“Blogging is akin to stand-up comedy — it’s not coherent drama, it’s a stream of wisecracks. It’s also like street art — just sort of there, stuck in the by-way, begging attention, then crumbling rapidly.”
Category Archives: Blogging
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A little history. I was keeping notes in a journal long before I got my first computer (1984). When I came across a good quote in a book or a line in a movie, I’d jot it down in a spiral bound notebook with the idea I could find it later. Only way to do that, however, was to page through all of the notebooks. When I got my first computer I tried making notes in a text file which was searchable but just barely.
In the late 90’s I used Microsoft FrontPage to create a “personal home page” where I parked some of this stuff. (My tagline was: “I’ve really got to start writing some of this down”) Hardly an improvement over my notebooks but I was naive enough to think someone might want to read what I wrote. I put the new stuff at the top of the page and pushed the older notes down.
As blogging software and platforms came along, I tried most of them. Radio Userland, Blogger, TypePad, Posterous and — eventually — WordPress. I don’t recall when I first encountered the concept of tagging my posts but it wasn’t until I started using WordPress that I got serious about metadata. Why I tag and how I tag in a moment, first let’s talk about categories. Continue reading
If you care about your thoughts, keep them
From an article by Derek Sivers on the benefits of a daily diary:
“Years from now you might be looking back, wondering if you were as happy or as sad as you remember during this time. […] We so often make big decisions in life based on predictions of how we think we’ll feel in the future, or what we’ll want. Your past self is your best indicator of how you actually felt in similar situations. So it helps to have an accurate picture of your past. […] You can’t trust distant memories. But you can trust your daily diary. It’s the best indicator to your future self (and maybe descendants) of what was really going on in your life at this time.”
Blogging coming back in style?
David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails, Founder & CTO at Basecamp) is leaving Medium for… a WordPress blog.
“Writing for us is not a business, in any direct sense of the word. We write because we have something to say, not to make money off page views, advertisements, or subscriptions.”
“Beyond that, though, we’ve grown ever more aware of the problems with centralizing the internet. Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.”
“With the new take, we’re also trying to bring more of a classic SvN style back to the site. Not just big, marque pieces, but lots of smaller observations, quotes, links, and other posts as well. In fact, the intention is to lessen our dependency on Twitter too, and simply turn Signal v Noise into the independent home for all our thoughts and ideas – big or small.”
I’ve been seeing articles (posts?) on Medium for six or seven years but never paid much attention. Here’s the Wikipedia page.
Scott Adams: Quotable
I started this blog in 2002. Since then I have quoted Scott Adams — from his blog, his books or other publications — 114 times. More than any other writer, blogger, or public figure. I found his insights fresh, provocative and brilliant. Topics included: robots; reality; education; the universe; immortality; free will; the economy; war; religion; politics; voting; government… and a bunch more. I stopped following and quoting Mr. Adams near the end of 2015. That was around the time he became — it seemed to me — obsessed with Donald Trump and his presidential campaign. It was “All Trump all the time” on Mr. Adams’ blog and I stopped following. As did many others. This week I’ve been doing a bit of housekeeping on this blog and had occasion to reread Mr. Adams’ posts. Many of his predictions about technology were eerily prescient. Most of his pre-Trump ideas still resonate with me.