in 1998. My least-controversial claims would be:
Given all these unanswered questions, I’m not going to just go ahead and raise a PR against the Hall of Fame! Instead, I’ll leave it to
Kev to decide whether I’m (a) eligible to claim a 14-time award, (b) merely eligible for a 4-time award for the years following the challenge starting, or (c) ineligible to claim
success until I intentionally post 100 times in a year (in, at current rates, another two months…). Over to you, Kev…
Update: Kev’s agreed that I can claim the most-recent four of them, so I raised a PR.
Well that was Bloganuary! It was pressuring, exhausting, and – mostly! – fun. Let’s
recap what I wrote about each day of January:
My Biggest Challenge, for which I pointed at motivation in the winter and how that was a major part of my
motivation for trying to participate in Bloganuary in the first place! I also touched on the difficulty of staying on-task.
Early in January I shared this chart which indicates the severity of the “dip” I typically see in my blog output in the first few months of the year. Could I overcome this through
sheer determination, I wondered?
Playtime. I talked about some of the “play” activities I engage in, including roleplaying games, board games, videogames,
escape rooms, and GNSS games.
Alumnus: an exploration of the higher education establishments I’ve been part of.
The Gift of Time, when I talked about being time-poor and seemingly perpetually-busy and expressed my love of gifts that
help me reclaim that time.
Nostalgia vs Futurism. I spend comparable amounts of time thinking about the future as the past, I reckon.
Uninvention, in which I propose uninventing cryptocurrency.
Leadership: I revisited an
old post about the qualities I admire in leaders; it’s still true.
Dream Job – am I already doing my dream job? Maybe, though perhaps it isn’t the one that pays me!
What’s in a name? My name today is one I chose for myself, but it’s not the only name I’ve been known by. I revisit the
names I’ve been called and what they’ve meant.
New Tricks, about how convenient it’d be to be able to explain to our dog that the builders in our house are not here to
steal her toys.
Fun Five: five things I do for fun – code, magic, play, piano, learn. A bit of a parallel to “Playtime” from day 2.
Harcourt Manor, a local attraction I’ve never gotten to see inside.
Landslide, the spectacular song that inspired this post because I didn’t objected to the original prompt.
Traditions my family practices, some of which are pretty unique to us.
Reading List, about how mine is pretty long this time of year, but that doesn’t stop me thinking about what I might
re-read next.
Not The Lottery, a game I play that’s… well… not the lottery. And how if I played the actual lottery (and
somehow won), how I’d do my “dream job” from day 18.
Sportsball! I don’t really play or follow any sports, but that doesn’t stop me writing a diatribe of what’s wrong with
professional soccer.
Toilet Paper is typically mounted on a holder in one of two polarities. One of those orientations is an abomination.
The Fear of expressing vulnerability is real in this final Bloganuary entry.
So yeah: 31 posts in as many days! Actually, it was closer to 40, because on a couple of days I wrote non-Bloganuary posts too:
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Of course, with the addition of this post, it’s now 32+ posts in 32 days. As I’ve noted before, this is my longest daily streak in over 25 years of blogging… and I’m genuinely a little curious how much longer I can keep it up. There are lots of things
I meant to write about last month but simply didn’t have time: if I dusted off a few of those ideas I could push on a few days longer. My longest unstreak or “dry
spell” – the longest number of consecutive days I’ve gone without making a post – is 42 days: could I beat that? That’d be a special level of personal best.
Wait, is that “most pointless” in quality, or most “pointless posts” as in quantity?
I initially aimed to fuel and inspire my blogging at the start of this year in a more-interpersonal way, by making some pen pals and writing about the experience of that. Except I ran slightly late with my first (and haven’t written it up yet) and even later
with my second (on account of winter blues plus spending any spare “blogging” time doing Bloganuary) so that project’s already way off track. Still aiming to catch-up though.
But I’m pleased to have been able to throw out 20,000 words of prompt-driven blog posts too, even if some of the prompts were weaker than others!
What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?
Boo to this prompt! This Bloganuary already asked me how I like to play and about five things I do for fun; now
it wants me to choose the thing I “enjoy most” from, presumably, that same set.
What is a song or poem that speaks to you and why?
Much better.
Landslide, by Fleetwood Mac.
I’ll save you looking it up: here’s a good live recording to put on while you keep reading.
At 5½ years older than me, the song’s been in my life effectively forever. But its themes of love and loss, overcoming naivety, growing up and moving on… have grown in significance to
and with me as I’ve grown older. And to hear Stevie Nicks speak about it, it feels like it has for her as well, which just doubles the feeling it creates of timeless relevance.
In concert, Nicks would often dedicate the song to her father, which lead to all manner of speculation about the lyrics being
about the importance of family. And there’s definitely an undertone of that in there: when in
2015 she confirmed that it was about a challenging moment of decision in her youth in which she was torn between continuing to try to “make it” as a musical act with her
then-partner Lindsey Buckingham or return to education. Her father was apparently supportive of either option but favoured the
latter.
Ultimately she chose the former and it worked out well for her career… although of course the pair’s romantic relationship eventually collapsed. And so the song’s lyrics, originally
about indecision, grow into a new interpretation: one of sliding doors moments, of “what ifs”. In some parallel universe
Stevie Nicks dropped out of Buckingham Nicks before Keith Olsen introduced Lindsey Buckingham to Mick Fleetwood, and we’d probably never have heard Landslide.3
Stevie still sings Landslide in concert, and now it feels like it’s entered its third life and lends itself a whole new interpretation. Those lyrics about turning around and looking
back, which were originally about reconsidering the choices you made in your youth and the path you’d set yourself on, take on a whole new dimension when sung by somebody as they grow
through their 60s and into their 70s!
In particular, coming to the song as a parent4
is a whole other thing. Its thoughts on innocence and growing-up, and watching your children do so, reminds me of my perpetual struggle with comparing myself to the best parent I know. An intergenerational effort to be my best me; to look forwards with courage and backwards with compassion for myself.
All of which is pretty awesome for a song that under other circumstances might be just a catchy twist on a classic country rock chord progression with some good singing. Sliding doors,
eh?
2 This is my first year doing Bloganuary, so I didn’t get to answer this prompt last time
around.
3 Nor, for that matter, any of the other excellent songs that came out of Nicks’ and
Buckingham’s strained relationship, such as Silver Springs, Second Hand News and, perhaps most-famously, Go Your Own Way. I guess sometimes you need the sad
times to make the best art.
4 Nicks, of course, famously isn’t a parent, but I refer you to a 2001 interview in which she said “No children, no husband. My particular mission maybe wasn’t to be a mom and a
wife. Maybe my particular mission was to write songs to make moms and wives feel better.”.
What a curious question! For me, it’s perhaps best divided into public and private communication, for which I use very different media:
Public
I’ve written before about how this site – my blog – is the centre of my digital “ecosystem”. And while the technical details may have changed
since that post was published, the fundamentals have not: everything about my public communication revolves around this, right here.
When I vlog, the primary/first version is published here; secondary copies might appear e.g. on my YouTube
channel for visibility but the “official” version remains here
Content gets syndicated elsewhere via a variety of mechanisms, for visibility2.
This is what I’m talking about.
Private
For private communication online, I perhaps mostly use the following (in approximate order of volume):
Slack: we use Slack at Automattic; we use Slack at Three Rings; we’ve
even got a “household” instance running for The Green!3
WhatsApp: the UI‘s annoying (but improving), but its the go-to communications platform of my of my friends and
family, so it’s a big part of my online communications strategy.4
Email: Good old-fashioned email5. I prefer
to encrypt, or at least sign, my email: sure, PGP/GPG‘s not
perfect6, but it’s better than, y’know, not securing your email at
all.
Discord: I’m in a couple of Discord servers, but the only one I pay any reasonable amount of attention to is the Geohashing one.
Various videoconferencing tools including Google Meet, Zoom, and Around. Sometimes you’ve just gotta get (slightly more) face-to-face.
Signal: I feel like everybody’s on WhatsApp now, and the Signal app got annoying when it stopped being able to not only send but even receive SMS messages (which aren’t technically Internet messages, usually), but I still send/receive a few Signal messages in a typical month.
That’s a very different set of tech stacks than I use in my “public” communication!
Footnotes
1 My thinking is, at least in part: I’ve seen platforms come and go, and my blog’s
outlived them. I’ve seen platforms change their policies or technology in ways that undermine the content I put on them, but the stuff on my blog remains under my control and I can
“fix” it if I wish. Owning your data is awesome, although I perhaps do it to a
more-extreme extent than many.
2 I’ve used to joke that I syndicate content to e.g. Facebook to support readers who
haven’t learned yet to use a feed reader. I used to, and I still do, too.
3 A great thing about having a “personal” Slack installation is that you can hook up your
own integrations and bots to e.g. remind you to bring the milk in.
4 I’ve been experimenting with Texts to centralise
several of my other platforms; I’m not convinced by it yet, but I love the thinking! Long ago, I used to love using Pidgin for simultaneous access to
IRC, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and all that jazz, so I fully approve of the concept.
5 Okay, not actually old-fashioned because I’m not suggesting you use
UUCP to send mail to protonmail!danq!dan or DECnet to deliver to danq.me::dan or something!
6 Most of the metadata including sender, recipient, and in most cases even
subject is not encrypted.
Making a conscious daily effort to write more has been… challenging. I feel like my thoughts come out half-finished, like I’m writing too trivially, without sufficient
structure, or even too-personally. But I’m loving the challenge!
Anyway – happy birthday Matt! Forty is a great age, highly recommended. Hope you love it.
I find winters are generally bad for my creativity
and motivation, usually until I bounce back in the Spring.
In an attempt to keep me writing daily, I’m giving Bloganuary a go this year. It’s sort-of like the NaNoWriMo of blogging1. And for me, Bloganuary’s very purpose is to overcome the challenge of getting disconnected
from blogging when the nights are long and inspiration’s hard to find2.
The Challenge of Staying On-Task
But outside of the winter, my biggest challenge is usually… staying on-task!
It’s easy to get my focus to wane and for me to drift into some other activity than whatever it is I should be spending my time on. It’s not even
procrastination3 so much as it’s a
fluctuating and changing field of interest. I’ll drift off of what I’m supposed to be working on and start on something that interests me more in that moment… and then potentially off
that too, in turn. The net result is that both my personal and professional lives are awash with half-finished projects4, all waiting their turn for me to find the
motivation to swing back around and pick them up on some subsequent orbit of my brain.
You know how sometimes a stock image says exactly what you need it to? This isn’t one of those times.
It’s the kind of productivity antipattern I’d bring up with my coach, except that I already
know exactly how she’d respond. First, she’d challenge the need to change; require that I justify it first. Second, she’d insist that before I can change, I need to accept and come to
terms with who I am, intrinsically: if this flitting-about is authentically “me”, who am I to change it?
Finally, after weeks or months of exercises to fulfil these two tasks, she’d point out that I’ve now reached a place where I’m still just as liable to change lanes in the middle of a
project as I was to begin with, but now I’m more comfortable with that fact. I won’t have externally changed, I’ll “just” have found some kind of happy-clappy inner peace. And she’ll
have been right that that’s what I’d actually needed all along.
Maybe it’s not such a challenge, after all.
Footnotes
1 Except that would be NaBloPoMo, of course. But it’s a similar thing.
2 Also, perhaps, to help me focus on writing more-often, on more-topics, than I might
otherwise in the course of my slow, verbose writing.
Tracy Durnell’s post
about blogrolls really spoke to me. Like her, I used to think of a blogroll as a list of people you know personally (who happen to blog)1, but the number of bloggers among my immediate
in-person circle of friends has shrunk from several dozen to just a handful, and I dropped my blogroll in around 2008.
On the Internet, a blogger is only as alone as they choose to be.
But my connection to a wider circle has grown, and like Tracy I enjoy the “hardly strangers” connection I feel with the people I follow online. She writes:
While social media emphasizes the show-off stuff — the vacation in Puerto Vallarta, the full kitchen remodel, the night out on the town — on blogs it still seems that people are
sharing more than signalling. These small pleasures seem to be offered in a spirit of generosity — this is too beautiful not to share.
…
Although I may never interact with all the folks whose blogs I follow, reading the same blogger for a long time does build a (one-sided) connection. I may not know you, author,
but I am rooting for you. It’s a different modality of relationship than we may be used to in person, but it’s real: a parasocial relationship simmering with the potential for
deeper connection, but also satisfying as it exists.
At its core, blogging is a solitary activity with many (if not most) authors claiming that their blog is for them – myself included. Yet, the implication of audience cannot be
ignored. Indeed, the more an author embeds themself in the loose community of blogs, by reading and linking to others, the more that implication becomes reality even if not actively
pursued via comments or email.
To that end: I’ve started publishing my blogroll again! Follow that link and you’ll see an only-lightly-curated list of all the people (plus
some non-personal blogs, vlogs, and webcomics) I follow (that have updated their feeds within the last year2). Naturally, there’s an
OPML version too, and I’ve open-sourced the code I used to generate it (although I can’t imagine
anybody’s situation is enough like mine for it to be useful).
The page is a little flaky and there’s things I’d like to do to improve it, but I’d rather publish a basic version now and then come back to it with my gardening gloves on another time to improve it.
Maybe my blogroll has some folks on that you might recognise? Or else: maybe you’re only a single random-click away from somebody new you
never heard of before!
Footnotes
1 Possibly marked up with XFN to
indicate how you’re connected to one another, but I’ve always had a soft spot for XFN.
